Good afternoon!
Welcome, everyone, to the monthly Ask the CEO chat. This past month on Gather has been very exciting with the implementation of many new programs and features, with many more in the works. I would personally like to thank you for joining me this afternoon to discuss what's on your mind. Not only do I look forward to interacting with our members, but the Gather community at whole greatly benefits from all of your suggestions, ideas, and comments.
To join the conversation, here are some helpful tips:
1) To see new comments and keep up with the discussion, you will need to periodically refresh your screen. You may refresh your view by using the refresh button on your browser, or the F5 key on your keyboard, or through the Ctrl+R key (on Windows) or CMD+R (On Mac) key combination.
2) Once you have posted a comment to the conversation, refresh your screen (see above). Don't worry about accidental double-posting of comments, as Gather technology prevents doing so without a screen refresh between posts. This will ensure that you can more quickly "chime in" with your thoughts.
I will be here for the next hour to listen and respond to your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.
I want you to use this time to tell me how you feel about what we've done, what we're doing, and what you'd like to see us do. Many exciting changes have been made since our last chat, so I'm sure you have a lot to say. I am excited to hear what you're thinking!
All the best,
Tom Gerace, CEO
Gather.com
tom.gather.com
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Comments: 57
By adding the ability for Gather readers to easily bookmark Gather content on Digg and del.icio.us, we bring new readers to your content. We plan to add a similar technology to Gather in the future, but these links let you reach the broad base of Digg and del.icio.us users as well to help them discover the great content created here.
If you want to use these links on Gather, you will need to set-up separate Digg or del.icio.us accounts. Please note that these are separate companies so you may want to explore their sites before doing so.
Good afternoon. I'd like to address something I haven't seen on Gather. As a new but very active member I'd like to propose giving members the option of turning their points over to a charity. Does Gather have or is planning to have a philanthropic aspect?
Instead, you can post links to Gather stories (and photos, for del.icio.us) there. These sites are used by people that want to discover great content on the internet. By posting Gather's best there, we help others discover Gather's top content and talent.
is there any progress on muting these horrible orance colors on the text boxes?
Good afternoon. You have mentioned that the new recommendation-based 'rating' system will be implemented this fall. Will you be performing any usability studies (member 'test drives') of the system prior to implementation?
In May, we took a first step in this direction. We allow any 501c3 (from public radio stations to find-a-cure groups to churches and schools) that invite more than 100 new people to their Gather group to receive Gather points donations today. Many Gatherers have donated their points to charities like American Public Media or Ryan's Run already.
We hope to find new ways to give back to our community as well as Gather grows.
Group owners: if we allowed you to create your own polls, would you?
I also noticed that Google now has every single comment I've ever posted on Gather . I am aware, of course, that Internet is very public, but not all message boards and services have every comment ever made searchable on the search engines. Is this a policy or was it something that you weren't aware of? Thoughts on this going forward?
Google doesn't have access to private articles on Gather. If you post an article only to individuals and private groups, that article will be restricted to those people. If you post your content to a public group (one that chooses to make content available to everyone online), however, your content will show up publicly (and therefore on Google) because you have picked this public forum for posting. In the future, we will differentiate between public and private groups for you when you are selecting where your content can appear so that you can make this determination more easily when deciding where to post (if you belong to many groups).
Note too that you can change your name to appear as just Danny D or something else, if you prefer, in your preferences. That will prevent people from searching for your content from finding it on places like Google, even if it is public.
In the early Gather days, we had a big debate about how comments should appear on Gather. We debated whether you should be able to make comments visible to just select people/groups (like you can with articles or images) or whether they should be visible to everyone.
In the end, we recognized that comments were different from these articles. Comments are part of a broader discussion thread; if someone could see an article but only some fraction of the comments, it would be hard for a proper conversation to happen. It would be more like a bunch of people, interested in a topic, getting together in a room and then just whispering to one another.
In the end, we decided that comments should be visible to anyone who could see the core content being commented on. Therefore, public articles would have comments that are public. Private articles would have comments available only to those seeing the article.
Thanks!
2) Would it be possible to show the number of 'reads' we have accumulated overall, in addition to comments on individual articles? I think this would give us a better idea of the popularity of our work than the mysterious ratings system now in place, and might be used as a legitimate ratings tool, as well.
We are working on fixing the "remember me" function so that you can stay logged-in until you choose to log-out. It's a top priority for our team and already in development. Apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime.
(see my post just above for the answer to number #2...it appears to have crossed yours in the mail)
Again thinking out loud (always dangerous, as our team can tell you), we also might consider letting film studios send disks to Gatherers who join our movie group as a way to promote launches of their new film. It turns out we have a lot of "influencers" on our site, so sending to a (limited pool) of people might be attractive to them.
Maybe the movie disk idea could extend to preview copies of books for people interested in that? Vince Flynn just had excerpts of his first 8 chapters of his new book sent out to member of his fan club who were interested... might work here too.
Keep the suggestions coming!
The Amazon Shorts program has been a big hit. It has grown to nearly 2,600 members in just three months. It continues to add members every day and the quality of the content there has been fantastic.
Only Gather members can vote in the Amazon Shorts program. Today, if someone publishes a story and invites friends to come and support them, those people can vote only if they become Gatherers. The sheer size of the group (with those 2,600 potential voters) and growth of the group means the impact of those new Gatherers grows smaller every day.
Tom has to jump to a call and therefore must have a hard stop at 1pm. All unaddressed questions and comments will be answered later in follow-up comments. Thanks again for your participation - it's feedback like this that makes for a better community experience!
Group chat and IM (member-to-member instant messaging) are both something we are exploring aggressively. Stay tuned for more.
I was glad to hear that the technical staff is working on allowing us to remain signed in on a machine.
Some of the other requess (charity, personalized invitations, etc.) make me feel that I actually know something about the site--though they also provide opportunities to say, "Yes, good idea, your wish is granted"!
I am waiting to see what the proposed new threaded comments system has to offer. At present we comment on several articles and move on. If there is some feedback or response on my comment on another's article I have no way of knowing it unless I go back and dig into those articles. I presume the threaded comments system has an easy way to circumvent that problem.
Thanks.
I would also like to see a feature where I could view all the latest comments to any of my articles. Not the ones I make, but others who comment on artcles I may have written months ago, but have no way of responding to them.
On the subject of polls:
If the polls were categorized, I think they would have a much better effect.
Most of the polls I've seen on other websites are so so vague in what they are targeting that they have very little interest to the read, and probably produce very little usebale information for the person posting ther poll.
If a polls were headed by titles like:
* Opinion
* Response
* Feedback
* Social Impact
( just to name a few) I believe polls would get a higher response, and those responses would be more focused.
I would use polls with my groups, but only if the format for polling was refined more than it is generally on other websites.
Example:
If I read a poll question that asked: "Should all coffee be served black ?" I probably wouldn't pay much attention to it.
However, If that same question was headed "Cost Saving Measures" and then asked the question, " Should all coffee be served black?" I would probably respond, and put some thought into my response.