Microcosm Feature Suggestions

Events are in my view the most under appreciated functionality of all community platforms, so i hope microcosm can boss them.

Reoccuring events - for instance Thursdays Hour of Power around Hydepark happens every week. its really annoying for administrators to have to repost it each time.

Guest list management.. each time it reoccurs the guest list should clear or give the admin the ablity to manually clear it.

Ticketing.. functionality that prevents someone from confirming event attendance before they've ponied up some cash.. probably though paypal or some other payment portal

I was just thinking, could you have an option for subscriptions to be either - 'all new posts' or 'only on a new thread'.
This would be useful for something like rides and races, and potentially classifieds (or does it work like this currently anyway?)

I was just thinking, could you have an option for subscriptions to be either - 'all new posts'

As in, all new posts in a single conversation/event, like subscriptions work now? (am currently adding this feature).

'only on a new thread'.

So you could subscribe to an entire microcosm (e.g. Classifieds) and get notified of any new items that are created in it? (am not currently adding this feature, but sounds like a good idea).

I'm working on the subscriptions code as we speak, so let me know what you don't like about the current system too.

Events are in my view the most under appreciated functionality of all community platforms, so i hope microcosm can boss them.

Reoccuring events - for instance Thursdays Hour of Power around Hydepark happens every week. its really annoying for administrators to have to repost it each time.

Guest list management.. each time it reoccurs the guest list should clear or give the admin the ablity to manually clear it.

Ticketing.. functionality that prevents someone from confirming event attendance before they've ponied up some cash.. probably though paypal or some other payment portal

We have a few things planned for the events feature - some way to manage recurring events would be nice. Ticketing too.

re: subscriptions, it would be nice to be able to filter the subscribed threads, particularly to see activity on threads that I've started (eg for sale threads), at a glance.

^

http://www.lfgss.com/search.php?do=finduser&u=34&starteronly=1

?

That link should be easy enough to generate; Add it to the "User CP" drop-down menu?

This idea probably belongs over there >>> http://www.lfgss.com/newpostinthread4490.html

but it's worth considering for Microcosm.

Any Microblogging feature even if only basic user status updates?

We haven't got a story for that, but what scenarios do you have?

...that aren't already well-served by Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Diaspora etc?

On a different note, it would be nice to have some visual indicator of whether somebody's online other than having to hover over their username to see.

...that aren't already well-served by Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Diaspora etc?

Even If I happened to use those other webshites. My friends on Linkedin are not the same as my friends here on LFGSS. While I could make a google+ circle.. unbelievably some people on LFGSS are not on google yet.

Although the value of microblogging is dependant on individuals, I think the feature creates an approach to engage communities around people and not just threads.

You should be able to follow 'people'

Story: Last night I was doing laps of Regent park for the hour of power, unless you happened to be following the hour of power thread you wouldn't have known.

Similar to the @mention feature it requires a notification engine and a summary of the selected users added content fed into some kind of recent activity page.

Not a feature suggestion, this, more of a user suggestion. Would Parkrun be worth approaching? Their event pages would seem to be a good fit, and current site is clunky.

http://www.parkrun.org.uk/aboutus/

Happy to hear the counter argument that 'content is king' - if it exists..?

Im not sure I understand what @sparky is suggesting.
Big fan of parkrun, less so its website.
http://www.parkrun.org.uk/events/events/

Content is king, because it's all communication between people and that is what builds the bonds within a community.

We'll sort the events stuff.

Note sure how we'd approach things like results. Which is the same issue we may have with bike polo, football clubs, etc.

We could just make it easy to visualise tabular data (CSV files, online spreadsheets), but I very much doubt we'd ever make a database for sports results for each different sport. That in itself is a big task for someone else.

Agree that building and enhancing social interaction should be the main goal of any network.

Don't agree that it has to be 'content' rather than 'relationship' driven.

Exformation communication for starters (my favourite subject)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exformation

Wasn't really suggesting that you could handle their results - that works ok at the moment.

But each individual event seems to have made varying attempts to build an online community around their run: one I do in Norwich has a Facebook page, Brockwell does lots on Twitter etc. Surely a Microcosm for each event would be relatively simple and enormously useful? Running also has lots of stuff to buy, and existing affiliate schemes with big retailers, and I know that this is Microcosm's business model. Initially, at least.

There would also be lots of shared Microcosms that were used nationwide and internationally.

Worth contacting them, I thought. Especially as they have a guy who does their online community and social media stuff, Danny Norman: http://www.parkrun.org.uk/aboutus/

Yeah, that would be piss simple actually.

I have thought about adding meta-data to a Microcosm to describe things like the place it relates to. For example on LFGSS, we have sub-forums for other cities... and that could be an attribute that allows a search "Find forums near me"

If rides were Microcosms, then that would there too.

That would seem like a useful feature to me. Would work for events, too, and classifieds. Location is a handy attribute.

On Parkrun, I'm sure that if you got in touch, pitched what you can do, and at what cost, then they'd bite your arm off. And it would expose tens of thousands of people to your product.

Cut and paste images directly into posts.
Auto detect the mime type and embed them directly into the message body.

Adding images as attachments is ugly and an annoy fiddle.

Actually what I want to do there is utilise the same stuff that does YouTube video embedding.

I want links to auto-convert into some useful preview or embedding of what's at the other end of the links.

From a technical perspective... imagine if the only thing that the user did was to put links in posts and we would follow them, read the mime-type of the end item in the HTTP chain, and if image embed, otherwise if HTML look for open-graph or Twitter card and auto-embed that way.

And... if someone did CTRL+V and pasted what was obviously an image... upload and auto-attach.

I want posting and editing, attaching and embedding... to be so incredibly easy that even thinking of anything else is hard.

How to monetise the shit out of microcosm. Micropayments.

Or just payments in general.

This is big in the financial sector at the moment, and gaining a lot of traction in other sectors.

Intra-community, inter-community, shop portals, payment aggregators, integrators, mobile payments etc... It's an open book.

It seems to me that microcosm.app would have a captive audience for this sort of stuff.

You mean Microco.sm becomes Escrow for its own classifieds?

Only in the very narrowest of implementations.

A payments platform has a scope larger by an order of magnitudes.

Sure, but if you used Microco.sm to host "Product" entities rather than "Thread" or "Event", you could use that to run a shop, complete with Escrow.