I've Been Thinking About You

Categories as they currently exist are not compelling. I recently went back to Friendster and was at a total loss to find any groups to join because the category choices were so uninspiring. On Tribe I've joined groups by just browsing the most recently created groups and checking out ones with interesting names.

Users should create your subcategories. They are going to be better at it and more creative than you are. (There's no cinema in the arts section.)

How about allowing a user to create her own categories for the home page, using tag words? These categories could be visible to others on the profile page, or not, at the user's discretion. People can get creative with the names of their categories. People like to get creative. Maybe you could create a category name and have the category form by using a list of key words for that category, but keep the key words hidden, so your categories list can be more whimsical and cleaner-looking.

It would be much easier to write tags for articles if I were able to reread the article at the same time as I write the tags.

Why is "Health and Fitness" flooded with Marketplace and Weekend America? Maybe they need their own categories.

The user needs to have multiple ways of finding content and organizing it for herself. I already talked about creating your own categories. You need search possibilities on all levels.

It is important not to see the same articles come up after you've looked at them, unless you've commented on them or bookmarked them to be read later.

New, new, new. I'd like to see the ten (or more) newest articles in all categories. An article that gets comments and ratings is alive. An article that doesn't is dead and once you've seen it and not reacted to it, it becomes an annoying ghost showing up over and over again.

I should never see my own or my subscribers' or my friends' content in a "featured articles" section. I've already read all that stuff and those headlines are just taking up valuable real estate on my home page.

Generally, the user should be given as much freedom and room for creativity as possible. If you encourage people to re-look their profiles and home pages, it gives them something to come back for, and something to do on Gather on a slow reading day (or a day the user just doesn't feel like reading.) The user should be allowed to put whatever information she wants on her profile. Some people will want to put their IM ids, others not. And so on and so on.

Everything on the home page and profile page should be foldable, so you can fit more onto your first glance, and decide what you want to see every time you log on.

People who are computer saavy will appreciate the sense of control. Of course, it has to be set up so that people who aren't saavy can still navigate and still have fun.

Tribe has been really great at this. A few months ago they redid their profile pages and added blogs. It makes looking at people's profiles a lot more fun.

If people are going to be writing long articles, there has to be some kind of "save as draft" (like on a MT blog) so that the risk of the heartbreaking accidental closing of the window is lessened. Also, people will want to work on the articles over a couple days and will need to save them.

I can't stress enough how important it is to be able to follow the articles to which I've made comments. Have you considered threading comments? Have you thought about having authors of articles sort of act as moderators, with the possibility of deleting comments if they are offensive, and even deleting the entire article if they have second thoughts? I think most people are responsible about this and only a few would abuse the power.

The site doesn't "remember me." I feel rejected.

Stalking and flirting are two important things people do on this kind of website. There should be ways of keeping track of people one finds interesting without actually subscribing to their content. Maybe you could bookmark profiles. A lot of flirting will probably happen in the comments, with people getting off topic, and the topic morphing into something else as it goes on. This is one reason threading comments could be useful.

Those are most of the ideas I've had on the subject over the past week. I'm excited about gather and I look forward to the next transformation.