Mark your calendars and clear your schedules – Gather CEO Tom Gerace will be hosting a live chat TODAY at 2pm ET.Tom will answer any questions you might have about the recent Gather redesign, he’ll also offer a sneak peek at what our developers are working on now.
Feel free to start the conversation below by asking your questions now in the comment thread. Tom will try to answer these questions first.
Today’s 2pm ET chat will be featured in help.gather.com, improve.gather.com, and in the Gather Picks section of the Explore page. You will also be able to find a link to the chat in the “Today on Gather” module located in the upper right-hand corner of the People, Groups and Explore landing pages.
So go ahead Gather, start talking – what do you want to talk to Tom about?
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Comments: 73
Is there a fake Tom running around Gather somewhere? I want to meet HIM! heheh.
But my big issue is being able to divide my groups in the same way that I can divide my friends into different catagories. Is that going to be available at any time? I would love to see that happen as it would make publishing much easier.
On a positive note, I do like the new give-aways that Gather has in place. Its fun to be able to participate in a chat and earn extra points with chances to win a few more. Thanks for that.
Question: Will you ever make the Gather home page back into something with a little more class and style, like it was before?
I'll second that. Come on, when's this going to happen?
Daily Question ... 8/5/08
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I'd just like to say -
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by John Philipp
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He's Worth the Trouble, Cause That's His Name
Kind of like what you can do to Facebook and Myspace etc. A little "G" icon where you can "gather" other articles and pages from around the web and they are imported automatically into the feeds in our individual gather profiles.
I will be addressing this at the next talk with Tom.
But my question is about something that started yesterday. Every time I try to do something, I'm getting this weird message that tells me my Ping cannot be done right now. I haven't tried any pings! I get that message when I'm trying to rate or comment.
(and telling me to use the feed will just irk me further as the feed does NOT provide comment counts AND it clears itself every damn day which means that the articles I am looking for are lost if I don't get to it in time)
I have suggested that a reasonable solution would be to add a For Me option to the Posts page .... no response to my suggestions though :(
I love that the new Gather promotes everything from silly games to great debates while still encouraging writing. I think there is room for everyone and I do believe Gather is trying to incorporate that!
I love the new contests that give us an opportunity to acquire more points.
Oh, and one thing I would love to see fixed is the downloading of pictures. Most of the time I have to try over and over again before the picture will fully load.
But regardless of what happens...I LOVE GATHER!!!!!!!
Other than that, I'm good with the upgrade.
I'd like to meet him too, Debra.
I am as disgruntled as anyone about these ceaseless changes which, for the regular users of the Gather, contribute next to nothing to the over-all effectiveness and interconnectivity of this site.
Most of all, I am concerned about Gather's apparent attempt to discourage connectivity. It’s almost as if Gather would like to "water down" the artistic and political expressiveness that once characterized the site.
Things were happening here! People had ideas, opinions. They contributed rich content. It was a thrilling place to visit! Gather was an exciting place to share one's work.
What I notice now---is the disarray.
And---the difficulty of staying highly interactive.
It is a constant challenge to stay connected. I only stay here because of the friends I've made on Gather. I don't want to lose touch with them and so I stay.
There no longer is much artistic or professional merit to being “posted” on Gather.
More and more, Gather is becoming "just like those other social websites." If I'd wanted to be on that kind of site, I'd already be spending time on one of those others. And I'd never have come to Gather in the first place.
If I were looking at this site now as a potential member, I certainly wouldn't be signing on. I used to recommend Gather to others all the time, but I haven’t recommended Gather for some time now---not since before Hawthorne. What’s to recommend? Gather doesn't even have a HOME PAGE! The front page/home feature page was one of the best things Gather had going for it! And now---it’s wiped out. Gone. The Explore Button doesn't do it. Not even close.
Didn't anyone do a real honest-to-goodness market research analysis before buying into these crazy will-nilly upgrades? You'd think you'd have used an independent agency to research these changes before buying somebody's expensive bill of goods! What financial benefit could possibly be gained from alienating almost all of your future advertisers’ potential customers?
Gather is no longer easy to use. It’s no longer fun to use. It has become a challenge---no, I'd say---it has become a real "chore" to make a significant contribution here.
I did a quick assessment of the number of friends and colleagues to whom I was still connected. I knew many had left Gather, but I was surprised to find that, of the ones that remained, fully 1/3 had not signed in since the Hawthorne "upgrade". That's a lot of people who are probably gone for good. Statistically significant, I'd say.
Please---No more boasting that Gather has 500,000 members. You may have collected that many "sign ups" over time, but saying you have that many active members is simply not true. Continuing to do so in order to attract potential advertisers or to find a potential buyer is tantamount to fraud. You don't have that many active participants on Gather anymore, Tom. They are gone. Gone, gone, gone.
Ina, as much as I'd love to attend, I believe I'll be on my way to to Omaha (or Albuquerque) at the time of tomorrow's chat. Not to worry though, I'm sure this "other" Tom guy will answer every question to your satisfaction just as I did during my Live Chat last week.
and I agree wholeheartedly
I understand the opening page is a marketing tool and maybe the previous homepage wasn't effective as that.
But we all loved it so, couldn't we have the same page somewhere inside gather that we could all click on? The scroll buried at the bottom of the "Explore" page is better than nothing but doesn't quite cut it.
We did take a positive approach, if you haven't read it, at:
Writers and readers to the rescue on Gather
Some good suggestions there.
Ina, as much as I'd love to attend, I believe I'll be on my way to to Omaha (or Albuquerque) at the time of tomorrow's chat. Not to worry though, I'm sure this "other" Tom guy will answer every question to your satisfaction just as I did during my Live Chat last week.
(Fake) Tom Gerace , Aug 6, 2008, 7:05pm EDT
Oh, thank you Fake Tom! I'm sure you're on your way to make sure our Omaha Steak gift cards are fully intact.
We salute you.
With fewer members in the demographic, how can you claim that Gather is the "premier online social network for the 30+ demographic"?
And, the RSS feeds don't work for me either. I put a friend of mine on a feed, and I never get the feed in my inbox like I'm supposed to. What is the problem here?
And, I agree with some others on here. When will we ever be able to group our friends, into something like top friends? Or order the groups we're in by the ones we use the most? I hate having to look up the same group over and over to post to them.
Do you think there's a correlation between the recent 'upgrades' and Gather's steady traffic decline?
Please replace our green mail envelope notifications. It is cumbersome to have to make the extra clicks.
Also, please find a way to put the HOME PAGE BACK ON.
I am on Facebook and it has a new page (which looks a LOT like the Gather page) but it says, click HERE for OLD FACEBOOK.
America is all about promotion.
QUITE A NUMBER OF MY FRIENDS AND CONNECTIONS HAVE NOTICED THAT MANY OF THEIR FRIENDS HAVE NOT CHECKED INTO GATHER AFTER HAWTHORNE.
ALSO, the big orange ball - if it is still big - it is TOO big - the colored dots are ok - but ORANGE is a bit offensive as a color, wheras blue is not - and the ball should be shrunk a bit.
Remember, Facebook has 90 million and is just a few blue slabs where you sign in.
Twitter has a cute blue bird so that is cute.
It is more important to KEEP memebers than to alienate them in hopes of getting new ones.
It is also important and perhaps in your contract with the paid correspondents to PROMOTE THEM, not leaving them hanging from the bottom of the page.
THE FEATURES REALLY NEED TO BE MOVED FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE AND SOON.
I now post little very serious work because fewer serious people are on regularly.
It is a classic case of Coke, New Coke do away with Old Coke. Oops, get rid of New Coke and bring back coke and call it Classic Coke.
BRING BACK CLASSIC GATHER.
I understand that there is a great difficulty to walk a fine line between change and making things supposedly more functional, but.....everytime you make changes Gather makes the same fundamental types of errors;
It changes things that don't need changing. This is what angers us more than the changes you consider necessary.
The green mail envelope notification was highly functional. Nobody needs extra clicks. We just don't have time.
Getting rid of the way the old MY GATHER worked as a notification system was a big mistake. That should be reinstated, too, along with the home page. I think there could be fewer groups and fewer members featured, for example, with the home page, and that would make it easier to read.
But getting rid of the HOMEPAGE itself, which was the main draw for advertisers, correspondents and such, and is what distinguished Gather as apart from all these other sites in terms of premier quality for the over 30 crowd, - it is a huge mistake to stuff it into the bottom of the page where nobody sees it.
If Facebook can have a toggle switch, so can Gather. I heard from my daughter but have also read and now have proof that when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, makes changes the members do not like, he restores FB to the way they like. He knows it is paramount that members accept changes. I am regularly reading the computer press on social networking news. PCWorld recently reported on Facebook.
I will be reporting soon on what the trade press is saying about Gather.
Mis dos centavos............ on Gather updates
The main ones are:
Bring the Home Page back!
Gather Essentials are now Non-Essential
Feeds don't work like they should and why in the world do they have to be erased after a certain hour????
We need Articles for Me back
We need Images for Me back
The new rating option is hard to use
Where are the Cc: and Bcc: options in Mail?
The way things are now, it is very hard to find my friends/connections' work!!!
Please consider giving us back some of the things you took away ....Gathering is not as pleasant as it used to be!
SO ... fix em both (and the mail icons too) please
Can this be changed?
I have read others' comments about the difficulties getting articles into groups. I don't think people realize the articles won't show up in the groups for 15 minutes, similar to the feed issue. You must have a technical reason for this, I am thinking it might relate to keeping the PING speed fast, but am not really sure of the reason.
Can the articles show up into the group within 15 minutes of their being posted to the group? Granted, this will not be a problem if the moderator gets to the group AFTER the 15 minutes have passed, but it is annoying for those of us (many) on a tight schedule.
And then the video as I had mentioned before. It would also be nice if we could post certain videos that were platform native and not be converted to flv.
Thanks
DBD
Maybe some of my equally frustrated friends will show up and try to get some of these questions we have only been trying to get a straight answer for, for the past three months or more, actually answered.
Does Gather endose this line of thinking or are secondary and thirdary roads always going to be how we must navigate/use Gather ? In short, why are so many clicks needed to get something done ?
I miss a few things with the new ICE version, but that more than anything!
I agree with Connie ~ The Home Page is an essential element (the previous Home Page was excellent). The circles are not useful and annoying to view.
Natalie made good points -- do listen to her.
Angela also had good input.
Chris ~ Thank you for posting Alexa
Cassandra asked one of the questions I had about sending invites to Groups and not duplicating existing members.
The disappearing posts, comments, etc. is a major issue here on this Site now. Are you working on correcting this problem Tom? I stayed away because of this problem in the last change -- now it seems to be worse. In addition, is there a time limit before a person is clicked out (loses data) and has to sign in again? This too is very annoying. . .
There are some good things about the NEW LOOK . . . however, at the moment, I am overwhelmed with all of the above complaints.
I must tell you I love Gather and enjoy being a contributing member here.
Thanks for giving us all the opportunity to experience this site!