Silicon Investor Members:
Over the past few weeks, we've been reminded of our long-standing promise to revive many of the features and capabilities supported by a third-party application that worked alongside Silicon Investor's previous interface. Before the site was redesigned in 1999, this application was used to speed up the browsing of Silicon Investor messages.
Earlier this year, we assigned a task force to research which features were most important and rank them accordingly. That list, maintained by CatLady, can be found here:
Message 12553971
Although it was always our intention to revive these features, their implementation had been delayed by infrastructure priorities, expanding Silicon Investor's research & analytics, improving our news coverage and working on other requested features like advanced search. So, without further ado... here's what we're doing about it:
Stage 1: Improving consistency of message displays
This includes putting "view replies" in the 10-messages-at-a-time page, and streamlining the reply process. (For those following along at home, that's request "H" We'll also crank out "G" & "F" at this time (although users will be going to "10" at a time from subjectmarks rather than "100")
Stage 2: Customizing the subject page
You'll be allowed decide how many messages are browseable on any subject page (there are currently 40) and how long each message snippet will be. (I think you now see the first 80 characters... that number would be customizable, although we will likely place min/max numbers on this.) That is "E" and part of "C"
Stage 3: Creating a pop-up window that allows quicker browsing
This will allow you to get all subjectmarks & peoplemarks at once. This window will also check which people and subjects are "read" and will auto-update alerting you of new subjectmarked messages. "A", "B" & "D"
Okay, I'm sure there are some questions... here are some answers along with some further information about what we're planning on doing:
Q: Who will this be available to?
A: Premium Silicon Investor Members.
Q: When will the features be released?
A: In stages, but all during Jan/Feb/Mar (Q1), 2001.
Q: Why can't you do everything we asked?
A: We're providing nearly everything on the wish list, even those features given a lower relative priority. What we've come up with will significantly speed up your Silicon Investor experience. The time you save surfing will go right into reading!
I should also note we won't be attempting to mimic the look of the original application. Our goal is to provide the requested functionality in a user-friendly manner consistent with Silicon Investor. After it's released we hope to improve upon these features further.
Thanks for reading! We've always felt like Silicon Investor's superior message board technology is one reason we have such loyal users. These changes will allow our heaviest users to read more messages in less time and widen the gap between SI and other message boards.
Happy Holidays,
John Busby |
