Greetings Gatherers,
I am excited to announce we will be conducting a site upgrade at 11:00 PM eastern time Tuesday March 4, 2008. The site will be unavailable for approximately 4 hours. Please be sure to complete any publishing activity prior to this time. Check back after 3:00 AM eastern time to log in and start your day on Gather.
This upgrade, codenamed Guthrie, is a significant release. Guthrie focuses on "connections," or as we'll be calling them after the upgrade, friends. Starting tomorrow, we will let you group your connections into "friend sets." When you then share things on Gather, you can decide whether to share them with all of Gather or just certain of your friend sets. We have added improved privacy controls on your profile, too, letting you share different profile elements with different friend sets as well.
Guthrie also includes a simplified registration process and a "Getting Started Guide" for new members. Please watch for a full article outlining the details to be published by Jim Bostick. To better assist you with using the new features, please join the Support team at Help.gather.com where they will be on hand to answer your questions.
As always, we appreciate your patience during this upgrade and we welcome your feedback on the new features!
All the best,
Tom
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Comments: 111
Katie- I will ask our Member Services team to reach out and give you a hand with group publishing. I haven't heard other reports of that this week so perhaps we can work 1-on-1 with you to resolve that issue.
but about the connections part, what if we don't want to call them "friends"? jk :)
Either way, thanks for all the great work on making Gather better!
My husband's computer is literally like 2 feet away from mine. I see my icon just fine in my comments, but when my husband looks at my comments, he doesn't see my icon.
Odd..
: )
You do not have permission to view this group. If the group is private, you must be signed in for permission to access it.
Will it be available later?
Once you have friend sets, you can share your content with either all of gather, all of your friends, or just certain friend sets. You can also choose to put your content into groups as well, as you can today. Jim Bostick will give a much more detailed description in the morning, when you can zip around the site and have a look.
possibly just a articles by my subscriptions link? then we could subscribe not only to articles but to particular groups whose articles we want to see even if we're not connected to the person
I am really excited about Guthrie!
Content that you shared previously will be visible to only those people who can see it today. To transition from our current system to our new one, we are creating "starter" friend sets for you that carry the names your old style connections do today (family, friends, colleagues). We will group people into those friend sets as you have them grouped today as well. Content will be available just to those friend sets that can see the content already.
Starting tomorrow, you can rename those friend sets if you want. You can change who belongs to each friend set. And you can add new friend sets if you like, too.
Going forward, we will also keep your friend set viewing privileges up to date. If you have someone marked as "family" and share (or have shared previously) content with just your family, that content can be viewed only by the people you have identified as family. If you remove someone from your "family" friend set, they will no longer be able to see the content shared exclusively with that friend set. We hope this will help you share what you want with just whom you want today, and in the future.
Thanks for asking!
Blessings
I just hope no major glitches occur. I can see nearly all the icons now but occasionally when I am reading articles, I run across certain icons that I cannot see. Wonder if they will ever come back? I have deleted history and rebooted MANY times!
D'you suppose the missing icons'll come back sometime too?
Jim Bostick - Gather Director of User Experience
I could not begin to imagine the task of trying to group 6960 "friends".
I only have 7 connections and all but one of them are cats (the other is a Katz). Maybe I will organize them by breeds or types: human, Scottish fold, domestic shorthair, cats of unknown pedigree, long-haired brain damaged cats with one eye, cats with three legs, etc.
just in time to drive those wanting to post about the primaries nutz!
[short trip in many cases!]..
I am looking forward to the upgrade. My only concern is that I want to make sure that I can connect ok afterward.
The upgrades sound like they will fun!
Does Gather really care about politics and Gather's political writing community?
The answer seems to be a resounding; NOT REALLY.
As to the idea of this helping keep content out of the hands of thieves (which was mentioned when that stolen Gather picture was found on Zazzle), I doubt it will help, especially since the thief was a "friend" of the victim at the time anyway.
Now THERE is something you can fix. Make it tougher for thieves - at least slow them down a little. I know you can't stop them entirely. And when a thief is caught red-handed, give them the boot!
Thanks for the warning, and Guthrie sounds like it's going to be a great idea.
While you're adjusting friends, will you please create GROUP SETS as well? That would make things A LOT easier!!!
and to learn more about it.
Thanks for the information.