Activity Feed improvements: Twitter search in social feeds & New Activity indicator

[Eric Suesz]

As part of our most recent release of Activity Feed improvements, we asked Network Creators to weigh in on a few things they might want us to tackle next with this ongoing project. We're here to announce a few new things we've now added: Twitter search in the Activity feed and a New Activity indicator.

Twitter Search in Social Feeds

Want to pull in relevant tweets from outside of your network? Do you use Twitter to follow special hashtags that might be of interest to your members? Want to start using unique hashtags that you create on Twitter and pull those into your Activity Feed? All of these are possible with this new Twitter integration. How does it work?

• Enter a word, hashtag or phrase into one of the two boxes we've provided in the Activity Feed Social Feeds section, and tweets will begin to pour into your Activity Feed.
• We're currently using 'Top' search results (twitter.com/#!search/ning), as opposed to 'All' search results (twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/ning)
• The more specific your words and phrases can be, the better. For example, if you enter "jazz" your feed will be virtually unusable and full of content that's not relevant to your network. If you refine that to "dixieland", you'll see better results. If you go even further and specify "#dixieland" you'll only see things people have explicitly tagged with that word or phrase. Experiment!

New Activity Indicator

A lot of Network Creators love the idea of providing a way for members to see new content pop up in the Activity Feed. Good news. Now, you can.

As you spend time on the page, you will notice that your Activity Feed will show an indicator that new items are available. Click that button, and the feed will refresh. Right now, we're loading in the most recent 30 items, but we may change that over time as we monitor how this is being used.

Try them out! 

Those are two things we have for you to try out. The Twitter updates are available with the Top News addition to the Activity Feed, which is available in the Ning Labs section of your dashboard. The New Activity Indicator is standard issue and will show up for everyone across the platform. We hope these new additions give you more flexibility and keep your members clicking and sharing!

Note for the CSS savvy

As part of this change, we needed to change the CSS class a bit. We had to rename the "More" button CSS class. It is now identified as "xg_show_activity_items". If you have styled the More button (or want to style this new activity indicator) in a custom way, you'll want to update your code. 

[Mat]

Nice but i wish if you guys add an option for social network creators to set the ACTIVITY FEED  for all members and friends only, Members will fall in love with our social when they connect with there friends, just like facebook. Give us option to set it to only friends so members wont miss there friends activity. 

[SweetPotato]

this control would have to be a member control not an NC control. Even here on Creators most of us don't make friends as such so the feed would be pretty pathetic if Eric (or whoever is NC) decided to make it friend only feed. I'd see nothing

[JC]

I don't think you understand what's going on here. This network is a version of a group, ok? Eric knows exactly what's going on. He stated it on a discussion here before. We need a network to interact with friends, not the entire planet.

[SweetPotato]

I completely understand. If my members had only a feed of their friends network activity the feed would be bare.

If what you're saying is they should only be able to see the activity of friends from other social platforms then that is different, but to me useless.

[JC]

That's great. And I'm glad you understand. To you is useless, but to others, it is the most important feature when it comes to social networking. We would like to interact with friends, not the entire universe. Thank you!

[SweetPotato]

so, like I say, optional for members

[JC]

Yes! If ning were to make this feature as an option, that would be the thing. Thanks!

[SweetPotato]

knew we'd find the love eventually :-)

[Jordon McGee (Jords)]

Woohoo!!! Now its off to play with fun ways to customize the indicator =] Good Job Ning!

[classic]

Coooollio:)☺

[Eric Suesz]

If you are seeing issues, Please follow this discussion. 

Thank you! 

 

[SweetPotato]

I don't use the top news feed but can't see the new activity indicator. Am I missing something? Assuming I could see it, why is it not optional?