July 27, 2009

• Xanga’s Hidden Features

  Xanga has a lot of cool things about it that no other social networking site I know of has.

  But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the front page. Sometimes you can be a member of Xanga for a long time and not even notice some of these features.
  
  Featured Webblog Submission

  Take the Featured Webblog entries. Xanga’s had them forever. But they introduced a feature fairly recently that lets you submit a post to be featured.  Yeah I knew about that. But did you know you could VOTE for your favorite posts that have been submitted to be featured?  I didn’t. I never noticed that VOTE tab until just today. Discovering that prompted me to write this entry.

  And you know I might not have even known you could submit posts to be featured had I not seen a small announcement for it in passing back when it was implemented. I didn’t even read that announcement, I just glanced at it and said “Oh that’s cool” and put it out of my mind.  But you know I bet a great many Xangans never even saw that announcement.  And unless you see the little link on the right hand side of the Featured Webblogs page that says “Nominate a good post by submitting it here. Feel free to submit your own posts!” you’ll probably NEVER know that you can submit posts to be featured.

  Xanga IDEAS

  Ideas are really cool. You can vote on what features Xanga develops. The idea of ideas is awesome. It means people have a say in what happens at Xanga. It makes Xanga more democratic than other sites. It may still be a false democracy because Xanga is a business but even considering user opinion in such a direct and quantifiable way is really unusual for internet sites.

  So how do you find out about ideas?  I have NO IDEA. Pun intended.

  Unless you happen to click on the link that says “More” at the top of the Xanga home page and look all the way down to the second the last link and happen to be curious enough to click on it you’ll have no clue at all that ideas exist.

  The only other way you might learn about it is if you happen to read another blog or see a plug that mentions an idea. And then you might just vote for that idea and never think to go back and peruse all the OTHER good ideas.

  Why These Two?

  Isn’t it weird that these two components are so hard to stumble upon? If anything in order for them to be effective, these features more than most other need as many people to use them as possible.  If only ten people ever know you can submit or vote on featured entries then those ten people can completely control which entries are most likely to be considered to be featured.  Likewise with IDEAS.

  Further if you’re a potential new user and you go to xanga and think “hmm a blogging community, wonder what that means?” Surely you’d want to see that part of what being a community means is that you have a *say* in what gets featured and what features in turn gets implemented. That might make you say “OK, maybe I’ll try this Xanga thing out.” But since you are unlikely to see that these features exist you might well after a cursory glance move off to another blogging site.

  What About Other Features?

  Are there other elements of Xanga that you think are cool that you didn’t notice right away? Things that just slipped through your fingers? For example…

  Did you know about Plugs? Did you know what they were or where they came from or that you could even turn them on? Do you know how to submit your own plug? Do you know what you need to do that?

  Did you know Xanga has featured questions? Have you ever looked at them, or used them for a basis for new ideas for your blog entries?  Did you know you could submit a question to become a featured question?

  Did you know Xanga has tags? Have you ever used them on your blog? Do you ever click on them when you see them while reading another blog? Do you show them on your blog? Do you use them to organize your site?

  How about user tags? Did you ever use them? Do you even know what they do? What the difference is between them and regular tags? They let you send an automated email notifying users that they appear in your blog entry. Ever wanted or cared about that?

  Do you use credits? Do you know what that credit number in the upper right hand corner of your screen even means? Do you ever try specifically to get credits? Do you even notice when your credit count has gone up or down or does a number just kind of magically appear there to you?

  Do you know what a mini is? Do you get it? Do you love them? Or do they seem pointless to you?

  Did you know you can SHARE an entry with other services like twitter, digg, facebook, linkedin, reddit, stumbleupon, delicious, myspace, friendfeed, slashdot, blogger, wordpress, livejournal and many others? Or did you never see that little green share button link on the bottom of each post? 

  Did you know you can use the SHARE also to post a blog entry on your own blog with an automatic link to the blog entry you are replying to? Did it ever occur to you that you could use it that way? As a kind of trackback/blog-reply kind of an option.

  Have you ever emailed an entry to someone? That’s the link right next to share. Do you see an point to it? Have you ever considered using it?

  Do you ever edit your profile? I mean like at all since the day you signed up? How often do you look at other people’s profiles. Does it ever occur to you to try and use profiles to find bloggers to subscribe to with similar interests as you?

  Do you use blogrings? Do you sign up for them? After you sign up for them to you ever check them? Or do they just kinda languish on your page unchecked and virtually unused? Would you care at all if they went away entirely?

  Do you even know what Metros are? I don’t. I’ve never clicked on that link. I see it there taunting me but I just don’t care…

  Did you know you can see people’s protected posts of the people you are subscribed to in the subscription browser of your private home page? I was talking to a friend of mine once who didn’t know that. Had no idea. She never used the subscription browser. Most of the time she used the old home page and was just switching to the universal inbox.

  Did you know you can also see just the Pulses of those people from that page? Or just the photos, video, and audio they’ve submitted?

  Heck did you even know about pulses? Did you know you can post LINKS in pulses? That it can serve a very similar function as a twitter account.

  Did you know you could put your pulse on your homepage?  Surely you must have known that. But how about this. Did you know you can put a list of the entries you recommended on your home page? Did it ever occur to you to wonder what other entries a particular blogger you liked had recommended? There actually is a way to see it if they put that module on their page.

  Did you know you can create custom modules with links to posts or blogs or other external sites you want to advertise on your home page?

  Did you know that if you have premium you can sign up for google adsense and post ads on your blog that can earn you money?

  Did you know your universal inbox has a little link on the right that says “Your Public Feed” from which you can see what posts you’ve been spamming all your friends with? And did you know that  there you can delete things off of your public feed?

  Did you know that there are friend groups you can organize your freinds in? At least there’s a link for them. I just discovered it today. But I couldn’t get it to work.

  Did you know you can set a post to appear on a specific date in the future you specify? Or that you can set a post to appear in the past? Or that you can update a post you already wrote so that its timestamp is now again and hence it re-pops on everyone’s subscription browser and universal inbox (a process called timestamping).

  Sooo Many Features So What Now?

  Xanga has a ton of features. Some or good. Some are great. Others suck. Still others seemed like great ideas at the time but no longer seem to serve a purpose.

  So you tell me. What other features are there? What are Xanga’s beste hidden features that you just happened to stumble upon that had you not you would never have known about? What features could Xanga stand to improve and advertise a little more to make the place more enticing to potential visitors and more fun for the existing users?

  Conversely what features do you think Xanga could do without? What do you think needs to be completely revamped or dropped entirely? Features that may have been cool when they were introduced but nobody uses or even knows about nowadays anyway so they’re just taking up clutter.

  Your thoughts are much appreciated.

  • 7:50 pm
  • 20 Comments