December 19, 2008
-
Xanga Ideas I Support
This is a list of Xanga ideas I voted for and support with some short discussion as to why.
See your posts in list form & be able to take action on posts
Judging from the staff comment they are definitely moving toward this kind of an interface. There have been numerous similar suggested ideas. In addition to just being able to act as a group for deleting, privatizing, tagging, etc. you should also add the ability to sort or filter by private/public/date/comments/views/recommends .
Honestly the Date line at the top of the subscription browser should have a drop down box so you can select the last weeks worth of dates or so and it filters or jumps your subscription browser just to that date.
Right now that Date line is too hard to see and hard to notice too btw. When it changes most people are unlikely to even notice that they are on a new date. This is because it’s in the same place and looks the same all the time and there’s no celar indication that it has changed. So you should also include a line between two blog entries when a new “day” begins that is very clear and stands out. This makes it easier when browsing blogs to partition your reading by date so you don’t end up browsing through entries you’ve already gone over.
This is exactly like the youtube Video Responses idea. I actually wrote A LOT about this in the past and I think it would be brilliant. I called it Blog Replies and I also suggested comment blog replies which perhaps I will enter as a separate idea.
One thing I don’t remember if I mentioned in my ancient post is that of course when you post an entry you have to be able to opt out from allowing users to blog reply to their entry. And you have to be able to opt out of blog replies altogether too. Otherwise it will annoy people a LOT. But in general I think people will love this and it will make the community more cohesive.
This has always annoyed me about the subscription browser. You can see protected and non-protected, but not BOTH. You should be able to see a view with both and the protected entries should just be colored differently or have some sort of symbol so that they stand out and you know it is protected.
I prefer this to putting protected entries on the unviersal feed as some have suggested.
Just for the sake of transparency you should have this. Otherwise most users don’t know how or why they are getting or using credits. And if there’s a bug it would be hard to catch. When credits appear and disappear mysteriously from your account it makes it hard to figure out what you could or should do to manage your credits most effectively.
Along with this when you do things like post a comment that gives you credits it should tell you right then and there how many credits you’ve earned. And when you give a mini it should tell you how many credits you’ve spent and how many credits the person receiving the mini will receive.
Default links to open in a new window or tab
This MUST happen! It drives me insane.
This is just a great idea that would be really awesome. But actually I think Xanga can do it in a lot more interesting way than the person who posted this idea suggested. Rather than simply letting each Xangan design their own one personal mini to give out, users should be able to create and MARKET minis as they desire. The currency would be in credits. Adn you get paid when others use/give your minis. That way you can sort of make your own mini-business if you’d like. THEMES could also be done this way and I think that’d be damn cool. Of course, I think it’s reasonable for Xanga to take a cut of the credits transaction sort of as a tax.
People love ideas but there’s obviously a lot of desire to have more commentary/discussion about them. That’s why there are a lot of ideas about this that have been submitted. I think just allowing basic short comments, maybe even pulse length limitation on ideas would be a great start.
Really powerful Xanga APIs are very important in terms of encouraging the growth of Xanga. Furthermore, as you can tell the amount of ideas the Xanga community can come up with FAR exceeds the number of ideas that can ever be implemented by the Xanga staff even if they were ten times as large as they are. APIs allow Xanga to outsource some of the work to Xangans themselves who can generate actual modules/plugins/utilities etc. that implement wanted features. Furthermore these apps can serve as TRIAL runs for the Xanga Team. An idea that sounds really good might not actually BE that good in practice so testing them out can be a great way to see what’s popular and what’s not. Good feature extensions built by the community can then be integrated into the Xanga main code.
I think this is a brilliant idea and I was thinking along the same lines. Only I wanted to not see these myself so much as SHOW them to my users. I think Xanga should do both. Allow users to Showcase their most popular, recommende,d commented, viewed blog entries as a module on their blog.
The idea here is to allow Xangans to VOTE on which featured question gets selected. I’m not sure so much about voting per se but some sort of more transparent Featured Question selection process should exist. Users should be a part of deciding which featured question gets selected. There’s a lot of ways you can do this:
1. Vote
2. User Editorial – Select user “editors” who select the featured questions, sort of like slashdot moderators
3. Pass Along – person whose question got selected picks the next question (not their own) and so onThose are just off the top of my head but I’m sure there are tons of other ways to consider.
“save” posts for viewing later
Basically this is a kind of “favorites” or “bookmarking” system like many other sites and applications use. Only with “favorites” you sort of have two sides, the public showcasing side. Ala, “look at these blog entries they are my favorites!” and the private reference side: “these entries are ones I *personally* like and/or want to reference again fro some reason.”
Currently “recommends” serve the public side of favorites. You can also use them for the private side if you use the recommends module on your blog which will give you a listing of all blogs you’ve recommended. Similarly you can try and find your entries in the recs tab of the Universal Inbox.
We could make recommends serve this private purpose better in two ways. You can put a “recs” tab to the Public Feed which shows what your site displays on other people’s universal inbox. And/or you can put a “recs” tab on the Feedback Log. Xanga should probably do BOTH of these things.
However, even with those changes, Recommends are a poor choice for the Private side of favorites because of its inherent limitations. Limitation 1: You can’t recommend your own entries. (but I can bookmark my own webpage for example and might want to) Limitation 2: If I am marking an entry as a reference point it doesn’t necessarily mean I want others to read it. Maybe I just want to mark something for reference so I can go back and comment on it, but I don’t want my subscribers or freinds to read it?
Limitation 2 can be fixed partially by complicating the Recommend feature. There’s a lot of Ideas that suggest doing this. For example some have suggested putting reasons on recommends which would enable you to put a reason that this recommend is just for reference. I’m not sure if anyone has suggested it but if not someone should, but there’s also the possibility of making recommends more targeted. A sort of “protected” listing for recommends, so that only certain people see what you recommend. Then you can make an empty list for private recommends.
But I’d say the best and easiest way to implement this kind of feature is just to make it it’s own internal feature that lets you mark a post to go back to. It should appear somewhere on the Your Stuff section or on a separate new Personal Content Manager panel or else as its own new category on the left hand menu of your private page. The interface can probably look sort of like the MAIL client, with check boxes so you can easily delete favorited entries.
——————————–
That’s it for now. I’ll add more thoughts on more ideas in the future. Keep up the great ideas!!
Comments (18)
phew, thanks for all the feedback! we’re reading all the ideas and many of the posts like this too
.
I think the idea for designing our own minis is great.
The only drawback that jumps to mind is if people use clever, easily obtained and customized, but COPYRIGHTED imagery. How would we make sure the imagery/humor/etc. is okay to use?
@john - thanks! It’s good to hear you are all reading and watching. I love the xanga ideas page and I think it’s one of the best features Xanga has ever made. It really makes Xanga stand out amongst the sites I’ve used. I’m going to have lots of fun finally getting all my thoughts about Xanga off my chest. Keep up the good work!
@runaheadofme - Yeah the TOS would have to prohibit the use of copyrighted material without permission but beyond that it really isn’t Xanga’s responsibility to police copyright law. If there is a case of infringement on your IP you have a right to utilize the mechanisms afforded by the legal system to gain recourse.
I wonder if Mini’s are traded on Credits if it might discourage copyright violation to some extent. Because although credits can’t be spent for very much, the courts might look more unfavorably toward you since it can be clearly seen that credits do have a kind of monetary equivalent.
Anyway, most people I think would just want to show off their own creativity with their mini designs.
Another thought though is if there’s a mini-editor built into Xanga sort of like Graffiti in Facebook all mini’s created would be the person who submitted it’s original workhence skirting the issue of copyright in *most* cases.
Judging by what goes on around Facebook, sites don’t worry overmuch about copyrights. They’re all indignant- “If you upload an image without the proper authority to do so, we will delete your account and ban you forever”- but they never follow through.
@nephyo - those sound like workable solutions. I was thinking mostly of Kawaii Not as a ready source of cute, clever imagery that could be stolen for designer minis. Maybe Xanga should just pay them for a bunch of their stuff?
I’d just like to say I think you’re a person who does or could “GET THINGS DONE.
I love the first idea, like a mass edit type thing. That would make things so much easier.
Ooh, I totally didn’t get the blog reply thing when I saw it posted on another site earlier, but it’s all making sense now.
If there’s so many things you’d like to change about xanga, why don’t you just go make you’re own website?
@MarksBeneathTheSkin - Please don’t misunderstand. I love xanga just the way it is. I’m not making all these suggestions out of a desire to criticize nor do I think Xanga is by any means a bad site just because there are a lot of things I could see being changed and improved.
I merely make these proposals because I want Xanga to become even better. I’d love to see Xanga implement some of these things because I’d love to see Xanga evolve and change to suit the needs and desires of its users. I just have a heck of a lot of ideas as to how to do this and I’d like to get those ideas out there and get people talking about them and thinking about them in hopes that they spur even more better ideas from others that keep pushing Xanga further and further and making it even more fun and enjoyable a sight for me to hang out at.
It’s the same with governments. Just because I critique the government in which I live doesn’t mean I want to jump ship and join another government or start my own nation, even though if I had the means I’d probably have enough ideas to make a damn good country with me as supreme ruler.
I *could* make another site to compete with Xanga sure. I actually build websites for a living. But why would I want to when I love the Xanga community and I think the Xanga Team is doing a wonderful job making the site the best that they can make it? It would be difficult to impossible to build a whole knew site and make it anywhere half as popular as Xanga is. In part because I am only one person, in part because there is already so much able competition that the market is somewhat saturated, and in part because I have no skills whatsoever in advertising or marketing or business and I don’t pretend to. But on a more basic level, it’s just illogical to try and reinvent the wheel when I can instead make my meager contributions to making some existing project I like better.
Xanga is such a project. And they just went through so much trouble to make a great mechanism to make it possible for people like me to contribute. The least I can do is give them my best effort to provide my honest opinions and best ideas. They don’t have to listen, indeed I suspect very few of my ideas or the ideas I most support will be particularly popular, but at least I can get them out there and of advocate them and get people thinking and talking about it. That’s the least I can do to give back to Xanga for all the good it has done in my life.
@nephyo - I just know that half of the ideas you have I do not like and would never vote for. So, I hope the xanga team also takes that into consideration.
Also, don’t talk down to me.
I am not a child. I understand that making a comparable website to xanga is just plain hard. I also understand that if you didn’t like xanga, you wouldn’t use it. I guess it’s just my way of saying “buzz off”. I don’t need your analogies and long-winded explanations of yourself.
@MarksBeneathTheSkin - And that’s fine and it doesn’t surprise me. A lot of my ideas are just brainstorming possibilities. I’m not trying to submit ideas that everyone will love and demand get implemented. I’m not using Xanga Ideas as a means of crusading for a change like some people are. I’m perfectly ok if none of my ideas or the ideas I support ever get implemented. I’m instead using it as a means to generate discussion and thoughts. I want people to imagine the possibilities and figure out what they want out of Xanga.
If you don’t like my ideas, Xanga Team is considering adding a “NO Vote” feature to the Xanga Ideas page when they do that you can go through and “NO Vote” all my ideas to register your dislike of them. They are also thinking about making it possible to add comments to ideas in which case you can go through and comment on all of them describing exactly why you think my idea is a horrible idea and would ruin Xanga if implemented.
But for now, if you dislike my ideas, you can comment on my blog saying what you dislike and why, comment on the Xanga Team blog or otherwise contact them telling them the same, or probably most effective of all you can write your own blog entry decribing the ideas you DON’T want implemented and why and thus opening up discussion that way. I will probably do that myself soon too cuz there are a lot of ideas people have submitted that I don’t like too.
And I promise you if you decide to write such a post I’ll even RECOMMEND it even if you lable it something like “Nephyo’s Stupid Ideas”. ^_^ I’ll do it because I WANT people talking about ideas and I welcome disagreement as much as I do solidarity.
Thanks for your honesty.
@MarksBeneathTheSkin - My apologies. I am not trying to talk down to you. This is simply the way I communicate. If you have read my blog at all or my comments on other blogs you’d know that this is the case. I explain myself as fully as possible and I’m always long winded.
As for saying buzz-off, you are here on MY BLOG commenting on MY ENTRY. If you have a problem with what I say I think it is appropriate for you to be the one to “buzz off”.
Again, I’m not trying to offend. This is the way I do things. And I’m not going to change or stop just because you or anyone or even if everyone doesn’t like it.
@nephyo - Exactly why I wasn’t saying “buzz off” in my first comment, you understand.
I do read. That’s what got me here. You must really think I’m childish to think that I’d expect you to stop or change. I did not come here to stop you from writing on your own blog, but rather share my opinion, which is what comments are for. But consider me successfully “buzzed”. I will not be back.
@MarksBeneathTheSkin - I don’t think you are childish. I really don’t know you at all and I would try not judge you on the basis of any one exchange.
I guess we’ve both gotten worked up about this Xanga Ideas thing and managed to annoy each other. I apologize if I offended. You don’t have to come back if you don’t want to but if you do I hope that in the future we can start over and become friends.
Very good reasons.
Nice ideas.
Merry Christmas!
@Dare2BDiferentt - thanks. Merry Christmas to you as well.