The Social Personal Status Board (PSB™)
The Personal Status Board (PSB™) is our contribution to efficient, effective social connectedness and communication.
See a demo of the Social PSB™ here on our Social PSB™ demo page. As a demo, it pretends you have all the passwords and usernames so you can change anything, but in real use you'd only be able to change your own status and comment.
| Comparison of Various Social Communication Methods | |||||
| Method | Communicates Current Status | Communicates Current Comment | Customizable Status Codes | See All Friends' Statuses at Once | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social Personal Status Board (PSB™) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc. | Rarely | Rarely | Only Emoticons | No | |
| Phone (voice) | Yes | Yes | No | No | |
| Texting | Yes | Yes | Only Emoticons | No | |
| IMing | Yes | Yes | Only Emoticons | No | |
| Emailing | Rarely | Rarely | Only Emoticons | No | |
Also check out our chart comparing our six different status boards: PSB™ Version Comparison.
The Social PSB™ is for any group of friends, acquaintances, relatives, schoolmates, teammates, military buddies, or whatever who wish to stay in touch with each other's activities, moods, projects, relationships, desires, needs, feelings, availability, whereabouts, ideas, or whatever.
The inefficient way to do this is with MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking websites where you can find out, sometimes, some friends' statuses and moods. Status normally means whether you are married, single, in a relationship, etc., on these sites. You can call them and get voicemail usually but occasionally hear about their status and get comments, but forget about getting all your friends' statuses at once. You can text them and find them unavailable usually but occasionally learn about their status and get comments, but forget about getting all your friends' statuses at once. The same goes for IMing, and emailing is even worse.
With the Social PSB™, a group that agrees to update their statuses fairly often gets an ENTIRELY different experience! Instead of one person maybe finding out about what one other person at a time is into, everyone can find out what everyone else in their group is into simultaneously. Now THAT'S efficiency!
Whether friends decide to update their statuses weekly, daily, hourly, or some other time period, this will quickly be the "goto" site for groups wishing a relationship of efficient relatedness, connectedness, and communication. Why will it be the main GOTO destination for quickly finding out their friends' current statuses? Simple. Once the software is installed and the friends try it out, they'll quickly see the HUGE advantage in the areas of efficiency and effectiveness when compared to MySpace, Facebook, etc. So they'll still use their social networking sites for sharing pictures, songs, videos, and their blogging experiences, but to see who is doing what or feeling what or needing what, why not go to where they find all that out at once about the entire group? And this, then, is why they'll continue to update statuses often. It saves them tons of time, as well as oozing with efficiency and effectiveness.
Using the Social PSB™ has another nice ramification, as if all of the above wasn't enough: Each time a user consults this board, s/he sees what her/his friends WERE into, and then when s/he presses the F5 button to refresh the screen, s/he sees what her/his friends ARE into (the last time they updated their statuses). Often the two will be the same. Often they will not be the same. This gives a kind of 2-point perspective on the user's friends that defines a straight line that often will indicate a "direction" in which the friends are moving. For instance, if John's status is "02 Doing research" pre-refresh, but post-refresh is "19 Errands/shopping", you figure he has gone shopping for that cell phone he had been looking into online and told you about yesterday. Can a code of "30 Texting" or "46 Text me" be expected soon as he tries out his new purchase? If Sue has had an "01 Lonely" code for the last two days and a refresh doesn't change it, perhaps it's time to call her to do something—which you've been wanting to anyway.
With the Social PSB™, trust, although sometimes present, is not implied, so each member gets his or her own password and user name and no one can change anyone's status or comment except his or her own.
In a world where efficiency and effectiveness of connectedness and communication is vital to make social connectedness more of a joy and less of a task, it's often true that inertia stops many social activities before they even begin—it's so often too much trouble to play all the phone tag or do all the texting needed to set up something fun with a group of friends. How different it is to use a "65 Want to go to a movie" code with a suggestion of which one, where, and when in the Comments and get the texting and calls that set it up within the next two hours from two of your buddies! If two of 19 friends on your Social PSB™ want to go and the rest do not, imagine calling them all with your idea. You can see why people go alone, don't go, or just go watch TV instead—INERTIA!
The Social PSB™ has emerged as the one device on Earth that gives the most holistic "sitrep" on what's happening regarding friends. (SITREP is military speak for Situation Report—a report on the status of your unit and the progress of its mission.) A civilian sitrep is a Situation Report of the status of your group of friends and the way they change over time.
Phone calls played the major part in social sitrep generation in times past. Computers made a few parts of this process more efficient, and substantially improved communication with social networking sites and emails and IMing.
But today, the sitrep generations of the past will be giving way to the new wave of sitrep generation tools: status boards. So far, we seem to be alone in the field—but that won't last long once people try out our Social PSB™s!
And you may use the Social PSB™ for as many Social PSB™s as you like without paying us anything extra beyond the initial selling price, as long as all the MySQL tables you create with our program files are located on one and only one MySQL database.
The Social PSB™ has a fully customizable set of 100 status code meanings (researched meanings designed to be the most needed social statuses) and it lets users change their own statuses and comments only, and no one else's (unless a user has another user's password and username as well as his own, for convenience—such as husband and wife or mother and young child).
There is also a Social PSB™ Plus (with Email) in which clicking the person's name on the status board opens up their default email program so you can send them a message.
The difference between the Social PSB™ and PSB™ Pro is that the Social PSB™ has a different set of status codes and meanings and it lets users change their own statuses and comments only. The PSB™ Pro lets any user change any other user's status or comment.
If you wish to purchase the Social PSB™ for $49.99:
Social Version
or
If you wish to purchase the Social PSB™ Plus (with Email) for $59.99:
Social Version with Email
or
If you wish to purchase the PSB™ Pro* for $49.99:
Pro Version
or
or
If you wish to purchase the Business PSB™ for $49.99:
Business Version
or
If you wish to purchase the Business PSB™ Plus (with Email) for $59.99:
Business Version with Email
*NOTE: If you have the PSB™ Standard version and you decide you wish to host multiple PSB™s (or at least get administration programs for editing from the Web rather than from a host's control panel), and you need PSB, registration, and administration files, we can help. You will need to get our PSB™ Pro version which will have a file called convert-standard-psb-to-pro-psb.php that will help you update any MySQL tables from the PSB™ Standard version.
PSB™s help grease the relationship wheels!
Personal Status Boards (PSB™s)
There are actually three types of PSB™s: The first is the only free type of PSB™ and we refer to it as an MC PSB™, where there is implied trust in a close group so that everyone can share one password and username and anyone can change anyone's status or comment—a must for childcare situations where there are caregivers updating statuses of children too young to do it themselves. If an MC finds out that a few members find the temptation of shenanigans too great to resist, so they play pranks with each other's statuses and comments, the MC is free to upgrade to the Social PSB™. Even though few people would know passwords and user names except their own, parents would need the passwords and user names of their young children who are too young to update their codes. MC PSB™s empower holistic social networking that is more EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE than usual social networking methods, and they take many of the headaches out of the childcare area—with which so many Americans are now struggling.
There's a Standard and a Pro version. The Standard version is described on the Standard PSB™ page, and it requires more file edits as well as having to type the people data into a MySQL database (it's free) on your website's server via the control panel. This data entry is easy but needed. Unlike the Pro version and all other PSB™s, it has no "front end"—so anything you want to edit (except for statuses and comments, which users will change by simply using the PSB™), you type into your MySQL database on your website's server via the control panel. The Pro version has a front end for administrator hosts to use for all editing of membership or user data. It's a complete application, as are the Social and Business PSB™s. Comparison Chart
ALL types of PSB™s require MySQL and a host to host the PSB™ files, as well as "creating" a database (simply name a MySQL database), and adding at least one user with one password, with permissions, that pertain to the database. It's easy and there are this site and/or this site to guide you—they have tutorials on doing this. Once the database is ready and you edit and upload the configure.php file we'll send you along with the application files, that's it. Register as a member and enter your PSB™'s user names. There will be a readme.txt to guide you. Your register.php file will have been uploaded to your site at http://yoursite.com/PSB/register.php so save it as a Favorites link.
Standard PSB™ users will not register—they will simply create a (free) MySQL database, enter a user and password and permissions (all), use phpMyAdmin on the server control panel to enter data, and upload the files we send them. To use the Standard PSB™, go to http://yoursite.com/PSB/test-db-WORKS-GOOD.php or http://yoursite.com/test-db-WORKS-GOOD.php depending on whether you put the 6 files we send you in a folder or not.
The second type is a Social PSB™, where there is a group of friends or acquaintances or even relatives where trust, although sometimes present, is not implied, so each member gets his or her own password and user name and no one can change anyone's status or comment except his or her own. It's probably obvious that if everyone could change anyone's statuses and comments, for most groups of people this would be an open invitation to chaos and pranks. It's believed that a loving, trusting MC group would not misuse their PSB™s. Of course, if an MC finds out that a few members find the temptation of shenanigans too great to resist, they are free to upgrade to the Social PSB™. Social PSB™s empower holistic social networking that is more EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE than usual social networking methods.
The third type is a Business PSB™, where there is a group of employees or managers or even projects whose status changes often, or where frequent communication is required and there is a need for a holistic overview of the person statuses or project statuses OF many persons or projects BY many persons or projects. As with general Social PSB™s, trust, although sometimes present, is not implied, so each member gets his or her own password and user name and no one can change anyone's status or comment except his or her own. Business PSB™s empower holistic intra-business or inter-business communication and networking that is more EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE than usual business networking methods. It may also be used to monitor telecommuting associates or remote contract workers or employees who work from home, temporarily or permanently.
The MC PSB™ is not for sale (but both the Social PSB™ and the Business PSB™ are), but the source codes for the free version are in the zip file which you can get to from the MC PSB™ page.
(See a demo of the Social PSB™ here on our Social PSB™ demo page.)
You may copy the files and use the PSB™ yourself for your friends, business, family, group, MC, local group of families, babysitting co-op, or whatever—any legal, legitimate group that is not about violence or hate or crime or treason or porn may use our PSB™ software. This site and the files we let you copy are all copyrighted material and you may NEVER sell any of them in any way (except if you paid us for them by buying a PSB™, in which case you may sell them as long as you delete all these files from all computers, servers, or any other storage device that you put them on). You may not change or omit the words PSB™ or Personal Status Board anywhere on your site or in the code or metatags. The Personal Status Board (PSB™) is our name for this software, which was invented as a concept by M.C. Smith in 1988, and created as an electronic device in 1988 as well, although software on the Internet is a more viable form, now. There just wasn't much of an Internet in 1988! Anyway, MCs are our name for microcommunities, although you're free to use the term however you like (but we'd prefer people use it in the sense presented on this website). PSB™s, however, are intellectual property and software copyrighted and trademarked by no one except MCS Investments, Inc., and any use of these materials not complying with the Terms of Use found here will result in legal action. So please honor the above terms of use—it's really not too much to ask!
| PSB™ Version Comparison | |||||
| PSB™ Version | Change Status/Comment | Front End | 100 Customizable Status Codes | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard PSB™ | anyone can change anyone's status | No | Yes | No | Free |
| PSB™ Pro | anyone can change anyone's status | Yes | Yes | No | $49.99* |
| Social PSB™ | you can only change your own status | Yes | Yes | No | $49.99 |
| Social PSB™ Plus | you can only change your own status | Yes | Yes | Yes** | $59.99 |
| Business PSB™ | you can only change your own status | Yes | Yes | No | $49.99 |
| Business PSB™ Plus | you can only change your own status | Yes | Yes | Yes** | $59.99 |
** Click on the PSB™ members' Names in the PSB™ in order to open their email program and send them a message.