More Latest Activity Feed Improvements: What's New with "Top News"

[Alex]

If you follow along with the announcements here on the Creators Network, you'll know that we've been making gradual improvements to the Activity Feed since we revamped it last summer. Most recently, we added Sharing and Liking capabilities directly in the feed, and we added Top News, a secondary feed that can include new content types like Facebook and Twitter posts.

We have some more improvements to the Activity Feed for you today, as well as some insight into additional items we may add to the Activity Feed in the future.

First, we've moved the Top News beta to the Ning Labs section. This is still a beta release, so you'll need to turn it on if you want to try it out. You can turn it on or off directly from the Ning Labs section. As always, if you're uncomfortable with a beta release, you may want to wait. But, if you're ready to try something new, go turn it on. (These updates we're writing about are now live.)

Second, during the initial beta we saw that some Network Creators had trouble setting up their Facebook and Twitter feeds using the Social Feeds feature. So, we added automatic validation of the feeds. If you try to insert a Facebook or Twitter feed that doesn't exist, this feature will be smart and indicate that the feed isn't valid. One important detail around feeds is that they will need to be fully public to be usable in Top News.

Next, we have hover cards. Now, when you mouse over an item from Facebook or Twitter, you will see information about the account that posted the content. This may include information such as who has liked it. It's a mini preview of some of the details. You may have seen something similar on other sites. Very convenient. 

Those are the main things we've added to the Activity Feed for this round of improvements, but we will definitely be adding more. To that end, we'd like to know which of these possible future improvements would be ones you'd like to see:

• Real-time indication of new Activity Feed items added that would prompt viewers to click to refresh the feed.
• Ability to enter Twitter search terms or hashtags, which will pull in relevant tweets and display them in the Activity Feed.
• Visual design improvements to be more consistent across all of the different content types.
• More social feeds like YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., as well as specified RSS feeds.
• Ability to add additional Twitter accounts.
• Ability to pull in a thumbnail as a preview of the underlying content that appears on Twitter or Facebook.

We are spit-balling ideas like this, so feel free to let us know which of those sound most attractive to you. They won't all happen, but some of them probably will. As always, we want your input before making our final decisions.

[Rev. O.M. Bastet]

• Real-time indication of new Activity Feed items added that would prompt viewers to click to refresh the feed.
• Visual design improvements to be more consistent across all of the different content types.

Those are my interests.

[Vladimir Sebastian Bach™]

Toggle between putting social feeds in both activity feed and top news, or in just one?

I want to feed my updates on facebook/twitter into the top news feed only, so it doesn't push the user activity away.

[CocteauBoy]

Hashtags would be awesome! More Social Feeds is always a great option.

[Morten Aabo]

I would love to have a clickable thumbnail on new videoes entering the latest activity feed. Right now the page has to load the whole widget into the feed (when you embed a video from ex YouTube). 

Multible videoes are show correctly as thumbnails you can click, but would like to see the same, on the single video embeds. Another thing is, that these embed widgets takes alot of space in the latest activity feed.

I've added af screenshot on my request.

[Debby Bruck]

I love having the larger view placed in the center column for people to watch on main page instead of going to the video section. Makes it more prominent, when members or viewers less likely to click away.

[Jo Grant]

My network uses a lot of RSS feeds and Twitter tracking.  At the moment I have these coming through a third party aggregator (http://feed.informer.com/) which works quite well, but I love the idea of being able to plug in RSS and Twitter feeds directly.

Also like the idea of the thumbnail preview.

[Corey]

This is all great, but we still can't directly message feed a "live" html link to direct our members attention to a specific discussion or page within our own network.  i.e.  Featured Link Page Updated!, or FAQ Page Updated with a clickable link to those pages...  I would expect to be able to do this before linking to external social networks, we're trying to keep people in our networks, not send them somewhere else...

Why can't the message feed have a text editor so we could do this?

[the_real_macfly]

Corey, this can be done at /main/activity/message  by writing the message manually and inserting the corresponding html hyperlink with an <a> tag.  All manual, though, and long URLs need to be run through an URL shortener first.

[Corey]

Thanks bud, you'd think they could improve on this or at least automatically recognize a http:\\ as a hyperlink though...

[RyanJames]

+1 Ability to enter Twitter search terms or hashtags... I'm in jeopardy of having to migrate my network to another platform unless this feature rolls out soon.

+1 add additional twitter accounts 

+1 Real-time indication

Thanks Ning!

[Rob Young]

One of the primary purposes of my Network is the exchange of ideas, data and specific information

I'm about to have 300 articles posted. The Topical Module in the Blog area only shows in order of visits and not topics so having near 40 topics that's a tough search to do as the Top[ics are random order not alphabetical.

The search feature  in 'All Posts' does not show the Tag Names/Links when searched.

How about making the Blog Post topics appear in Alphabetical order.

Or at least the Tag information appearing in the All Posts search feature.

[EAM]

That would be awesome!