Gather upgrade - let's not throw the baby out with the bath water

So much strong reaction from everyone today!  Well, at least it shows us how strongly people feel about Gather.  Better that than nobody caring, right?

It seems like a lot of people are upset about various pieces of this upgrade, but it seems like they're wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater, i.e. they want the old way back, never mind the good things that have been introduced.

Good things?  What good things?

Well, few people are commenting on them, but they're there.  You know how you used to have to go to each individual group to see new articles posted in them?  Well now you can see all the new articles in your groups all in one place in the Group Feed.  Before, there really wasn't much of a good reason to join groups, if you ask me.  But now, you can easily keep up with the content being posted in your groups.

And the interests feed (or as it's labeled, "Feed Me"), is a great way to see what's being talked about on your favorite subjects, without having to join every possible group that might be related to that subject.  Someone might post a really interesting article about Hillary Clinton or about whale migration, and never post it to any groups at all, but if you have those terms set up in your Feed Me, you'll be able to see them.

And on to the Friend Feed...  This is where people seem to have a lot of complaints, not wanting to be stalkers seeing every ping or profile update, etc.  And a lot of those complaints are quite valid - I do think it would be an improvement to make the dropdowns "sticky", or to include in the feed options which activity types you want to be able to view by default.  I'm just disappointed to see people saying "I hate it all, change it all back."  On the old page, you could only see a few articles, images, and video at a time, and they took up a lot of room on the page.  You had to click on "View all" for each section to see any more.  It may need a little tweaking, but I think we've made some big improvements to the page.

Another complaint is not being able to spotlight old content, and I agree, this really is something we should have.  I hope we get it in there soon.  But again, there's no reason to denounce the spotlight functionality entirely - it's still a good idea, but again, it needs some tweaking.

The fact is, people do resist change, and I'm sure some of the reaction is just from that - the changes we've made are not small, so they will take a little getting used to.  Not saying it's all that, because obviously there are some improvements we can make.  But it's just a fact - people take a little while to adjust to change.  So please just give it a couple days and play with it.  Meanwhile I'm sure we'll be doing our best to iron out the wrinkles on our side.