Dolphin 7.1 (Sundance) Public Debate. Part 1.

As I noted earlier we are hard at work on Dolphin 7.1 and for the most part we are certain about the list of improvements. And still, there're things we're hesitant about. To do those things right, we'll be running a small set of "Public Debate" posts to ponder in cahoots with the Unity brethren.

Now, there's the famous Henry Ford's quote that also often attributed as one of the Steve Jobs' mantra and the key to Apple's recent success. The quote goes: "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'". Luckily, Unity members are not "customers" in this context. I guess we're just lucky to have customers that are still on our side of the fence when it comes to R&D - the end-customers are site members, and we build the software to suit them. So, I guess it is safe for us to ask you, but just don't ask your customers, mkay? Sure a "faster Dolphin" would be nice, but it's time to talk innovation.

We invite you to put on your thinking caps and brainstorm on the ideas and questions we'll be throwing you in the coming few weeks. Your voice will affect the final product. We'll be developing "as we speak".

Today's topic...

Homepage Feed

...or maybe not even a feed. We have a few options and any of them may have a number of different names. Anyway, there's an immediate need for a better approach in representing the site's activity and content to a new user to grab their attention and deliver the idea of the site's meaning.

Some of the most popular existing ways to do it:

- Splash Screen

Perhaps the most popular and, if done right, the most flexible way to engage a newcomer. Basically, it's just a billboard that you can use in any way you want to tell the story. It's universal, flexible and effective. It's here to stay. Facebook, Apple, PayPal and many other use those exclusively.

Pros: flexible; easy to manage; spam-proof; lightweight.

Cons: requires high-quality design and copywriting; not engaging for repeat visitors (unless you change them regularly, like Apple does); suits established brands better; doesn't represent site's activity and hence requires some existing knowledge about the site to be effective.

So, it is good, but obviously not enough for a startup site or most social sites. It's just the icing. We need the pudding.

- Activity Feed

One of the wonders brought by dynamic web development is the ability to display what is happening on the site - who's online; what was just added; who's chatting; what was commented, etc. This can be highly engaging, provided that content is of interest for a newcomer. Twitter is doing it nicely - top tweets, trending topics, online members... they are what they call "the pulse of the web" after all. Foursquare also has a nice activity feed that tells the story in a matter of seconds, much better than any marketing-blurb-description.

Pros: highly engaging; tells the story; interactive; instantly satisfies people's desire to be in the "limelight".

Cons: prone to spam; may be discouraging when there's not enough activity - bad for young sites; resource-intensive; may require selective approach when activity is high; may look bland if content samples are not included.

Activity feeds form a big part of Web 2.0 experience. They are surely "a must" for a social site software, but there're 1001+ ways to make them and if this is going to be a centerpiece of Dolphin's homepage - we need to figure out the best method there is.

- Cherry Picks

A little bit if this, a little bit of that. Some "featured videos", some "latest members", some "blog posts" and "site news" to ice. YouTube, Amazon, eBay, my[     ] (whatever that means), and yeah - Dolphin do this for ages and for a good reason - cherry picking is a highly controllable way to represent the site's cotent. It's nice and all, but doesn't it belong to the times when Yahoo was relevant?

Pros: flexible; engaging; easy to control.

Cons: requires moderation; may not reflect topics/trends changes; highly resource-intensive as it requires more content to be displayed to cover all content types; often creates over-complex layouts.

Cherry-picking is inevitable - it is the only way you build software anyway, because everyone wants something different. The whole premise of Dolphin page builders is based on the idea of cherry-picking. What we need, though, is to create some sort of laconic all-inclusive module that would minimise the need for pulling dozens of blocks to the homepage and still do the job.

- Today's Heroes

If your site is heavy on voting, liking, thumbs-upping and recommending, arguably the best way to build your homepage is to display the "top" content based on the community choice. Social bookmarking sites like Digg do this with some success. It may also work nicely with contest-oriented media sharing sites.

Pros: self-moderated; enagging; easy to control.

Cons: irrelevant for many types of social sites; limiting to specific cotent types.

As a part of cherry-picking concept they are fine. As an exclusive way to build a homepage - only for Hot-or-Not kind of sites.

- Template-Contaminited

You know our stance on social networking templates already. Now, I'm not saying that templates are bad - they are fine, but they should not overpower the content. Unfortunately, many webmasters still believe that design is the cornerstone of a site's homepage attraction. Well, it's not! And I am not expressing an opinion here, I am stating a fact. Just browse the Alexa Top Sites list and carve this simple gospel deep into your brain - design must give way to content. Good template is the one that gets out of the way and only underlines the feel of your site, the feel that is driven by content.

Pros: short-lived appeasement of designer ambitions.

Cons: technical complications; clutter; disorientation and many more.

Again, there are bad templates and there are good templates. Good ones are those that set the stage, but don't take it.

- Other tricks.

And now, there're dozens of other methods: ascetic "form-only" (Google, Tumblr, Quora, Friendster); localized (Groupon, Yelp); adult (a world in itself - "I am 18+" page first, then any of the above, but with its own... flavour); exclusive (invitation-only sites, limited-betas); directories (Graigslist, WebmasterWorld) and many others.

Sundance needs...

some kind of a neat universal module that would engage users, parade content, preserve server-resources, take it easy on homepage real estate, stay relevant over time, work for broad range of social sites and enable unflappable sleep for both webmasters and moderators.

Achievable? A reasonable man would say - hardly. This, however, makes me think of what Ed Bloom said in the Big Fish movie - "There comes a point when any reasonable man will swallow his pride and admit he made a mistake. The truth is... I was never a reasonable man." We are here to innovate, to wow people and to be ahead of the game. We need to think well beyond reasonable. And by "we" I mean you, too. We are one team. BoonEx builds software for you to create community sites. We want you to be able to build the best community sites. Now let's think about how we're going to do that.

Share your ideas in comments, or if you have sketches or specific outlines that we all should discuss together - create forum topics and post links in the comments. I am leaning towards a Foursquare-like feed with small content samples and filtering. What's your take?