New Community Feature

hankfdh
 June 10, 2008, 10:57 AM posted in General Discussion

We are trying a new Community feature on the LanguagePod's today - 'latest study activity' or study streams - find it in the Community sidebar. We hope that this feature can churn up some of the under-used parts of the site and promote more student interaction.

The idea is inspired by Facebook's News Feed and 'lifestreaming' services like FriendFeed. The purpose is to provide a chronological, aggregated view of your study activities with the goal of enabling a unique way to discover and discuss learning objects/tools amongst similar minded students.

Currently, we are only tracking the creation of lesson & vocab sets, in addition to 'Status' updates (as in Facebook) which can be updated in the side panel of the Me > Profile page.

The community study stream feed is also available by RSS subscription.

Please let us know if you want other activities to be tracked or have any other suggestions!

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boran
 June 10, 2008, 11:41 AM

Overall I think this is a good idea.  Particularly, it makes the Lesson set feature more obvious and as you said helps promote under-used parts of the site.  Some questions/comments:

  • Can you opt out of broadcasting to the stream?  Does making your profile private automatically do that?
  • What about events that aren't relevant to certain users? For example, only premium users can create/manage vocabulary sets.  Should these events show up for non-premium users?
  • Maybe add some administrator events such as when new entries are added to the grammar guide.

Oh, your "status" is what comes after the "I am" on your Profile page.  I was wondering what that was for.  In that case, you probably should make it easier to update so you don't have to navigate to your profile page every time to change it.

I like that you are trying these things.  It gives me "the future is now" kind of vibe.

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lostinasia
 June 10, 2008, 02:18 PM

On Lessons Sets: who can actually use those? Who can set them up? I've made sets for most of the series (and I think Bazza's handled the others), but I'm not sure if these are any use to Basic or Non-paying users. As Boran says above, the sets are potentially very useful - especially for new users who need guideposts to the content that's around here, and also since the "Related Lessons" and search functions doesn't seem too useful yet.

On features... didn't there use to be a Netvibes ChinesePod universe? I think that's what got me into Netvibes! Yet now it seems not to exist.

The new feature seems interesting. I had no idea so many people used vocabulary sets.

(Crikey I'm glad there's an edit feature now...)

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boran
 June 11, 2008, 11:33 AM

LostInAsia,

As a basic member, I can create lesson sets, albeit awkardly (I think they're working on smothing this out) as well as access other's including the public ones you created.  As far as I can tell, this feature is for everyone including free members.

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lostinasia
 June 11, 2008, 02:14 PM

Thanks for the reply. Good to know - to me, those sets seem a potentially great feature to draw new users in.

They're really awkward to set up with a Premium Subscription as well. What I actually did is first make sets of each level ("channel") - then I can look through those sets. It makes the browsing a lot faster, since i can see all lessons on one page, although the size of the Newbie set annoys my system a bit.

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henning
 June 12, 2008, 04:46 AM

An action worth tracking: Adding new vocab to the Glossary. Not only shows it community action but also teaches you strange new vocab.

What would be also interesting for us vain people: Who looked at your profile (which could profit from more fields...)?