Thank you for joining me today. As always, I look forward to the great dialogue and thoughtful input these live chats generate.
I encourage you to voice your opinions about everything Gather, the Gather community and our direction. I will be here for the next hour to listen and respond to your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below and many members of Team Gather will join me in reviewing your feedback. Let's get started!
All the best,
Tom Gerace, CEO
gather.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
|
|
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 200
After our April release (Hawthorne), many members wrote with suggestions about how they might want to change or improve their “Friend feeds.” We know that Gather members care a great deal about keeping-up with the content shared by their friends and family. Some people found that comments and status updates were pushing their friends’ content out of their feeds too quickly. Others found some items in those feeds desirable and other items distracting.
A number of you requested that we revisit the design of the feeds and consider breaking out content from other activities. Our product team plans to address that in our next release. We hope this will address the needs of those, like flit, who miss “articles for me” or “images for me” from our prior my page.
We are currently testing a number of alternatives with existing members (some content contributors, some readers, some more social members) to figure out what works best. Once we have this testing done, we will share our plans in greater detail.
Kathryn asked about content featuring and moderation within groups, and specifically about whether we can make content appear more quickly within groups once it is approved (it can take up to 15 minutes now).
Marianne and Angela joined you in asking about grouping groups. People sharing a lot on Gather often want to post to multiple groups simultaneously to broaden their exposure. These members want to be able to organize their groups into sets like we currently allow people to organize friends into sets.
Cassandra asked about improvements to the group invite system, specifically preventing people who are already members from being invited.
A number of people have asked about adding live chat to groups to allow members to have open discussion forums on the site.
These are all great requests/suggestions. Our product team is planning to focus on group improvements later in the fall. This will be a significant release, but we will have to make hard decisions about what will fit in that release and what might have to wait to be addressed in the future. I will collect these suggestions for our product team (please post others to improve.gather.com) and we will be looking at them in about six weeks when we start planning the groups release.
Has it been considered at all to add a live chat option to Gather?
fiction/poetry/journal entries/games/etc.
You keep grouping us by people which, in my opinion, encourages a clique mentality, when some of us are here for the content. It would be so nice to be able to click on a link and find CONTENT that interests me.
Any chance of adding an edit button in our comment bubbles?
I haven't heard a good explanation for this. I'm also curious as to what the rationale was for changing "articles" to posts and "images" to photos. Actually all the terminology changes were very offputting for me.
And why friends/group invites and mail notifications are only visible on the my gather page?
I certainly hope you'll come up with something that works to replace Articles For Me .... (although since what we HAD worked so well, I am not thrilled that we have to wait for it *sigh*)
How about you unbreak the workaround in the meantime? Whoever did that needs a kick in the shins, by the way.
And I'm with Stephanie B about the new terminology!
I understand your concerns about the homepage. Let me address your question, if I may, in two parts. First, I'd like to explain why we made a change. And second, I'd like to cover where we wanted the community to discover new authors/content and, if we have fallen short of what we aimed to do, chat with you about how we can do better.
We changed the Gather homepage because it was confusing new visitors. As you suggest, our public radio exposure (and other partnerships) bring lots of new people to Gather. With the content-heavy page, many arrived, were unsure what Gather was, and left without joining.
In market tests we did, we discovered that new visitors thought Gather was a magazine or newspaper-like site. They did not understand the quality of the community, human connection, and conversation that happens here. We thought the homepage would better serve new members by offering them a description of what Gather is and allowing them to join. It is succeeding in that purpose.
[As an aside, it may be worth mentioning that we are testing (and will continue to test) different homepages for the site right now. Some visitors see one version of the homepage today while others see another. We are measuring how well each of these homepages works in convincing first-time visitors to Gather to join the community. We will continue to test different homepages over time to make sure that those visiting Gather find a compelling, easy to understand description of the Gather experience.]
Of course, the homepage served our current members as well, allowing contributors an opportunity to be seen by the broader community and members the opportunity to find interesting things happening here. There is a concern today among writers that their content is more difficult to find without the homepage. There are members who want to more easily explore the essentials content and find it’s now buried more deeply in the site.
We created the “Explore” page on the site as a new destination for members, with the goal of allowing those of us that share and read here to find the most interesting stuff on Gather. Rather than playing a “top down” editorial role, we decided to put the community in charge, allowing you to decide what comes to the top based on what is most viewed, discussed, and highest rated. On this page, we also offer staff picks as well to call out the things our editorial team finds even if they have not yet been picked-up by the community.
Additionally, in social spaces like Gather, it’s worth remembering that people discover things differently than they do in more traditional media spaces (like newspapers or magazines). We find things through the connections we have and the ideas they explore (see a piece I wrote on social discovery a couple of months ago). This kind of social discovery is already at work on Gather.
From what I read today, though, a number of people think that the Explore page falls short of the mark and would like us to revisit it. Some people would like a summary of the essentials back. Others would prefer more frequent updates to the page. Some find the community-driven selection does not work as well as our editorial picks.
I will pass this feedback on to our product team. I would love suggestions about other changes you might like to see to the Explore page. There are minor changes we might make in the short term to improve this, but I'd like to consider the big picture with you to see what specific changes you might like to see us make there.
Not everyone, and those of us who use all ten numbers catch all kinds of grief over it.
I think you made it harder to discover new authors/content. I feel stuffed in a corner, more than ever. I didn't use the home page, and I honestly want to cry when I look at the recent articles list. I realize that makes me nearly impossible to please. The categories would help ;-)
Can you talk about the plans for the (In)Essential Channels? As a correspondent, I was most dismayed to see them disappear from the homepage and have definitely noticed the hit on page views. Where do you see the Essentials going over the next year? How about the Correspondents? Many of us feel a bit 'twisting slowly in the wind' on the topic. grin
I think that is truly the biggest problem with your update(s) [still meaning downgrade, not up, but whatever] .... beyond the actual changes that are made - there is a failure to consider the messages you are giving to members with those changes, or, sometimes, in your communications about those changes
We are now working on a release that will allow people to do just that. I expect this new technology be available in the early fall (and can't wait for it myself). As a related question, would you like to have the option to allow friends and family to order prints of your photos? Would you order photo prints or photo books yourself? (For the sake of clarity, I should mention that we are not launching any photo printing technology this fall, I am just curious about whether or not people find this interesting/useful).
The one thing I'd love to see is a way to set certain articles aside to watch them as they progress. I lose touch with some of the more interesting debates because the easiest way to get back to them is by sifting through my comments to find what I said. It would be nice to have a feature where you could set some of them aside for yourself to easily watch them as they move along.
We should be able to put all the "post anything", "articles/writing", "photos/videos" ect ... in their own grouping. This would so eliminate the need for moderation on the massive scale we have it now.
I have 2 post anything groups but I also have subject specific groups ... I get tired of having to go through content EVERYDAY to approve pics or articles.
- gather.com/fiction will take you to anything tagged fiction on the site
- gather.com/poetry will take you to all poetry content
- gather.com/games will take you to game content
- gather.com/new_england takes you to content tagged with two words "new england"
Today, these pages sort by relevance. You can resort them to see the latest things on a tag, if you like.
Please take a look at these pages and see if they help you find the content/experiences you would like. If they do, perhaps we can find a way to make them more visible on the site for members.
SRSLY
Are new Gatherers getting responses to their posts and making connections with the current state of affairs? I have not seen any ...and know that all of the people I've brought to Gather are no longer bothering with it much any more :(
If you do, however . . . I have found it's time to double up on the medication.
Anyway, I'd like to see more control on the very issue Joseph touched on. Some sort of bookmark function, perhaps, with minimal inormation if it's somehow tabbed . . . like the comment count.
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
I second Sandy's suggestion, Tom. I think many of us would like to approach Gather from a content rather than person perspective.
Thanks.
I also notice on heavy activity days, that the current page count won't even allow for all posts that given day, which means posts are falling off the edge so to speak if posted early. That doesn't make sense to me either.
I'm also glad to read your explanation about the changes. I didn't see the opening page as a function of membership as you described it. The economics weren't in the forefront of my mind.
That being said, I find membership on an opening page a turnoff. There are many sites I've visited but not joined because of that very thing. If the content is here and showcased, then people will join to comment and add articles. If there is no content on the opening page and they have to join to see it, I don't think they will (I don't) BUT - I bow to your team's research results. I hope we get tons more members!
Thanks for the dialog.
had been quite worried about the new ICE changes but I see where you are going with this(hope) and realize the changes will change with what we want,need, and ask for!
and you should hear me swear whenever my feed clears itself before I have caught up on the days postings. Bad enough I have to click on every damn thing to see if there are new comments... but to just wipe it out for no good reason is INCREDIBLY INFURIATING
You probably noticed this, but you can also just click on the "Explore" tab without waiting for the sub-menu to appear and see a summary of the photos, videos, and articles published in one place.
There are lots of different ways people handle comments/threading/editing out there, though, and it's a question worthy of exploration. Thanks for raising it.
Does this answer your question?
I would sure like to be able to organize the groups I'm a member of too, instead of having to page through one by one. Our groups would probably get more visitation if that was possible as well for people.