Any day now I'll be adding an invitation system to make it super easy to invite your friends and family to join Charitocracy, and to start growing your Giving Tree. But first I had to introduce a more social aspect to the site, so after you invite people to join you'll actually see each other on there!

Today you'll find three new components to Charitocracy:

1. Friendships: you can now make friends with other donors at Charitocracy. When you click on a user's avatar, in their profile header you'll find an "Invite Friend" button. This will send the donor a friendship request, which may be accepted or rejected. More on friendships below...
2. Activity streams: All your activities on Charitocracy are logged to your activity stream: your donations, your votes, your likes, your nominations and discussion comments, changes to your profile, etc. are all logged for posterity. And if you have permission, you can see some or all of other donors' activity feeds.
3. Privacy settings: All of this activity can be made as public or private as you like. And here's where your friendships come in: the default privacy setting is to show all of this activity to your friends and only your friends! But if you want to be more of an exhibitionist, you can make some or all of your activities "public" even to non-friends. Or conversely, if you want to be more anonymous, you can either set your privacy settings to "no one" or simply don't make any friendships on Charitocracy.

Different activities have different settings, so if for example you want only friends to be able to see your voting history, no one to be able to see your donation amounts, but anyone to see the rest of your activity feed (likes, nominations, profile updates, etc.) you can totally do that. But making everything visible to friends and only friends is a nice simple default.

Charitocracy isn't trying to become a replacement for other social media. This is not where you come to meet people and chat about what you had for dinner. But part of our mission is to make charitable giving more social. We believe that your friends and family seeing you donating, nominating, and voting for causes can only help encourage them to do more of that stuff, too, and vice versa. So let's go make some friends!