The Feed - Discussion & Feedback

We're always hard at work here at Shapeways, striving to bring you the best possible experience. Of course, that often involves some serious bug squashing and site fixing, but we also like to get together at the end of the day (often over beers) to try to come up with some interesting ideas that can really improve the whole experience.

One topic that was brought recently was how can we visualize what is happening on Shapeways right now? There is so much awesomeness being created, shared, and brought to life, but it's not always readily apparent if you're browsing the gallery. How cool would it be if you saw what was being created, favorited, purchased, and shared with the world? Pretty cool.

We ran with the idea and quickly hacked up a feed of Shapeways activity (regarding only public models of course). It shows the following:

- The purchase of a product
- A product being favorited
- A new picture uploaded to a product
- Someone leaving a comment on a product
- A product being shared on a social network
- The total number of views that product has

Once we were finished scrappily putting this together, we took a look at what we did and shared it with our colleagues. We couldn't get enough of it. Until now, we relied on the forum and scouring the galleries to surface community activity -- now, we have a peek into the creative energy of the Shapeways community. Seeing all the activity was exciting, addictive, and felt like we were playing with a new toy! So today, we want to share our new toy with you. You can take a look at the "Feed Of The Future" right here: www.shapeways.com/feed

We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

Also, this isn't all we're up to - we still are building great tools and making improvements to improve your experience with shop management, uploading, materials, and other areas of Shapeways!

The feed looks good! I notice that the number of views are shown with each model activity, please can we have the number of views back on our models pages?

How about having the title of the model with the images too?

A bug with the feed page, clicking on an image does nothing (XP + IE8).

[edit] Actually, now that I've loaded the page in Chrome, I see the page is broken in IE8 - the facebook & twitter links are missing. Seems to work fine in Chrome though.

Is it just me that pays attention to this stuff?*

Anyhow...

Renders are not 'a picture of their product' - they are a representation of how the item might look, and I haven't a clue how this could be gixed as anyone can upload whatever image they want whether the image is related to the item or otherwise.

It looks like someone has attemped to fix the code that didn't work in IE, and now it seems that it may be the facebook stuff that's causing issues as 'pin' & partial tweet shows... nothing clickable still though

*or is it just me that uses IE8?

Hey Paul,

We just released a couple of changes and fixes for the feed! This should resolve the issues you've encountered with IE8. Let us know!

Works fine now.

Just discovered this page.
Wow! This is great! Very good idea, indeed!

I'd like, as Paul said, having the title of the model but also the material in which the model has been ordered, the number of models ordered (not the overall total, just the total of the order: I mean if someone ordered say two rings having the following text :
"Someone ordered 2 'Dragon Ring' in White Strong and Flexible.'

This is real time but what about a summary for the day? For instance what about several people ordering the same model the same day?
"3 people ordered 3 'Dragon Ring', 2 in Stainless Steel, 1 in Red Strong and Flexible"

One last thing: I'd like to have more models in one page. All sems huge (image, the text under the image. Perhaps we could have 4 or 5 images per line?

Thanks again for this nice addition.

[Edit] What about adding filters? See only sold models or favorite models or added comments etc.

Thanks for the feedback Paul and Magic!!

We experimented showing 1, 3, 4, and 5 products in each row. We also toyed with the idea of a 'responsive layout' (i.e. resizing to fit your browser window and displaying more items if you have a larger screen). When you add more items, the images get smaller and smaller. We're trying to avoid the issues we have with the gallery and other areas around the site in which the images are so damn small that you can barely tell what the item is!!

I love the idea of the quantity and material in-line with the order. It would only apply to purchases though, not favorites/ratings/comments/etc (As we don't do those per-material currently).

Filters would be great.

Would you want sold/favorite? Or would you want to filter by your favorite tag or category?

For example, I envision being able to say "Show me the feed for Model Trains in 1/144 Scale."

Or perhaps "I followed these 6 designers. Show me the feed for all activity across the shops I followed."

Thoughts?

I would just love to be able to browse through uploaded models, I imagine this can be done with a feed filter, yes?

Also just being able to enter in a model number and get back the model page would be cool too (semi related to 'your model has been shipped' email message)

Dynamic page sizing doesn't need to re-size images, just have a small, medium or large image button somewhere on the page, the default could be medium, and give the viewer the choice of changing if they want. I prefer smaller images so I don't have to scroll down 3, 7 or 20 times to see the whole page (anyone remember the old skool web design rule, KISS? A 120kB webpage including images and jscript dynamics back in the day of dialup was easily do-able for fast loading and smooth running, why have things changed so much?)

I would also suggest not to get ahead on something new until other exsisting issues are fixed.

Initially, I thought filters would be nice to exclude some categories of information I did not want, such as people adding comments, or shop owners adding pictures.
But being able to filter by shop or even by tag could be great.
For instance, I'd like to be able to see what happens in my own shop.

I have also some remarks about the informations given by the feed. This new information are really great. But like Paul, I regret that they are not available elsewhere:
- the number of view of a model
- the numbers of favorites of a models and who added this model to his favorites
- who gave that numbers of stars to this model
- etc.

For instance the feed says that this model has been added to the favorite of three persons (see image bellow). How do i access this information (except from the feed when this model is bought)? I tried being logged and unlogged, and still i cannot see this data...

The favourited information used to be on the model page, same as the number of views.

I am also beginning to think that the star rating should be anonymous, as it is on the model page. Also it would be good to show the overall star rating on the model page so that designers get a general idea of feedback (this used to be the case)

And please fix exsisting issues before bringing out new stuff. imo, releasing new stuff before fixing issues with old stuff shows the same level of customer awareness as M$ :confused

Why am I seeing sales on the feed that for which I haven't yet received email notifications? It's somewhat disturbing.



Purchases at 18.01 and 18.05 no email as of 19.32.

- I don't get individual emails.. I only get a single email a few minutes after 01:00am CDT every day.

- Could these items be setup with no markup in some materials? That would cause you to not be notified. If any one material has $0 markup, then that sales of that model+material won't be reported to you. Use the Markup CSV to check that.

- The other major suggestion is check your Order Overview Spreadsheet. All sales that have any markup, even any you've not been notified about yet, are listed there.

I'm used to receiving emails as the sales are made, usually within a few minutes of the time stated in the notification.

I checked the markup and I checked the overview. Neither of the models have any material option with zero markup set, both the sales appeared in the overview xls.

Looking at the feed now (21.19) the sale of the dice set has disappeared, the single d20 remains but no email has been received.

A fresh dl of the overview xls (21.22) still shows both sales.

Is this perhaps a result of the sales being as yet unconfirmed (ie. not yet paid for by the purchaser?)

looks like forum email notifcations are broken, however sale notifications usually head my way at 08:00hrs GMT every day with a list of what's been purchased on the previous day

My experience to date has been that I receive individual notifications of sales within a few minutes of the purchase being made.

I appreciate other users have a different experience (sales summaries would make sense for people making more sales than me - I make two or three sales a day at best!)

Perhaps my sales today hit some sort of limit whereafter I'll receive a sales summary rather than an individual email?

my sales can be intermitant, sometimes none for 3 days, somtimes 5+ in one day - but the 08:00 notification has been the norm since I started on Shapeways

Yes, I understand that's what you've been getting. My experience has been different to that, thus far I've received individual emails, throughout the day, often within a few minutes of the purchase being made.

I'm wondering if the difference in what we've experienced might be part of a bigger problem with SW's email notification system - and I also still feel that seeing sales on the feed page (esp. sales that then disappear) before receiving a personal notification is an unsettling experience.

Out of curiosity, could you post a (censored) example of such an individual sales email, as I am not familiar with those.

Do you get a pdf (so<nr>.pdf) with sales info with each email?

And perhaps there are some hickups in the new feed. I have seen some sales being reported as double there.

But in my experience the order overview.xls is a real time feed of sales. So I always consider that leading.

Cheers,

Stijn