Preparing to Scale Intimacy at Groove
New features that let you tailor your experience
Groove has some awesome new features in the works. We’ve taken all of the generous community feedback we’ve received, to start building features that support the community’s growth while honoring our commitment to avoid vanity metrics on the platform — more on that here.
The features we’re rolling out over the coming weeks will allow Groove to grow beyond the beta testing community we are now, while keeping the intimate nature of the experience intact. We’re calling this set of features “orbits”.
What’s an orbit? 🪐
In a nutshell, your orbit is the list of people you Groove with. You don’t need to spend any time “building your orbit” because that’s not what this is about. Groove builds this list for you. When you Groove with someone, that person will automatically be added to your orbit.
If for some reason you decide you don’t want to bump into them again in the Groove community, you have the ability to change that manually. You can also decide, for each person in your orbit, if you’d like to get notified about Grooves that they start.
How do orbits play a role in my Groove experience?
In the current Groove experience (pre-orbits), when you tap the big green button to start a Groove, anyone in the entire Groove community can join you. This was great when we were small, and still is great for when you’re looking to meet new faces.
Over time, however, we started getting frequent requests from Groovers to be able to have a little bit more control over their experience. These were not requests to be able to create cliques or followings on the platform. They came from a compassionate place.
Here are some of the questions we got:
- What can I do to deepen the friendships I’ve already made on Groove?
- What can I do when I don’t feel up to meeting all new faces in my Grooves, or when I feel like I need to see familiar faces for support?
And, lastly:
- With all the newcomers in Groove, the way my Grooves fill up can sometimes feel random.
When orbits are released, the way a Groove fills up won’t be as random. We’ll be improving things over time based on your feedback, but to start out with, it’ll work like this:
When you tap the green button to start a Groove, only people in your orbit will be able to join it for the first one minute. This default setting assumes you’d prefer to be matched up with someone you have already met on Groove before meeting someone new, but you can change it at any time: set it to 0 minutes to meet more new faces, or set it to the maximum, 5 minutes, to always give priority to people in your orbit.
In addition, we love the magic of meeting “friends of friends” and this is built in to orbits as well. If you start a Groove, and someone from your orbit joins it, now someone from their orbit can join too. We hope this will create fun opportunities to meet your friends’ other friends.
Please note: Once you’ve done 5 Grooves, you’ll get access to all the orbits settings. New Groovers won’t have them yet. When the features are released, current Groovers orbits will automatically include everyone they’ve Grooved with to date, so they don’t need to start from scratch.
Who can see my orbit?
Nobody will see who’s in your orbit except you. You can have as many or as few people in your orbit as you’d like. You decide who you’d like to be Grooving with, and these choices remain private.
Why orbits are an important next step for Groove?
We had two main goals in mind while building this feature.
- Give Groovers more control over who they Groove with, with transparency over that process.
- No awkwardness over whether someone likes you as much as you like them, or vanity metrics to look at, count, or compare.
Orbits are a step to giving our community autonomy to create their own unique experience on Groove: the orbit of people that you, personally, get energized by. Think about it like walking into a virtual coffee shop — the Groovers in your orbit are the folks you have enjoyed sitting next to and working alongside in the past, and the door is open for new friends to walk in.
Personal choices
With this rollout of features, Groovers will also have the choice to take someone off the list of who they Groove with. We want to be very clear about what this means: Just like with other social situations in life, you might vibe better with certain people over others. In real life, if we return to our coffee shop analogy, when you don’t feel super energized hanging out with someone, you can walk over to another area and take a seat. This feature allows Groovers to do the equivalent inside Groove. Orbits are all about your ability to make choices to better your own Groove experience.
Someone doesn’t have to do something wrong to warrant another Groover from selecting not to Groove with them. They’re simply making a choice about who they’d like to keep bumping into around Groove, or the kind of energy that they need in their workday on a regular basis.
We think a lot about how we spend our time
At Groove, we believe in spending time on things that really matter, the projects you care about, the things that bring you energy — when you come to Groove it’s to spend time on things that are worth making time for in your busy day. We want to keep it that way.
It’s important for us to recognize that some Groovers might feel intimidated or nervous about the idea that people can now have a bit more of a choice in who they Groove with regularly. At the same time, we’re betting that the upside — that autonomy you now have to create your own environment — is going to make Groove even more useful and humane. As per usual, we want to hear what you have to say about these new features as you start to use them.
Why call them orbits?
Technically speaking, an orbit is ”a regular, repeating path that one object in space takes around another one.” Inside of Groove, we cross paths with each other all the time. When Groovers Groove at similar times each day, their patterns line up with other Groovers’ patterns of showing up. So, they bump into each other on their orbit paths. We also like how orbits stay on track…and so do we when we’re getting sh*t done inside of Grooves 😉
Launch time
We’re going to start releasing pieces of orbits over the coming weeks. Stay tuned as we update our roadmap and share feature releases in our community newsletter. We’re counting on you to send feedback our way!
Carving your own path doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. Groove is an energizing online coworking community where you can get sh*t done and meet some pretty rad people while you’re at it. Join us at groove.ooo🏄🏼♀️
