You may also encounter changes to "subscriptions" on Gather. We've been doing some research and have found that most Gather members either don't understand subscriptions feature or just don't care. In an effort to focus our attention on the Gather features that provide the most value to our members we're taking initial steps toward discontinuing the subscriptions feature.
First, if you have subscriptions they can now be found on your "My Gather" page. This effectively makes all subscriptions private so there's no longer any option to control who can see who you are subscribed to.
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. If you happened to be both subscribed and connected as a friend to the same person the subscriptions for those people have been removed since they essentially do the same thing on your My Gather page. You can no longer be both subscribed and connected as a friend to the same person.
Group subscriptions have been discontinued so if you are a member of a group a duplicate subscription will not appear for that group. To be informed about the activities of any group on Gather you'll need to join that group.
Email notification options for subscriptions have also been discontinued. As noted above you now have the option to receive notification by email for any individual friend so we encourage you to send a friend request to any of your subscriptions to whom you really wish to stay informed. When your friend requests are accepted your subscription to the person will automatically go away.
It's always a difficult decision to remove a feature but as we continue to build a better Gather it's in everyone's best interest for us to focus our attention on the things that matter most. Subscriptions will be discontinued entirely with our next major set of features and enhancements. We'll be communicating more about this change over the next few weeks.
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
Improved Publishing to Friends and Groups
You can use your Friend Sets to share what you want with who you want. While we were at it we also improved the group selection options and cleaned up the publishing page design a bit too. learn more
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Comments: 14
No wonder you name the updates as they do hurricanes! Just kidding.
Jim, I'm disappointed with the decision to do away with something that some of us understand, use, and value, because others don't care to understand. People don't understand ratings, conversations, publishing to appropriate groups, why it is wrong to claim work that doesn't belong to them, and most every other feature on Gather - because they don't want to. None of it is difficult.
I have many interests, and comment in areas that others aren't interested in. I don't want to annoy people who don't share all of my interests by showing up on their My Page comment threads.
Without subscriptions, my Gather experience will be greatly decreased. I will not go to that general article area and wade through the games and one-liners to find the few people whose work I will enjoy.
Don't know. That is what I got out of what he wrote.
10 4 u