My First Eight Days With Jive's New Platform

Day 7.

I thought I was done with learning new things and tweaking my experience. WRONG! So on the "What Matters: Activity" page, I changed my settings today to "Followed Activity." I'm hoping that will cut down on the noise. I'm a little concerned that I'll miss good stuff, but I guess it won't hurt to give it a try. Maybe this is where the recommender really comes into play, filtering that big stream so I don't have to. And maybe I'll end up using different settings when we launch this in our own community. This also means that I can check my settings for content and places even more, making sure to turn on "Following" where I want to see things when I have time, and emails when I want to know right away. So it's sort of like having three levels of notification: "emails" for immediate notification that's not dependent on my viewing the site; "tracking" for things I can wait to review a couple of times a day; and "following" for things I can wait and look at when I have time. Maybe email and tracking will swap places as I get more comfortable.

Day 8.

Now that I'm getting the hang of the interface, I am actually paying attention to things. I'm also noticing what other people are complaining about that I actually like and thought I'd comment on some of it.

What Matters: Activity. Some new elements are surfaced here, such as "Social News," "Latest Likes," and "Latest Acclaim." These aren't things I always value, but sometimes they let me stumble on an interesting group or a piece of content that I would never have otherwise seen. And I notice that I key in even more when someone I know has joined a new group. Finally, from a VERY selfish standpoint, I love seeing when someone has liked something I wrote or said, even more so if I really admire the person. Who doesn't like a warm fuzzy now and then?

Recommended For You. This has surfaced one or two interesting things so far, but my guess is that it either needs to learn more about me to do a better job, or Jive needs to tweak it some more.

Matters Most. This one has been very slow to populate, and at this point, I still have only three items in it. Maybe this also needs more tweaking or more time to gauge my actions. Or maybe, since I can read so many things easily in my Communications stream, my actual behavior (clicking through to content) gives the artificial intelligence misleading information.

So that about sums up my learning experience with the new Jive 5 platform. Have you seen or used it yet? Comment on this post and share your experience.

Tracy Maurer is an Enterprise 2.0 system administrator, evangelist, community manager, and trainer at United Business Media, the parent company of InformationWeek, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, and a range of leading business technology media brands. Contact her at [email protected].

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