Tomorrow we’re going to be rolling out a whole bunch of changes to the site. I wanted to give you a preview so you know what’s coming, plus make you aware that we will be taking an outage (probably in the evening) to get everything put into place and all of the data migrated over.
We’ve got a number of new features we’re pushing out, including three new social bookmarking services. We are also turning off a couple of services, one because they’ve taken it down to revamp it and the other because it doesn’t quite align perfectly with our service. Of course you’ll want to sign up for accounts with the new services so you can get the most bang for your buck.
Which leads me to a great new feature: the Setup Wizard. The Setup Wizard is where all new users will be sent right after registering to help walk them through the process of setting up all the social bookmarking accounts, adding in their first bookmark, and sharing their first link. We’ve heard from a number of members that it’s a bit hard to understand the system when you first sign up, so we’re rolling out the Setup Wizard to help out.
But you can use the Setup Wizard even if you’re not new. It will show you at a glance which services you have accounts with and which ones you still need, and provide a quick and easy way to get your account completely up and running.
One revamped section of the site is the bookmark management area, reached by going to the ‘Bookmarks’ menu and then choosing ‘My Bookmarks’. First off, we’ve simplified a number of things about how you work with bookmarks. There’s no more ‘cell’ to worry about, no more activating and deactivating, etc.
You simply have links that haven’t hit the maximum shares yet and links that have and were archived. On the ‘My Bookmarks’ page, all of your non-archived links are shown. You can see what the individual bookmarks look like here:
You can see the little status indicator next to the name of the bookmark. That will show green when it’s being shared, and gray when I don’t have enough credits. The green arrow shows that I am currently allowing that bookmark to be shared - I can pause it any time I want.
We are also adding a new option on the Share page. We’ve always had the ‘Abuse’ button, although it’s rarely had to be used. Sometimes though, there are links that pop up that you’d rather not share but you don’t necessarily feel deserve the abuse button. They can get lodged in the top of your Share page and prevent you from seeing other, more interesting links.
Enter the “I’d prefer not to share” button:
The unhappy looking fellow next to the abuse button will let us know that you’d rather not see that particular link anymore, and we’ll go ahead and remove it from your Share area altogether.
We’re also restructuring our accounts. There are a number of specific issues want to address:
- Be more friendly to the social bookmarking sites
- Make sure people have items to share
- Reduce the work needed for our paying customers to get their links
Coming out of the upgrade tomorrow we will have 4 account types. As I mentioned previously we’re going to be adjusting the number of credits received per share based on the account level. So the free account will receive less credit in exchange for sharing compared with the paid accounts, and each level of the paid account will get more credit than the one below it.
Balancing this out, we will be reducing the number of shares per day allowed for all account types. Many of the social bookmarking services consider sharing 20 items per day spam, and we definitely want to stay on their good side. Besides, a banned account doesn’t help anyone out.
So our paid accounts will be able to share a reduced number of sites per day, but will be receiving more credit per share than previously. In addition, we are raising the limits on the number of bookmarks you can store in SocialAdr at any given time, and raising the limits on the number of times each link can be shared. We believe the net effect will be that all of our members will have their bookmarks shared more than they were able to previously.
For our existing members, we will be leaving your existing accounts as is for the duration of your current billing cycle. After that, unless you let us know otherwise, your account will be upgraded to one of the new accounts automatically. While prices are going up overall, your price is locked in and we’ll be honoring that through the upgrade.
This is the last major set of change we have planned before a major re-release and membership drive. Once we come back up from the downtime tomorrow, I’ll post the full patch notes. Let us know if you experience any issues or have other suggestions.
