A more interactive Main Page

Your Main Page is the hub of your Ning Network — the page that gets the most traffic and the page most visitors see first. It's your one shot to wow newcomers, and it's the best place to engage your members. Over the next several weeks, we'll be introducing a bunch of new features to make your Main Page even more compelling.

Rich Text & Media in all of your Main Page modules

Your Activity, Blog, and Forum features will support rich text and media. This means that if someone posts a video, you should be able to play it from the Activity Feed. And if someone posts a forum discussion with a photo or hyperlinks, those should appear on the Main Page as well.It's a simple change, but making content more engaging on the Main Page is a great way to draw people deeper into your community.

Like & Comment on Status, and post a status from the Main Page

We've seen great traction of the Status feature, which lets members share updates and integrate with third party services like Twitter & Facebook. We'll continue that momentum by improving Status in 2 ways:1) Let members post a status from the Main Page2) Let members comment on and like status posts.

Inline Commenting

Finally, we've seen great engagement by allowing Liking inline on the Main Page. We want to take it to the next level and let members comment inline on the Main Page in the Activity Feed and Blog module.We're just kicking off work on these initiatives, and we'll have more updates as we get closer to releasing. I just wanted to share these projects with you early, and get your initial thoughts and feedback!

Replies

Michael@FansOfFilm June 3, 2011 at 9:40pm

thanks for the tips(-:
john s. June 3, 2011 at 6:59pm

will the number of posts we can display be increased from a max of 20 to more? I hope so
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  - Chris Richards June 5, 2011 at 3:04pm
    
    Eric.. i sure hope the See More activity is included in this big new interactive status update.. if not everything you guys are doing is of little use, becuase the more successful your network is, the more activity that will go on, which means that 20 items could mean you can only see the last 5 minutes of activity.. as much as i'd like to think that all my members LIVE on my network, i am pretty sure this is not the case, so the MORE ACTIVITY is an absolute must...
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      - Speed Racer June 5, 2011 at 4:12pm
        
        Eric,
        
        I personally think a "see more" link at the bottom of activity feed would be awesome, Chris has a good point, if you've had a very active hour (my network is sporadic like that, especially Sunday when races are being run), 20 pieces of latest activity can get covered up quite fast. Although I won't ever have more than 10 (and maybe even less so I can better utilize space on the main page), I, and most everyone else would love to have a "read more" link, and especially with this new feed, as it is a LOT more interactive.
        
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        Rev. O.M. Bastet June 7, 2011 at 12:51am
        
        Just sayin', Eric, as I track what I do and others do, I see that Latest Activity of the network, which is displayed on every page, is one of THE primary ways our members discover content they interact with. Possibly THE main way. Our 20 items often range over 3-5 hours of activity, and we have maybe 50 people on per day, and I notice that when an item is in the LA, it attracts activity a LOT!!!!
        
        So, just info about this one network, and the importance of the LA for us.
  - Rev. O.M. Bastet June 3, 2011 at 11:44pm
    
    Eric, you will not find me yelling too loudly about number of items displayed in LA feed on network pages UNLESS the max falls BELOW the currently available 20. I would love to be reassured about that....
    
    Of course, more is better, but I don't want the increased amount of information on each item to reduce the number of items. That would be way counterproductive to engagement, IMHO.
    - Brian Floe > Rev. O.M. Bastet June 5, 2011 at 12:30pm
      
      I think the real issue here is to get a "more activities" at the bottom of the new interactive latest activity module.
      
      I imagine it's going to take up a lot of space with just 20 activity items, now that they can be commented on (!!!).
      
      we need the facebook solution where people can click at the bottom if they want to see more activities. This has the added benefit I think, if I choose to only display 10 items: takes up less space, but people still have access to the same amount of activities simply by clicking.
      - marco britt > Brian Floe June 5, 2011 at 1:34pm
        
        +1
      - Speed Racer > Brian Floe June 5, 2011 at 1:01pm
        
        i like the more activities link idea as well. some networks' activity moves at a fast pace, and some people may want to look further back than 10-20, plus, the space savings of just 10 with a "see more" link is awesome, i don't really want my activity feed to be really tall
James Wilson June 3, 2011 at 4:35pm

about time

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