How stable is the platform? Would you consider providing social login in future?
A couple of observations:
1) the double pop-up for posting a reply (right hand top) and Start a conversation is bad UX, IMHO.
2) the urls (of forums and conversations) aren't SEO friendly. Is it possible to change this?
The platform is stable. Most of our investment to this point was in building a very solid foundation. We're using Postgres + S3 for storage and Go for the API. So our core is built on solid technologies that are well known and established, with only Go being a potentially risky bet as it is relatively young.
On your observations:
#1 Were you not signed in? Is this the sign-in popup? We don't use pop-ups anywhere except for the sign-in dialog that uses Persona. If this is the issue then it is one more thing to add to the now growing list of things we'd like to improve about how the Persona UX integrates with ours.
#2 We know that we will add more SEO oriented URLs, but this will require us doing it once and never changing how we do it. Which basically means that we want more content and to analyse that content to determine the most optimal strategy for building those URLs.
Google and others penalise harder for duplicate URLs reaching the same content than they reward for nice SEO friendly URLs. So when we do this, it will be done in a way that constructs a canonical SEO friendly URL for content and that is the one and only URL that will ever reach the content.
We need to get this right when we do it, because it will affect placement to make changes once it's done. We know that during the life of a forum content is moved, edited, and some content has liability in a title and we need to provide a way for that to change.
What I'm saying is that content is temporal and URLs are permanent. Whatever our strategy we need to strike the right balance here without making the UX weird for the end users.
In the meantime we are focusing our effort on ensuring that the HTML we produce is marked-up well, such that headers and titles are given due prominence, that we use schema.org microformats, etc. And we will soon add an API for sitemaps.xml files.
We'll help your content get indexed, we'll help you stay indexed, we'll help the unindexed content be discovered... but what we aren't going to do is rush in and create a potential fragility or weakness with the content that is already indexed.
There should be a place where I could shout my "love" for it.
For years I have played with notes, lists, mindmapping software. Sometimes I think it was not created but "discovered". That workflowy is to life , what lisp is to software... i.e. the right way to program !
Indian Election Commission has gifted the entire country's electoral data to Google. The electoral data includes (at least) voter's name, father or husband's name, address, age and sex. Apparently its a service being done by Google as part of its CSR obligations. It is not clear if Google can use it for any other purposes.
A couple of observations: 1) the double pop-up for posting a reply (right hand top) and Start a conversation is bad UX, IMHO. 2) the urls (of forums and conversations) aren't SEO friendly. Is it possible to change this?