Internet Forums Reimagined: The Future Of Online Discussions

Last year, I wrote about the history of online communication and how it has evolved all the way from online bulletin board systems to social media. But what does the future have in store for us in terms of communicating online?

The latest iteration of online communication may indeed be social media, but it seems that the most popular avenue is still the old-fashioned internet forum. It remains today as an excellent way to structure a community on the web. While social media can be somewhat amorphous at times, forums provide order and a sense of home.

I believe that forums will never die out, but forums will evolve and adapt to advancements in web technology. Please join me as I take a look at a few forum software systems that are so innovative that they’ll transform the concept of the forum forever.

Moot

Moot (Beta) is a very interesting project in my eyes because there’s a bit of tension in its design philosophy: it wants to take a step back into the past and recover the lost relevance of meaningful discussion (which they claim have died with social media) while incorporating features of the future (clean and responsive interface).

But more importantly, Moot is entirely embeddable, meaning you don’t need to download a package and upload it to your own web host. Instead, all of the data and control is done through your Moot account and your forum theme; forum content are embedded directly into your site wherever you want it to go. It has been designed from the ground up for complete and easy integration.

Other notable features that Moot is pushing:

• Both forums and comments. Moot is a full-fledged forum embed system AND a comment embed system. Unlike other forum systems where comments are just normal forum threads with their post data molded and displayed differently, Moot lets you embed unique comment threads onto pages using one line of HTML. Each comment thread is unique, dynamic, and separate from your forums.


• No content deletion. Moot is taking a hard stance: deleting posts and comments disrupts the natural progression of a discussion, resulting in an incomplete thread that’s harder to follow. Therefore, once content is older than 2.7 minutes, it cannot be deleted. Also, if a post or comment has received any replies or likes, it can’t be deleted.


• Complete control. Even though Moot is a third-party service that you have to embed onto your site, you will have full control over it. You can alter the design using CSS. You can also alter the behavior and extend Moot functionality using an API that will be released in the near future.

Discourse

The mentality spurring the Discourse team is the desire to “raise the standard of discussion on the web through better forum software.” Core to their actions is the belief that forums are an integral aspect of proper web communities, yet most forum designs are stuck in the 1990s. With Discourse, they want to make forum hosting easy, flexible, and appealing to the 21st Century.

The Discourse interface takes a lot of inspiration from social media: just-in-time loading of content, flat and sleek aesthetics that are indicative of social media design, @replying to users, logging in with social media accounts, real-time stream updates, and more. But unlike Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and the others, Discourse remains faithful to big blocks of text for deeper, more meaningful conversation.

Other notable features that Discourse is pushing:

• Notifications. One big problem with legacy forum systems is the lack of convenient notifications. Up until a few years ago, the best we ever got was clunky email notifications, then we had RSS subscriptions, but both of those had their limits. Discourse will regularly notify you on the site when someone mentions you, replies to you, quotes you, or anything else that involves you.


• Forked conversations. Instead of having a linear thread where users reply to multiple users in a single post (often using ugly blocks of quotes to establish context), Discourse allows discussions to fork by letting you reply to individual posts and branch off.


• Smart interactions. One awesome feature of Discourse is that you can begin writing your reply even before you’ve finished reading the thread. The reply box will follow you no matter where you are on the page, which means you can reply while you read. Also, when you prematurely leave a thread (maybe you had to go somewhere), Discourse will remember your place and start you there the next time you come back.


• Dynamic moderation. As users participate on your Discourse forum, they gain something called trust. Users that have trust can help with forum moderation by culling spammers, flamers, and trolls before they get too big.

We took a detailed look at Discourse when it emerged on the scene.

Vanilla

Moot and Discourse are relative newcomers to the forum scene, but Vanilla has been innovating the forum concept for years already. Honestly, ask anyone (who has forum experience, obviously) which forum software is the most non-traditional and I’m willing to bet that most would say Vanilla.

Vanilla has gained a lot of traction over the years. Big name sites, like Penny Arcade, are starting to turn to it for their discussion needs because of its cutting edge design. This is a free, open source project that really is revolutionizing the forum landscape.

Other notable features that Vanilla is pushing:

• Scalability. One major issue in many free forum systems – and some paid systems too – is that they buckle under too much traffic. When it takes over 10 seconds for a thread to load, users are too frustrated to continue a discussion. Vanilla is built for speed and can handle millions of users right out of the box.


• User reactions. With Vanilla, you can set various “reactions” that users can have to content: like, dislike, spam, off topic, insightful, funny, or whatever else you can come up with. These reactions have actions associated with them (e.g. add score to the post). The result of the user reactions system is that users can decide on and promote valuable content.


• Built-in gamification. Gamification describes the addition of game elements in a non-game context for the purpose of engaging users. By participating, users can earn badges (achievements) and reputation (score) which lead to user promotions and access to more features if you choose to set it up that way.

Conclusion

On paper, these systems may not seem like a huge deviation from the usual forum platforms that we typically see. However, paper can be deceiving. Take one look at each of the solutions above and you’ll notice a landslide difference in the end user experience. And in my humble opinion, all three systems are doing a heck of a job in refreshing the boring realm of forums.

Do you use forums? Know of any other forum systems that are revolutionizing the field? Please share with us in the comments!

Image Credits: Chat Bubbles Via Shutterstock

The post Internet Forums Reimagined: The Future Of Online Discussions appeared first on MakeUseOf.

YouTube Search Experiments

YouTube experiments with some new search features. When you click a video from the list of YouTube search results, there's a red progress bar displayed at the top of the page until the video page loads. Here's the new feature in action:

The search box still includes your query when you watch the video. Another experimental feature shows a list of search suggestions when you watch a video and click the search box. The list of suggestions is probably generated based on the video's title.

Click the homepage search box and YouTube shows a list of recent searches.



Here's how you can try the new features (the red progress bar seems to be Chrome-only). If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:



1. open youtube.com in a new tab



2. load your browser's developer console:



* Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac



* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac



* Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console"



* Safari - check this article



* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the "Console" tab.



3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:



document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=jyDR-4Ljl_I; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();



4. press Enter and close the console.



{ Thanks, Yu-Hsuan Lin. }

Create Google Now Reminders in Google Search

Reminders are a new feature in the latest version of the Google Search app for Android. You can create reminders using voice search and Google Now will show notifications.



Now you can also create reminders from the desktop Google Search. When you search for things like [when is bonnaroo 2013?], [when is the first day of summer?], [halloween day], Google shows a link that says: "Remind me on Google Now". Click that link and "Google Now will remind you 1 week before." For now, notifications are only available in Google Search for Android.

{ via Search Engine Roundtable }

Google Cross-Language Search, No Longer Available

Google removed yet another advanced search tool: cross-language search. It was available in the "Search tools" menu as "translated foreign pages" and it allowed you to find pages written in other languages.

Google automatically suggested a few languages for your query, but you could manually add other languages. Your query was translated into all these languages, Google performed multiple searches for the translations, compiled a list of results and translated titles and snippets into your language.



Here's a screenshot from 2009, when Google Search added this feature:

"If you're traveling and want to find hotels, restaurants, activities or reviews written from a local perspective, or if you're just curious to find what's being written about a company, product or topic in another language, give Translated search in the Search Options panel a try," suggested Google at that time.



The feature was first available in 2007 as part of Google Translate, but the initial version supported a single destination language. "Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type 'wine tasting events in Bordeaux' into the search box on the 'Search results' tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English," informed Google.



It's sad to see this feature disappear because it was very powerful and difficult to replace. It integrated Google Translate and Google Search, so Google performed multiple translations and searches just to shows you 10 cross-language search results.



Why was it removed? "The translate foreign pages feature is no longer offered. Removing features always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. You can still translate entire pages in Chrome. Streamlining enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people's lives," explained Google. Most likely, not many people used this feature.



I assume that most "search tools" features are rarely used and the same thing is true for other features for power users: advanced search, operators. They're not obvious, they're difficult to use and few people need them. As Google focuses more on answering questions, I expect to see fewer and fewer advanced search features and that's disappointing.

Facebook Search Sucks – Use Facebook Email Notifications As A Workaround [Weekly Facebook Tips]

Facebook is more than just a tool to stay in touch with friends or waste time. Sometimes people post valuable information that you may want to refer to later. So how do you find an old post on Facebook, if you barely remember the content, let alone who posted it or where? Facebook doesn’t exactly make this convenient.

While there are several ways to find stuff on Facebook, they are all but comprehensive or reliable. This situation also forces you to spend even more time on Facebook, increasing the likelihood that you will get distracted. One way to increase your chances of finding something and thus waste less time, is to enable Facebook email notifications. As I explore the benefits of email notifications, I will also show you other ways to search Facebook.

Why Would I Need Facebook Email Notifications?

Facebook Email Notifications are useful for two main reasons. First, you can read updates without visiting Facebook. Second, you are creating a searchable archive of those posts.

Facebook is an incredible time sink. It’s tough not to scroll down your News Feed or view the notifications that have accumulated since your last visit. The best thing you can do to escape this drift is to visit Facebook less. Email notifications allow you to do that and at least partially fight your FOMO (fear of missing out) because you will receive notifications of important posts and events.

At some point in the past Facebook retired its old Wall and Timeline search option. Recently, Graph Search was introduced, but it doesn’t really search posts on your Timeline or News Feed. So when you want to find a post or a comment in which you were mentioned, you have to manually search Facebook, for example by expanding the relevant time frame in your News Feed and using your browser’s search feature. If you have Facebook email notifications enabled, however, you can simply use your email client’s search tool. With Gmail’s filter and search features, this is super convenient.

Alternatively, you could download your Facebook expanded archive and search it. However, it can take several hours before your archive is ready for download. It also gets outdated the next day, and it doesn’t contain group posts.

Presently, it’s possible to search within groups. However, it’s unpredictable which features Facebook will remove or otherwise alter. So if you rely on the group search option, it’s better to be on the safe side and also collect group posts via Facebook email notifications.

How Can I Enable Facebook Email Notifications?

Facebook offers a range of ways to receive Notifications in the respective section under Account Settings. Besides email notifications, you can enable visual and audio notifications on Facebook, push notifications, and text messages.

For email notifications you have two options:

• All notifications, except the ones you unsubscribe from


• Only notifications about your account, security and privacy

You can unsubscribe from:

• Pokes


• Friend confirmations


• Friend suggestions


• Friends added based on your suggestions

Once you have enabled email notifications and made a choice what to unsubscribe from, note that you can further customize email notifications under the What You Get Notified About header.

Particularly interesting are notifications that concern activities of close friends and groups you are a member of. Note that you cannot opt out of activities that involve you, for example when someone comments on a post of yours.

Won’t These Notifications Clog Up My Inbox?

No, because you know that they are coming and you will take care of them in advance. What you need to do is set up an email filter. Your email client should allow you to automatically mark the notifications as read, make them bypass your inbox, and sort them to a separate label or folder. We have previously outlined how to set up email filters in Gmail, Yahoo, and Thunderbird.

Conclusion

Facebook email notifications can be set up in a way that doesn’t bother you, and generally can be very useful. They can serve as a partial archive, become a valuable resource when searching for information, and by allowing you to avoid Facebook they might even save you time.

If you are still not finding what you are looking for, you can try external services like SocialSearching. From my own experience I must report that they are slow and unreliable, but maybe you are more lucky.

Do you know of a better way to find things on Facebook? Please share!

The post Facebook Search Sucks – Use Facebook Email Notifications As A Workaround [Weekly Facebook Tips] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Google Checkout Discontinued

Google likes to discontinue products without waiting until it launches some proper replacements. Lately, Google closed products that were used by millions of people. There's a race to destroy everything that was built by the old Google and build new products that are aligned with the most important features of the new Google: social and mobile.



Google Checkout is one of those old products. It was launched in 2006 as an effort to improve online shopping and to offer more value to AdWords advertisers. "One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you'll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout," explained Google at that time. Google Checkout was free for merchants until 2008, then Google started to increase fees until it moved to PayPal's tiered pricing. Then Google Checkout became less attractive.

Back in 2011, Google launched Wallet, a new product focused on mobile payments. It started as an Android app available for Sprint Nexus S phones that used the NFC chip to make credit card payments at physical stores in the US. Since then, the app started to support a few other phones, mostly from Sprint. Google Checkout merged with Google Wallet, but it still remained a distinct product focused on online shopping and available internationally.



Now Google announces that Checkout will be discontinued. "Merchants can continue to accept payments using Google Checkout until November 20, 2013. If you don't have your own payment processing, you will need to transition to a different solution within six months. To make things easier, we've partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer you discounted migration options. If you are a U.S. merchant that does have payment processing, you can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy, which offers a fast buying experience to Google Wallet shoppers."



Instant Buy is a simplified version of Google Checkout that has no fees because Google no longer processes payments. Instead, Google "passes a Virtual OneTime Card, a MasterCard-branded virtual prepaid debit card product that can only be used for the specific purchase for which it was issued. Using this card, merchants can process payments with their existing payment processor." Instant Buy is tied to Google Accounts and it's faster to use than the regular checkout experience, especially on mobile devices. Right now, Instant Buy is only available in the US.

Since Google Wallet is mostly a US-only service, users outside US will be limited to Google Play, other Google services and some web apps. Google has recently announced that Gmail users in the US will be able to send money using a new button from the Gmail interface. There's also Wallet for Digital Goods, an API for in-app payments limited to web apps, and it works outside US.



For now, Wallet remains a product with limited availability and many disjointed features. The virtual wallet that stores information about your credit cards, coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards, tickets and makes payments frictionless is still a work in progress. Google has a huge opportunity to create a successful product for payments: it owns Google Play, it can integrate it with Android and Chrome, not to mention Google Shopping and Google+. Google now has the most popular search engine, online video service, ad network, analytics service, webmail site, the most popular browser and the #1 mobile operating system.

Ubiquitous Player Is An Everything-In-One Portable Suite

Think about all of the software you’ve got installed on your computer. Almost all of us have some alternative of Google Chrome, Spotify, Evernote, OpenOffice, IrfanView, and more. Software of these types are pretty essential to any PC user. It’s one of the first things that you toss on your brand new desktop or laptop when you take it out of the box and set it up.

Windows 8 has managed to do a pretty decent job of putting all of your favorite and most-used applications right in your face with their rendition of the startup screen. Not all of us fancy it though. I personally skip straight the desktop. With all of these commonly-used applications so separated, daily tasks can seem like a hassle. Ubiquitous Player makes an attempt at alleviating that and serving as your Swiss Army Knife of application goodies.

Download Ubiquitous Player

Ubiquitous Player is a completely portable application that runs on any version of Windows from XP onward. It’s 100% free and even works on tablet or touchscreen devices. This application aims to serve every purpose of your daily PC routine. It’s packed with a media player, image viewer, file manager, text editor, browser, bookmark manager, notes keeper, calculator, color picker, screenshot tool, clipboard monitor, and even more.

Ubiquitous Player’s interface is very sleek and attractive. Let’s pick apart some of its many uses.

Music Player

The music player offers pretty much everything the average user needs to enjoy their music collection. You can organize a playlist and view album art (in the top-right corner) within Ubiquitous Player.

You’re able to play an entire folder, play random tracks, set a track to just play once, and skip to the next album in your folder to play it in its entirety. Ubiquitous Player includes all basic media keys to start, stop, skip, go back, and change the volume of its player. Ubiquitous Player’s music player isn’t entirely impressive, yet it’s everything you should need.

Notes

Ubiquitous Player’s take on notes is very bare and straightforward. As you can see in some of the examples above, note-taking is composed of “folders” (which simply act as a header describing a list of notes) and then line-by-line notes beneath them.

Obviously this doesn’t compare to an Evernote or CintaNotes, but it’s very quick, good for jotting down simple things, and even supports searching your notes.

Image Viewer

The image viewer offers some interesting features. Just using your left-click button, you’re able to navigate through to the next image in a folder. With each individual image, you have options to view it at its actual size, cut the image, rotate it, change the backdrop to black or white, or resave the image as either PNG, JPG, BMP, or JPEG. All images show the dimensions, size, and date modified.

When you’re hunting through a cluttered folder, Ubiquitous Player’s image viewer is a great way to look at images quickly and easily.

Text Editor

Ubiquitous Player’s text editor is a very straightforward alternative to Notepad. You’re able to format your text in a few ways, such as changing the font face, size, and color. You’re able to immediately access a special characters map from within the interface. You can also view your text in HTML format using the built-in browser.

The settings allow you to activate a touchscreen mode, change the interface scaling, and even set hotkeys related to screen capturing (all of which I used to take the screenshots in this post).

Conclusion

Ubiquitous Player isn’t the type of application to exceed your expectations. It definitely isn’t going to be a replacement for any of the dedicated applications that exist as alternatives for some of its built-in features, but it does well for bringing so many elements together in a single interface. It’s the kind of application that could work best on low-resource machines (like a netbook).

What do you think of Ubiquitous Player and the features it provides? What can Ubiquitous Player do better? I think it’s a really solid application that deserves some attention, and I hope you give it a try if it interests you. Let me know what you think about Ubiquitous Player in the comments section below!

The post Ubiquitous Player Is An Everything-In-One Portable Suite appeared first on MakeUseOf.

8 Features Missing in Windows 8 and How To Get Them Back

Microsoft removed a variety of features from Windows 8. These features range from the widely-used — like the Start menu and DVD playback — to the useful-but-rarely-used, like Windows Media Center. Other features, like the Windows Briefcase, are hopefully not being used by anyone anymore. Many of these features aren’t great losses to most people, but they are if you depended on them.

Luckily, Windows 8 isn’t yet a locked-down mobile operating system, no matter how hard Microsoft is trying to make it into one. While many features are missing from Windows 8, you can still get them back. Most important features can be restored with high-quality alternatives, but replacements for other features — like the Windows 7 Aero theme and Windows Classic theme — are nowhere near as polished as Microsoft has removed the necessary theming code.

Start Menu, Unified Search & Boot to Desktop

Windows 8 removed the Start button and traditional Start menu, opting instead for the Start screen, which functions as a sort of full-screen Start menu. You also can’t boot directly to the desktop in Windows 8, nor can you use unified search to search programs, settings, and files at once, like you could in Windows 7.

All of these features can be returned to Windows 8 by installing a third-party Start menu like the popular Start8, free Start Menu 8, or traditional ClassicShell. There will be a delay before you see the desktop every time you log in — Microsoft added a delay to hinder people who try to boot to the desktop as they want you to see the Start screen every time you log in.

DVD Playback

Windows 8 can no longer play DVDs out-of-the-box. While you can re-purchase DVD support from Microsoft by purchasing the Windows 8 Pro Pack and then the Media Center Pack, this will cost you over $100 in total. Luckily, you don’t have to do that. Just install the free VLC media player to play DVDs on Windows 8.

Note that, if you purchase a new computer that comes with a DVD drive, the computer likely comes with included, licensed DVD playback software that you can use to play DVDs without downloading anything else.

Windows Media Center

Windows Media Center is no longer part of Windows 8. If you love Windows Media Center and want to keep using it, you’ll have to upgrade to the Professional version of Windows 8 and purchase the Media Center Pack. You can do all this from within Windows 8, but it will cost you over $100 in total. You could also try using a different media center application like XBMC instead.

Solitaire, Minesweeper & Other games

Windows 8 removes Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the other games included with Windows that procrastinating office workers everywhere depend on. You can install Modern versions of Minesweeper and Solitaire from the Windows Store. If you really love the desktop versions, you can install the desktop versions of Solitaire and Minesweeper on Windows 8 — although this will take some work.

Windows Desktop Gadgets

Desktop gadgets were removed from Windows 8. Microsoft says they’re insecure — a desktop gadget is a program and can modify your system like any other program. This is true, but means that desktop gadgets are just as insecure as any other desktop program. If you love desktop gadgets, you don’t have to go without. You can easily install desktop gadget support in Windows 8.

Parental Controls

The parental control feature found in previous versions of Windows is now gone. It’s now replaced by Microsoft Family Safety, which is integrated with Microsoft accounts, gives you a web-based administration console, emails you reports about your children’s internet use if you like, and adds many other new features.

Windows Aero Glass

The transparent, glass-like Windows 7 theme is also gone. You can get some transparency with a tool like Aero8Tuner, but don’t bother. This doesn’t work very well and, even if it did, Microsoft removed the blur effect so it’s not as slick-looking as it is in Windows 7. Microsoft went out of their way to strip the Windows Aero theme engine out of Windows 8.

Windows Classic Theme

The Windows Classic theme has been removed. You can approximate it by using a user-created Windows Classic theme, but it’s nowhere near the same. This theme is essentially a tweaked version of the High Contrast theme, as many elements of the default theme can’t be tweaked.

You can also install a variety of other interesting third-party themes for Windows 8 if you don’t like the included theme. This requires overriding the protection against installing third-party themes on Windows 8, just as it did on Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

Do you depend on another feature that’s missing in Windows 8? How did you get it back? Leave a comment and let us know!

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