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Thoughts on Squidoo’s Revised Activity Stream

UPDATE: This post is now obsolete, as Gil has continued tweaking the new activity stream and has taken our suggestions onboard. There are now TABS that let us filter our Squidoo activity stream according to sales or other specific info we might want to see, and the data goes back more than 200 entries. YES! THANK YOU, GIL!

 

 

Squidoo is testing an update to our Dashboard. Squidoo quests, LOTD, and HQ announcements appear in the Activity Stream. Participation in polls has been removed. Participation in quizzes is still there, for the moment. The stream gets truncated after listing 200 items from our own lens activity, but will show HQ blog posts, LOTD notifications, and other HQ announcements going back a month (I think).

Here’s HQ announcement about the New Squidoo Activity Stream A/B Testing.  Obviously, it’s not finalized.

The revised version has been unrolled for many Giant Squids, so it’s gotten my two big Giant accounts. The sales data that I rely on has now been lost, and cluttered up with a bunch of things I used to filter out using Fluffanutta’s Workshop Add-on from SquidUtils. I wanted to share this comment I made in SquidU’s discussion of these changes, because I think it’s an idea that has broader applications:

I would’ve loved if they’d just made Fluff’s tool canon and then added a set of checkboxes that stuck, so we could set our dashboard up once and for all to show the stuff we care about.

I’m a victim of the A/B testing. It only shows the 200 most recent items from lens activity. For me, that’s 100+ people taking my quizzes, and there’s not even a day’s worth of sales records. Every Sunday, I sit down and review my sales for the week. I’d grab the info right out of the activity stream and GREP it into a tab-delimited chart that I could plunk into Excel. Now there is no easy way to do that.

Every one of us has a different lens profile and different goals. Some people may WANT to track how many quizztakers and polltakers they’ve got. Maybe someone’s built some polls for research purposes and honestly wants to see that. Whereas others of us are here to earn a living and don’t want the quests, monsters, and points cluttering up our dashboard — we’re only interested in real-world results. If we could customize it to fit our needs, instead of being mashed into what Squidoo thinks we should use Squidoo for, that would be really great!

I loved Fluff’s tool because it did exactly that: let us focus on whatever we think is important.

It’s hard to make custom tools that show different information to different users. It’s much easier to extrapolate what most people use a site for, and create an interface tailored to that particular kind of user, figuring that everyone else will manage anyway. Big sites like Squidoo have so many features and stats (yay!) that it’s hit the point where they can’t show everything. That’s a given. But what we’d love is to be able to tailor those features and stats to suit our own needs, instead of being given the options package the car dealership thinks we want.

3 Comments

  1. AJ says:

    I am one of the Giants that has not had the new Dashboard to check out, so I am relying on comments like this to be my “eyes” for the moment. You make some good points here Ellen. Apart from traffic stats, the only activity I am really interested in is sales and I do pay attention to Angel Blessings, so I can go and thank them.

    Considering that the majority of people who have been on Squidoo for awhile are there because they want to make money, I am surprised that HQ is not giving more credence to the Sales activity.

    Let’s hope with the feedback they are being given, that this is something they take note of.

  2. Greekgeek says:

    I love seeing the blessings too. I don’t always manage to thank everyone — bad Greekgeek! — but they do encourage and inspire me. And sometimes, when I’m not in a hurry, I do like to see some of the other ways people are interacting with and reacting to my lenses.

    I think if you don’t have a lot of quizzes and polls, it might not be such an issue to have only the most recent 200 (or 500; gil’s thinking of upping the threshold) activity items showing. The problem is that quizzes and polls are very popular! I’ve got about 12 quiz lenses that are interlinked to pass traffic from one lens to the next, so for one visitor I may have 10-12 separate “quiz” alerts, a comment or two, and maybe a like. Most senior Squids don’t have quite that many poll-lenses and quiz-lenses cluttering up their activity stream, I suspect, so their sales for a few days back would still be visible.

  3. It’s been updated – now all the points are back (as far as I can see) and there are four main filters + ‘All’ (Points HQ News Quests Sales). They don’t work exactly like Fluff’s did, but they do work, and hopefully they’ll be more feedback.

    *I haven’t actually seen any poll votes since it was implemented, but the historical ones are there.

    And Sales is apparently a temporary thing until they create a new and better page. As they now have a filter for Quests, the Quest tab is probably going soon…

    Overall, it’s a needed upgrade and they are DEFINITELY listening to feedback on this one.

    What I still want = subfilters on the main filters (e.g. eBay & Amazon, comments/duels/blessings/my stuff, LOTD/other updates)

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