Sharing, yay! And a question.

I managed to find one friend who had a beta invite and we’ve tested the sharing. So far: Yay!! It is very exciting to have sharing back in my RSS reader, so thank you a million times for doing this!

We had a question for you, though - it seems like the only way to see if someone has commented on something is on the dashboard. Are there future plans to have a “Comments” feed on the sidebar so that we can see any shared post that we follow that has recent comments? Since we don’t have a third person to test with, I can only assume that, at this point, my comment on friend one’s post would Not show up on friend two’s dashboard, but I’d like to still be able to see that a conversation is happening.

2 Likes

Yeah, I’m going to build that comment feed sometime soon, although I may opt to launch without it for now. I had to punt on many, many features in order to push social out the door.

Quick question, would you want the article’s content? Or just a short snippet with a big button to expand it? I’m thinking that’s how I’ll go with it. The other problem is that this comment feed can’t have unread counts, so how will you know to open it up?

Launching without seems reasonable as long as it doesn’t come toooooo far out in the future. That’s what will give me the best chance of getting all my old reader folks to come over to the Blurry side.

As for how it displays, my ideal would be a short snippet with a *small* button to expand it :slight_smile: At the point in my workflow where I’m reviewing comments on shares I’ve already read, the article is already a known quantity, so the Expand bit wouldn’t need to stand out. In my mind, the main benefit is if someone quotes something from the article in their comment and I want to read back and get some more context.

For knowing when to open it - can you track if there are new comments since I checked last? My preference here would be to always show “Comments” on the sidebar, and bold it if something new has popped up. If commented posts are bumped with new activity, I would just need to scroll until I hit a post whose comments I’ve already read, so you wouldn’t need to worry about counting up how much activity has occurred but rather just set a flag that something new is there.

That was kind of the idea with the Interactions dashboard module. If you participate, you’ll get the new activity.

But think about it this way. If a friend shares a story, you’ll see it as an unread story. If you then read it, you won’t see future comments unless you interact with the story. I then have to figure out that you haven’t commented (otherwise you’d be pinged twice – once on the interactions module, and once in this proposed comments feed) but that you also have read the story. It’s a bit complicated, so that’s why I left it out.

That makes total sense! I can see why you waited on it…

For me (and this *always* happened with GReader shares), my group of friends would comment back and forth on an article that I didn’t necessarily want to comment on, but still wanted to see what people thought about it. There’s value in being an observer, even if you don’t have any skin in the game. I guess that’s the difference for me - my dashboard can be updates on things that I interacted with directly, but the comments feed would be for all comment activity in my little Blur network. What’s happening on my island vs what’s happening in my world, as it were :slight_smile:

So if I were to make another dashboard module called “Observation Deck” that only included comments by friends on stories you aren’t interacting on, that would be enough? I kinda like that. It shows only replies and not comments. (Comment = shared story). Once you start interacting with a story, all replies from that story disappear from the Observation Deck.

No unread counts, just timestamps that you would keep track of yourself, similar to the Interactions and Activities dashboard modules.

The main downside I can see with this, assuming it works like the Interactions and Activity dashboards, is that I’d have to keep going back to the dashboard to see each post that has new replies on it. My vision is more like a separate Blurblog that shows, from people I follow, all Comments with Replies in one feed. Though I assume the implementation on that is a bit harder…