So now that you've learned about Friend Sets you're probably wondering what to do with them. Well they do a lot more than let you find friends on you're My Friends page easily. Friend Sets allow you to share content and profile information only with those whom you want to share. If you like sharing your world with everyone you can still do that too.
Share an article only with your co-workers. Those picnic photos can be shared with just your immediate family. Post an article to have a private conversation. Maybe you only want your closest friends to know your hometown or other profile information. Now you can privately share things you might not have felt comfortable sharing before. It's all up to you.
When you share articles images and Video on Gather you'll notice a few changes. Mainly there's now a new option to publish to "selected friends" in addition to everyone, public groups, and private groups or "just me". Just click the Friend Sets that include people you want to have access to your content.
While we were at it we also improved the publish page layouts. If you want to change your rating and commenting settings click the "options" link and they'll appear. Most people don't change these so we've minimized them so that they won't be in the way of the options you use most. They're still easy to get to though. When you return to edit things you've published previously we'll minimize the "Who can View" options too. We've learned that many times people just want to edit text or tags so to clean up the page you'll just see a note indicating all your settings. Just click the "options' link and your group and friend settings appear.
Speaking of Groups
I know what many of you are thinking. "Did they make it easier to publish to my groups?" The answer is yes!
We know that Groups are a really important part of the Gather experience and we've been listening to your feedback. The Guthrie efforts focus mainly on your relationships with your friends but when we improved how friends are selected to include in Friend Sets we also applied improvements to how you select Gather groups when publishing articles, images, and video.
Your
group lists now have the new "find" option above each list making it easier than ever to find the right group for the right content. Type a few letters and the groups whose names start with those letters appear. For example, I love photography and belong to several photo groups on Gather. Now if I type "PHO" I quickly get my groups that have names that begin with photo, photography, photographer. Then I go and type "TRA" and my Travel Photography group appears.
The groups in the list also display a description as well making it easier for me to know what each group is about. I encourage all group owners to use the short description of your groups to let others know exactly what your group is about. This will help reduce unwanted off-topic submissions to your groups.
If you have a lot of groups there are some important things to know. The lists will initially load up to 250 groups. If you belong to more groups than that on Gather you can find them using the "find" option explained above or when you scroll a list to the bottom you'll see a "get more" link. Clicking this will load an additional 250 of your groups. The vast majority of Gather members have fewer than 250 groups so this shouldn't affect too may folks.
We're aware of many other suggestions for improvements to Gather Groups from members and we're in the planning stages to implement additional improvements to groups over the next several months. We'll announce those enhancements as we get closer to implementation.
To join the conversation on these and the other features introduced in this upgrade please visit the Guthrie Overview article.
Learn More
The article links below provide detailed descriptions of the enhancements being introduced today. There's a lot so take some time to soak it all in.
Friend Sets allow you to organize the people you're connected to on Gather. Friend Sets are optional and private. You can edit, create, rename or remove Friend Sets any time. Friend Sets give you control. learn more
Subscriptions to people will continue to feed the articles, images, video, and comments by those individuals to your My Gather page as they always have but we've introduced several changes to the subscription options. learn more
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Comments: 16
Thank you for this feature!
Is there anyway I can email that list, say the ones I've marked "collegues?" It's a pain to have to select forty individuals names from a long list of "friends."
Thanks.
I see no point in writing and publishing if I cannot contact my friends to read my work.