Is Gather Sustainable?

I think any great place, thing, etc. has to make some changes to grow and to be acceptable. I guess we all must keep up with the times, so that said, Gather will probably make some changes in the coming year too. One I would like to see is the ability to group or organize our groups and for them not to change their order all the time.

I'm just glad that I got here early to watch as everything develops! I think that it will only become better and I don't see it as one of the many shut down sites out there

What a great place this is. My favorite part is the connecting with people from all over the world and sharing stories and viewpoints with these same people. Really makes this world a much smaller place. I would hate to see it go away.

It will either survive and get better, or it will implode upon itself like a supernova.

Funny, I consider it a place too.... It seems to grow in spurts from what I can tell. I certainly hope it will be around for years. I'm looking forward to improvements, even though I rarely visit my old haunts anymore.

I think of it as a place too, and since joining less than a month ago, I'm already addicted to it. My friends are also addicted to it. If it keeps growing, I think it will be like Myspace for people over 25 and writers or artists. I wish that the Gather team would work the kinks out of the system so that it would run a little better, but I bet that's coming.

Thank you for all your comments. It seems like the most common idea is of "place," a change of vocabulary for all of us. I wonder what the implications of that are?

Robin--I share that sense of being here early. The ideas of pioneer and place fit neatly together.

John--why did you stop visiting your old haunts, or was it just that new things came up?

Jody--the supernova is quite an image. What was behind that idea--an explosion of human energy that would have to go somewhere else if all of Gather addicts didn't have a place to put it?

jennifer--I'm sure that the designers of Gather lie awake nights trying to figure out ways to make things run better and how to find the money to do that while paying back for points too. I guess I hoped that we might generate some ideas for them with this visioning exercise!

Audrey--what did you have in mind for organizing groups in a way that works better for you?

It seems like the groups change positions about every time I go to publish something. It would be nice to have a way of organizing them according to group content,(Like all poetry), but I realize there are too many categories. That said even alphbetically would make it easier to find the groups you want to publish to.

Would it be possible to have basic groups, like storise, poetry, food,health, travel, you get the idea and then have a miscellaneous or other area. Alphabetizing would be nice regardless. If we had basic groups and wanted say, a poem to go just to that group then perhaps the function could be added to publish to a certain group.

Audrey, I haven't heard anyone bring up the idea before. I wonder how difficult it would be to alphabetize them. I suspect that you would like to have a feature that would allow you to organize your groups in your own personal way. I hadn't noticed that my list changed positions on the second page of an article, just before you hit publish. Has anyone else been bothered by this?

Another thing I think would improve navigation on Gather is to have the option to pull up a particular page of groups,friends, articles, whatever, like they have on the various search engines. For those of us who have a lot of friends for instance and want to find a friend say on page 40 of 52 pages. It takes a long time to get through them all the way it is now. I have not been able to get the Find a friend function to work no matter what I enter. If that worked it would solve at least that one area's problem for me. Yes it would be nice to be able to have a feature that allowed us to organize our own groups, but if not plausible then alphabetically would help.

Hmmm, it seems to me that Kevin V. published an article some months back about hidden shortcuts to make it easier to find your way through cumbersome systems. Anyone out there remember what that was?

you have been here much longer than me and have probably seen it grow much much more. I have absolutely no idea how big the network is or how fast it is growing. i would be interested in knowing that.

If you look at myspace or facebook, they have grown continually from their beginnings. Eventually myspace was sold to a large company, though it was started by a kid. I think those facts are right. Myspace and facebook both lack the intellectual aspect of gather, if you ask me, but provide for a lot of community and keeping in touch. There are a few aspects of myspace that i prefer over gather. In general, though, i think Gather takes the community of myspace and adds a stronger and more interesting element by putting the focus on articles and writing rather than on simply connecting.

My persona experience has not been one of making connections. I have only been reading and writing and learning. A lot. I don't know why i haven't had any feelings of connectivity, and i don't know why others have. i'm quite interested in that actually.


I can say that since i joined gather i have grown tons and tons in my understanding of things political, environmental, religous, and social. I havent been really putting that on gather - i've been seeing it as my own personal growth that had nothing to do with gather. but i realize now that much of the books ive been reading and the conversations ive been having with people in the real word are derivatives of conversations on gather. huh. interesting. thanks for inspiring some thought.

Thank you for a terrific comment, John. It seems obvious that you are making your Gather time count towards personal growth, and that can only help the whole community in the end. I also think that your comments amount to high praise for Gather in ways that I haven't quite heard anyone else express so directly.

It sounds like you're quite comfortable with the way things are going and not so concerned about the whole connection thing; I find that appealing. I have connections that help me have at least a slim chance of finding work by people that inspire me to grow, and I love to see their icons displayed. I will often go to an article based strictly upon the fact that someone I respect went there first, as was the case when I first "met" you. But as you publish more, you will also find that you get a lot of connection requests from people who will never come back to look at your work again, which may lead you to believe that they were only interested in building an audience for their own work. That may or may not be true, but it's part of the dual, flexible nature of connections in this virtual world, and you will have to decide for yourself how to react to it.

Candida, I have not heard you say that before, nor had I really thought about it being Tom's vision which set all this in motion. So thanks for giving me something to focus my gratitude on too. I hope Tom knows how we feel.

It's funny how often I will read and learn things here too...but not comment just because I feel I've nothing to add or anything important to say. I enjoy being here because it's as close to "being in the world" as I can be lately. Sometimes like a family, sometimes friends, sometimes just a class or seminar. I hope Gather continues to grow.

Gerry- thanks for the mail. I like the diversity of subjects and people here. There is so much in one "place" ha ha. That, and that I can contribute with articles/images if I wish, as opposed to just commentary in so many of the topics available. I some times think of Gather as a sort of community magazine, that I can thumb through to see what is new with people and the world in general. I like the feeling of contributing too. My connections and groups help me focus on that easily.
I have met some wonderful people here that have made communication in this format fun as well. They share a bit of their lives with me, I do the same, and it seems more like a community of friends than at other sites. Maybe that is why so many think "place" instead of "site" here..........? A meeting place.
I hope this helps answer your questions better. There are some bumps in the road I would like to see go away, but overall I just like it here.
Thanks.

Roxanne--thank you for coming by! "Being in the world" contributes to the idea of place again. I hope you're not hurt, so that you can't get out. I'm sure there are lots of other people that come by without leaving a trace.

John--it would seem that you expect any "place" to have "bumps in the road" and they don't bother you much. The idea of a community magazine is a new image--thanks for sharing a bit of your life with us!

Readers--at this point it would appear that there is much joy about the existence of Gather and contentment about what it is. I infer from this that no one who has read it sees any specific danger or threat to it coming down the road. I'm not sure that this contentment makes this much of a visioning exercise, so imagine this scenario, please:

The number of Gather members tops 1 billion. Top members receive over two hundred connection requests per day and the networks of some extend to over one hundred thousand people. How has Gather responded? How are the servers holding up?

All's I can say is...HOLY COW!
Lol, I guess I don't think in numbers much.

Well, that's a new idea. The chat would be, or at least seems like it would be a little harder to save good ideas in that anyone else could read. But maybe it could be great. The numbers I suggested do boggle the mind, but it occurs to me that a lot smaller numbers could still be overwhelming to handle.

I think that it will survive if some changes are made.

I think that it will be interesting to see how things evolve.

I don't have any desire for the chat feature, but I have seen so many other good sound ideas.

Being able to sort your contacts so that your oldest and dearest friends aren't at the bottom of a stack
Being able to sort your own articles to feature what you wish on your own page
Being able to click in and out of a category of articles without having to see them all. If I am looking for recipes, then I don't see book reviews etc.

That's just a few of the things that I hope to see.

I do however, believe this "population explosion" is going to result in more and more myspacer type people. That's sad to me, and far beneath what Gather should be about.

Nice article to prompt thought Gerry. I've sent you a connection request...

Nicole--and I have responded with a yes based upon your thoughtful comments. I like the idea of sorting your contacts, especially if it could be in a way that helps me keep track of the work of my dearest friends. This is a complex way to interact with other human beings, despite the superficial ease of it all. It leaves all sorts of nagging questions to be resolved by those who organize the whole endeavor. It will mean balancing between lots of possibilities. If I sort for my best friends, what am I going to miss? If I decide that my list of friends is uselessly long and I delete the ones who never made an impression on me or who never left a comment on my work, what kind of ripples will that cause downstream? Deleting friends? What a strange idea that could only come in this computer-enabled world!

I've deleted a few that needed to be, but then again, by that time, they'd shown themselves to either not be friends, nor friendly.

Glad to "meet" you

At one time, poetry was a widely used public language. Over time it changed to a method of "self expression." Of course, there were still great poets, but soon more people wanted to "express themselves" than wanted to make the effort to grapple with reading and understanding high-quality poetry (which almost by definition is difficult to understand).

Now, there more people who write poetry than read it.

The same thing is happening to blogging (or globbing as I call the Gather version). So many people want to express themselves with their blogs/globs, who will be left to read each others' self-expressions?

How many people can you communicate and stay sane? Or at least keep faking sanity in the way you've been getting by with?

Ooh--now there's a daring post! "So many people want to express themselves with their blogs/globs, who will be left to read each others' self-expressions?

How many people can you communicate with and stay sane? Or at least keep faking sanity in the way you've been getting by with?"

So many people here seem determined to amass huge networks of connections without pondering whether they are taking on enough responsibility to make those connections meaningful and sustainable. Which is to say, are they willing to support those connections by actually reading and commenting on their work? Are they willing to work on the quality of their own material so that their connections will have an incentive to read what they publish?

This article has survived for nearly a week because a few of you out there continue to contribute something which takes the question a little deeper. Thanks to all of you for doing this thinking!

Will you be cutting down some trees and artfully building them into dams to slow down the Gather flow long enough for us to figure out where we're going?

Gerry,

Good post. I read poetry on Gather because that is what I like and can best comment on. If I have time I may venture onto other postings. I think we have to find a balance of real and virtual lives lived...simply and well.