Gather Upgrade - Ice: Cool or Freezing?

Gather's newest upgrade is on the horizon, codenamed 'Ice'. Is it going to be known for its coolness, or is it going to be known for freezing things up more than ever? Here's a quick rundown, based on the QA demo provided at 3pm today.

This upgrade is more of a cosmetic change than anything - the overall layout of the site changes radically to a crisper, more simplified view. The style of the 'submit' boxes on spotlights has been used for much of the redesigned layout, and many separate pages have been condensed into fewer pages with more information. Some examples:

The tabs used to navigate the site are reduced from ten to four - My Gather, People, Groups, and Explore. Many of these tabs are being combined into the My Gather and Explore sections, in particular. The functionality provided by these pages increases slightly as a result, although very little of this is actually new as opposed to being rearranged for easier access.

The search function has been improved so that you have the option to perform advanced searches - for instance, searching for all articles by a specific member on a specific topic, instead of only by member or only by topic.

Many sections that were filled with text (such as the create new groups page) are now much less cluttered.

Within publications, the articles have a slightly more streamlined interface - related content and other content by the author are moved into a sidebar to the right, and tags and groups are streamlined so that content with multiple tags or groups does not display it unless you wish it to, making it much easier to get to the comment section.

With these changes, one notable change is that the Essentials are now taking a much less significant role in the new page design, occupying tiny links at the bottom of the page instead of being directly featured on the homepage. While they are still available as normal groups, this will likely cause concern for Correspondents in particular.

Gather is also changing certain elements of terminology -- articles are now to be known as posts, images are now to be known as photos, and creating a new publication is now to be known as 'sharing'. Expect the following complaints from Gatherers:

-- "Articles were changed to posts because the seriousness of Gather articles is nonexistent! This emphasizes the wrong sort of behavior!"

-- "They're changing 'images' to 'photos'? This means they're trying to drive out original art and limiting the medium to five hundred pictures of someone's baby!"

-- "Sharing?! I don't want to share my content! I just want it viewed by people who are interested in it, not every Yahoo or Google enthusiast who found me by looking up the 'gardening' tag in their search engine!"

... to which the rest of the Gathering community will likely shrug and post the exact same things they were posting all along, most likely. The changes in terminology, and in the layout itself, seem mostly geared towards encouraging new Gatherers to participate -- a worthy goal, considering that all online communities live or die based on their ability to attract new participants faster than the old ones move on. Since despite very vocal threats, only a handful of long-term Gatherers have actually left the site after an upgrade, the price of change seems worthwhile to a site that wants to expand its userbase and become more user-friendly to all.


In short, the new upgrade adds little to direct functionality (although the upgraded search is a welcome feature), but is likely to strongly affect the way people browse and use the site. Expect rolling blackouts as the most offended Gatherers don their traditional 'Gather changed and now I am angry' squares of black (seriously, if you're going to make a protest icon, make it say something - it'll be far more memorable than a Myspace-style black square.) Most of the people who participated in the demo, including some diehard critics, sounded enthusiastic about the layout changes, but we won't know for certain how well it works in practice until we've all had a chance to actually try to use it.

According to the QA team, when the site goes live tomorrow, Gather is intending on providing two separate threads for people to comment on - one for actual technical support, and another for feedback, to make sure that neither ends up swamping out the other this time around. It sounds like Gather is at least going to do its best to make sure most people are satisfied with the changes, but I suspect that there will be a large number of outraged shrieks as a direct result of this upgrade. I highly recommend that people test all of the changes carefully tomorrow, with an eye towards finding bugs and glitches, and then report to help.gather.com to discuss these bugs in the tech support thread. If you don't find any problems, but you aren't happy with the new layout, I recommend using the feedback thread to discuss it - "I don't like how it looks" is feedback, not a glitch. I will re-edit this article after the upgrade goes live to directly link to these threads once Gather has created them.

Also, considering that the earnings server tends to go down when Gather upgrades, be prepared to have a delay in cashing out immediately after the upgrade, potentially requiring signing out of Gather and signing in again, or more arcane procedures as befits your operating system, browser, and Gather's environment. As the points server is connected to this, also expect an initial delay in points accumulated after the upgrade - both because of sync-up difficulties, and because of the fact that a lower-than-usual viewing audience will be reading your content immediately after any upgrade, particularly during the four hours the site is down while the upgrade is in progress (thereby effectively making your view count for that period a flat zero).

I must admit, having the tags and groups sections in articles ... or posts, or whathaveyou ... is a welcome change I've been rooting for for a while, and the improved search function will make my Gather life easier when trying to find content (especially from specific members) that I want to check up on. The layout itself... well, I might have to change a few bookmarks, but unless it's grossly inconvenient or nonfunctional, I won't mind it too much. It does, at least, appear to run more smoothly.

Don't panic, guys. Your content will still be viewed tomorrow. Let's hope for a bug-free upgrade.