Talk to Tom: Improving the New Gather (Redux)

Friends-

There were so many fantastic comments on the last piece (252 last I looked), that I thought it made sense to start a fresh article for the conversation itself (otherwise people would have to scroll through pages to find our dialog). 

Before I begin, I want to thank you all again for caring enough to share your perspective.  That kind of commitment to Gather, the quality of the interaction on the site, and the constructive conversation we have here about the future all make Gather an exceptional place. 

As background for our conversation, I thought it might be helpful to share the vision we have for Gather and some of the things we have learned in our journey so far.   This will help put our recent upgrade in context and allow us to have a better conversation this afternoon.

One of our key learnings since we first launched the alpha version of the Gather site, way back in late 2005, was that people discover things socially and engage in more meaningful dialog when they do.  What do I mean?  Some of the information we consume is information that we actually seek out.  We might google it.  We might scan a newspaper looking for a few key areas of interest.  We might visit wikipedia or other sites with specific questions as well.

But much (perhaps most) of the new things we learn come from the people around us.  We learn from meetings at work, casual conversations with friends, or discussions with family over dinner.  We hear a story on public radio and mention it at the coffee machine, forward an article to a group of peers that might be interested, or even hand a physical newspaper or magazine clipping to a friend we know might like it.  And sometimes, when we want information we can really trust, we reach out to the people we know (our offline social networks) and ask them what they know, or who they know that might point us in the right direction.

This is all social discovery.  It is made much more powerful, over time, through the careful (albeit often unconscious) selection of who we keep in our lives as friends and colleagues.  Over the course of many years, we form relationships with people that we respect and trust.  They come to know us well (our likes and dislikes, our passions and hot buttons) as we come to know them.  And we begin to share, with each person we know, the things that we know will interest them.

In the early days of Gather, we discovered that a very early version of the "Friend Feed" we just launched created tremendous social discovery and learning.  People would share ideas and we would be sure their friends knew.  Interested friends would respond and we'd pass that response to the friends of those friends.  And in a matter of hours, great ideas (the best conversations on the site) would cascade(tm) through the network to reach hundreds or thousands of people.  Many of them would be engaged in dialog with the people they know and trust.  When it works, it's powerful stuff.

At the same time, we recognized that we were failing to deliver an experience to a broad segment of our members. There are a lot of Gatherers who do not want to create articles or share images every day.  They want to stay in touch with the people they care about.  They want to share and stay connected with them.  They want to interact.  But they wanted a lower threshold for doing that.  Some of our new technology is, therefore, meant to engage an underserved segment of our member base. 

Last fall, we set-out to build a better social engine for Gather, one that enables social discovery/sharing as I described above.  We created a platform that allows information to cascade through trusted circles of friends. And we added features (like status and pings) that let people keep in touch and interact with folks they know more playfully.

We launched the first part of this social platform in this technology a month ago when we allowed you to create friend sets and share with specific friends.  We launched the second piece last week, when we enabled feeds. 

We recognize, from the conversation over the past four days, that we have some work to do to improve this experience.  I am confident that it will, when we are done, be a much better one for the community.  It will take us some time to get there, but with your help we will build a Gather that meets the needs of a diverse membership, allows social discovery and sharing, and allows you to see the people and things you care about on Gather quickly and easily. 

With this context, let me start to respond to thoughts posted on my previous article.  I'll do my best to keep up today (but remember...you have me out numbered!)

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.