Follow & Feed Updates!

Hey everyone! We're excited to tell you about some new updates we've just made on our site:

We've just released improvements to our Follow and Feed features. We realize that these features are key to discovering great products that you design and in general assist in connecting users within the Shapeways community. Highlights of the updates are:

- The landing page for your feed has been updated so you can easily view:
- Favorite Products
- Product Lists
- Comments on your products or products you are following
- We will also be showing the community a list of everyone following you, & everyone you are following in your public designer profile .
- Global Feed will no longer be an option.

Please note that you may periodically receive emails notifying you that you have new followers. You can turn this email off altogether or change the frequency as you wish.

We're excited to be launching these improvements and look forward to seeing how you use them!!!

Please let us know if you have any feedback!

Global feed no longer available? That's a wrong decision.

If somebody like to watch this awesome showcase yet

https://www.shapeways.com/feed

(probably this wouldn't be available for a long time).

- folks, this is simply absurd. The feed used to be the place to go to if one wanted to be introduced to new products and designers one did not already know.

Personally I may be guilty of not ordering much from this showcase yet (though among other things I learned a lot about numerous military and civil engineering topics just by coming across models of something I did not know existed in real life), but I cannot be the only one who found it useful, given the abysmal state of the shop category and search functions.

Additionally, shouldn't this
(the second part in particular, but probably both) be opt-in so as not to create a privacy issue ?

Hello--

I'm the Product Manager here at Shapeways who worked on these improvements and just wanted to share a couple things.

First off, the global feed is not gone, it's just been hidden. The URL is still accessible for anyone who wants to visit. However, it may quickly prove to be less compelling or interesting than one's own My Feed depending on who and how many people you follow. The reason we chose to hide it is that in working on this improvement, we wanted to focus on each user's own individual Feed. There are a lot of moving parts to My Feed (to any feed, really), with a fair amount of complexity, and we wanted to focus our efforts on making a significant improvement here before focusing on the Global Feed. It's a different beast.

In terms of the privacy concern, Shapeways is a public marketplace. Comments, Favorites, adding Products to (Public) Lists and Following are all public activities. There are obviously private actions, like uploading a Model or making a purchase, for which we would be extremely careful before we ever considered possibly showing those kinds of events in a feed. We create a lot of value for our users from being a public marketplace, and exposing public activity to other users on the site in a better way is a big step toward improving discovery of Products (which ultimately leads to sales) and connecting users.

And in regard to categories and search and filter functions, we are fully aware of how this experience is less than ideal for both people selling Products seeking to be discovered and for people looking to discover Products. There are many inter-connected issues related to categories, tags and other things that make it hard to simply "change the taxonomy." I think of this challenge as a tangled ball of yarn, and we're investigating how to untangle it in the best way that makes sense for our Shop Owners and our Shoppers.

I'm not even sure how all this is supposed to work. My personal page says I have 6 followers yet only two are displayed. And it is also my assumption that those two followers are simply spam related since their profiles link to realty and resort sites which may or may not even be real. Is it possible for a user to un-display followers or do we need to go through customer service for things like that? At the very least we should be able to approve followers or remove them at any time.

Thank you for the response.

Good to know that one can still access it - as long as one knows that (and where) it exists in the first place. Maybe it is just me, but I sense a misconception here - your concept of the feed appears to assume that customers already know exactly whose new products they want to see, even if they are completely new to shapeways.
The "global feed" in its previous form did so much more to promote designs - it would showcase models from designers one did not know before, and also highlight older models as long as someone happened upon them and liked them enough to add them to their favorites. And last not least it provided a form of popularity barometer.
If I only want to follow a walled garden of four or five designers, I might as well just bookmark their shop pages and revisit them directly. (And then I would never come across designs that do not interest me personally, but which I might still forward to a friend with matching taste or interest.)
And as already mentioned by MrNibbles, the follower linkbacks are just another avenue for spammers.

At least with the Lists I have the choice to keep them private, why should this "follower" thing be different ? Or do you want to inflate your user count by privacy-conscious designers creating pseudonymous accounts for their "private" endeavours - it might be awkward to show whom one sees as the close competition one has to keep an eye on, whom one secretly gets inspiration from, or just that one has a personal interest in kinky statuettes, unusual body gear/body modifications or anything else that goes against one's shop image.

Perhaps we are just different demographics, but I have a growing suspicion that shapeways is overrating what goes for "social" media aspects these days while the technical functionality is dropping from focus, and once-useful tools fall into disrepair and are quietly removed.
Much of what you call "untangling of yarn" looks awfully like a new and/or reduced crew cutting away working code that they are no longer able to understand and maintain.

I'm not seeing any tab or anything to monitor product comments. Will this feature only be engaged for new product comments or also for existing comments?

As far as product lists go I've noticed that models which are not for sale can't be added to a product list. But I have a verification list that I use to prioritize models that I want to have fabricated even if they aren't for sale, because I want to make they sure they can be manufactured before offering them to the public. The same problem applies to ceramic products that can't be sold in ceramic until ordered by a shop owner.

Most of my recent followers seem to be spam accounts. The pattern with them seems to be odd username, moderately handsome/pretty photo, no products, no one following them, and a non 3D printing related link taking up most or all of their about themselves line. Like this guy:

https://www.shapeways.com/designer/lorenzo50

"I sale cod liver oil capsules."

Or this woman: https://www.shapeways.com/designer/kellyadisney

"Win Ex-Wife Back Spell Zoologist"

Hi Jay,

you have quite a talent for understatement.

What I write below is not aimed at you specifically, it is a general lament...

I have been with SW for a while now, and the search has NEVER worked. The tags are also less than useful. Isn't it embarrassing that the only way to find stuff (still) is via a 3rd party search engine?

Instead of getting basic functionality working, things get 'fixed' that were never really broken. And effort that should go into getting the items that people actually want, like the search, like orientation, like group items and like variants (think ring sizes). Function that people like and use is removed/not maintained and arbitrary changes are made to the shops like messing up people's margins when the pricing model changes or cropping their photos without notification and badly.

SW should spend more time addressing what its users actually want and ask for, and less time in imagining what might be cool to do. A funky website was quite cool a few years back, but SW is no longer a start-up - get it together please.

This is just what they were doing again and again for years.

Nice tools to show our work like the pics that you can watch down right of the product page, and that are working right till a year ago, one nice day start to show randomly products in lieu of "related items", and the four pics that shows "more from -designer-" is impossible to configure at all. Designers warned about it, but never was fixed.

Some software engineers seem to work against logic, instead to watch the web under the eyes of a new customer or designer.

Another silver badge for the chest of somebody. Congrats.

I still don't understand exactly where this landing page is. Is it the "myfeed" page or the "lists" page or is it somewhere else? Is this landing page supposed to integrate "myfeed" and "lists" or something? If a product is favorited by someone will that also show up like a product comment?

This seems to be a new venue for fake/spammy accounts and backlinks. :-/
I still remember when Shapeways wanted to mimics twitter, by cropping product description to three words. Unfortunately, pics are still weirdly cropped, but don't waste precious dev time on this. I like those new ideas, keep them coming !

Never fix old and annoying problems. :-(

Not sure if this is a bug or intentional, but you can't see any of your feed unless you are following people. And if you follow random people just to get past the splash page and then unfollow all of them, you can no longer see the feed. Is there another way to see comments on your products besides the feed?

I had a second look at this: Imagine I'm a link-spamming software (or a someone trying to earn a few cents a hour in a third-world country). I create a lot of new accounts on Shapeways and everytime I configure my feed -one click, easy to automate-, the spammy link on my profile receive five backlinks -I could not see a nofollow, but I can be mistaken- from reals profiles.

That would explain why I'm not seeing anything anywhere. I tried clicking past that splash page without any selections but it wouldn't work. Personally I prefer to not see lots of designs from other people because it might color my design efforts. Having a proper place to see all feedback from customers or potential customers is all I care about. I don't need things to get too Facebooky or Twittery. This feature might be great for account holders who don't upload designs and are only concerned about buying things but others may prefer to have a firewall option.

Hey everyone,

Thank you all for your feedback on follow and feed. The team has spent some time reviewing these, and we are taking your concerns to heart as we continue to build out tools. First, let me address a few issues here:

- You will see other peoples actions within your feed if you are following them. If you do not wish to view their actions, you can unfollow them at any point.
- Spam accounts: Thanks for flagging. we're digging into solutions for fake accounts.
- Our intention is to make your products as discoverable as possible. We know search has been an issue in the past, and this is something we actively make improvements on. The launch of "My Feed" is a new tool for discovery, and will keep you + your followers up to date with new projects you are working on.

- At this point in time, my feed is an aggregation of actions that are already public. If you make a list or add a new model and choose to keep it private, it will not be displayed within your feed.

As a reminder, this feature was launched as a way to elevate you as a designer and build a robust network for you to share your work. We will continue to make updates to follow & feed. Remember that this is v1, and your feedback is extremely valuable to us, so please continue to share your concerns as we move forward. We will be posting more on this topic very soon, so stay tuned for more

My followers number is now correct. 3 followers three visible accounts.

I also followed myself so I would know what I'm up to.

So let me reiterate: I can choose to make my "favorites" and other lists private - so why is there no such option for this new "following" thing ?