Communicating is the thing that is going to bring people back to gather several times a day. The content is good. The developers need to make it extremely easy for people to keep up with the communication side of the site. It needs to be easier for people to feel like they are engaged in an exchange of opinion and information. This site has the potential to thrive. The thing that is going to keep people writing and commenting is going to be the perception of the users that they are really effectively communicating with one another.
Here are some of the ideas I've had about gather lately.
On my home page, I want to see more of my connections' content. I don't need to see much more than who wrote it and the title. Because these are people I know, thus I know that I want to read their articles. I want to see a long list of their articles.
The second thing I want to do when I log on to gather is check out the comments to the comments that I made last time I was on. It happened recently that I commented on an article and then had to go to some effort to find the article to see whether or not someone had reacted to my comment. The fact that an article has new comments should somehow boost it in the line up, even if it is not the newest article. Also, somewhere on my front page, I want to see a list of articles to which I've commented and which have new comments.
I would also like to see my connections' comments. Maybe there could be a way to have a person's five (or more) most recent comments appear on their profile pages. I want to read what my friends are reading.
The categories are good, but I think it would be better if they could be reordered. Either the user could choose which categories he or she wants on the home page and in which order, or the site would reorder them according to which ones a person clicks on most often. If I click on "travel" every time I log on, but never click on "politics," "travel" should be at the top and "politics" should be at the bottom.
I like that there are featured articles on the front page. I always check them out. But I would prefer if I didn't have to scroll down to see my connections' content. I know there is a side bar for my connections' content. Maybe this side bar could be expanded.
Those are the most concrete thoughts I've had on this subject so far. Anybody else have any thoughts about how they do or want to use Gather in the first ten minutes after logging in?
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Comments: 4
Another thing I think would be useful is to have some distinction made on the homepage between stuff that's new since my last login. I don't necessarily want to see the same three recommended articles every time I visit the site, especially if I've read them already.
The categories thing is tough. I do like the idea of being able to browse by category, but everyone has different ideas of what categories an article should go in, and how those categories should be organized. I guess the ones that are up now strike me as somewhat arbitrary, both when using them to navigate to content and when categorzing my own stuff. How about letting users create, or at least suggest, new categories?
I'll second the proposal that users be able to reorder the categories that show up on their home pages.
And, somewhat tougher, how about letting users knit the categories into hierarchies? One thing that I think is terribly important when creating hierarchies is giving the ability to have multiple parents. Person A might expect, say, "Hi Fi" to be under "Technology," while Person B would look under "Hobbies." I'd say there's no reason they can't both be right.
Here's a list, pretty much in order, though I'm not rigid or consistent all the time, of what I want to do immediately upon logging on to gather. I would be very interested to know how other people use or desire to use the site.
1. check comments to articles I have written.
2. Check comments to articles for which I have written comments.
3. Read anything my friends or subscriptions have written, not only articles they have written, but comments they have made to other people's articles.
4. Browse headlines and read articles, by topic. The topics definitely need some refining.
5. Stalk my friends', subscriptions', and favorite authors' profile pages to find out who they are reading, what they are saying, and to find links to their other web entities (photologs, weblogs, professional sites, favorite links, etc.)
6. Write an article.
For a lot of people "write an article" would probably come higher on the agenda, and it might move up for me in the future, but I already have three weblogs, two yahoogroups, and tribe to keep up with, so I haven't yet figured out what writing niche gather is going to fill for me. The main attraction to using gather is that a lot more people (especially people who don't know me) will potentially read what I post here than on my weblogs.
My wish: that one could sumbit comments with the same editing features as when submitting an original article. On other forums as well as this one, I've often found the comments to be as interesting (or more so) than the original article. Why can't they incorporate bold face, italic, underline, or web links, just like articles?