emails, coming back

I don't really want emails telling me when someone has reacted to something I posted on gather. Like most poeple, I get enough emails already. I want to log onto gather and see on my homepage all the new activity (comments my articeles, new comments to articels I've made comments to, new articles in general).

At the same time, though, I ended up getting really involved in another online community when I was notified by email (after having joined several weeks earlier) that I had been invited to join a group. So there's certainly something to be said for a certain amount of email notification. But at the same time, I haven't been drawn back into Friendster by any of the "friendster news" notifications I've received over the past six months. It has to be something that feels like it comes from some person who is interested in me. Not just some spammish "news." It's exciting to feel like someone has read something you have written and wants to include you in something they are doing.

I don't have a specific idea for gather about what can make a person who has written a couple articles and then left come back and back again, but it's sure that what you want is for people to be checking in on gather on their coffee breaks at work. You want gather to be one of the five things people do every day immediately after turning on their computers.

The comment as content idea is key. I've commented on several articles in the past few days and have no way of quickly finding those articles again, particularly because my navigation methods on the site are multiple. I find myself looking at all the articles of a person I find interesting. Maybe you could have a little sidebar of people I've commented on recently. I don't feel confident right away to subscribe to a person, but I still want to stalk them a little, and I'm bad with names.

Also, during this beta stage, more articles from this site comments section could appear in the suggested articles section. I feel like not enough users are reading and reacting to this essential stuff. I'm very interested to know how other people think about a site like this, how they want to use it, but it seems like no one will read about these issues if they don't go all the way to the bottom of the subject list and click on "site comments."

I'm excited about this site, and I think it fills a spot that hasn't been filled yet. The quality of the content is excellent. The whole problem is how to make it into something I can pop in on a few times a day and manage into chunks of readable and organizeable parcels.

I promise to write an article in another rubric within the next two weeks. Really.