We've put up a Beta version of the new My Eons page.

This is an "early Beta." The design of the page - as a whole - is not fully baked. There is plenty of time for people to weigh in. For example, tell us what you like about the current version of My Eons that might be missing in the new design. Tell us what you don't like about the new features. But first, please read this blog post.

What We've Done So Far

1) We've proposed a basic concept: Dividing the incoming dynamic information into three buckets: "Notifications"; "Subscriptions"; and "Activity." The three are interrelated.

* "Notifications" are notifications about activity that is directed at you. This is activity that we think you will not want to miss, so the notice remains until you've acted upon the request (review comment, friend request) or you've seen the page showing the new content (PM, gift, comment) .

* "Subscriptions" are notifications about activity on blogs or group messages that you've specifically subscribed to.

* "Activity" consists of notifications about all other activity that Eons has reason to believe you might be interested in, based on your connections and (perhaps) other preferences.

2) We've begun to organize all the "Notifications." We now show new gifts and comments on your stuff. (But we haven't hooked up the code that automatically erases the notification once you've seen the comment.) By the way, these notifications are coordinated with the email notification system.

3) We've grouped "Subscription" information together (Blog and Group message) and we've improved the Blog subscription display so it does not show duplicate information. There's still a lot of work to do here - both behind the scenes and with the display - e.g. making the display consistent with the Activity shown below.

4) We've implemented a brand new activity logging and reporting system. Here are some of the new capabilities of this system:

* Can show more information - like actual photos, videos, headshots, etc.;
* Can aggregate multiple actions into a single "news story";
* Can show activity in groups;
* Can show activity happening *to* a friend (in addition to *by* a friend);
* Can show activity happening to you;
* Can show activity happening to any piece of content (blog, group, message, etc.);
* Filterable in a variety of ways (friend only and group only are only the beginning).

At the moment, we only use some of these new capabilities. We're just beginning to play with the new capabilities of this system and get it "tuned up" so it will be useful.

A Critical Design Issue: Group Updates

On the current My Eons page, the group list along with group status updates - e.g. "7 new messages" - is a very useful feature. It's useful because the information appears in a consistent location, making it easily scannable. For example, if you are currently interested in 2-3 particular groups, you go to My Eons and you know exactly where to look on the page to quickly ascertain whether there has been any activity in the groups. You don't have to read through a long, reverse-chronological-order list of activity in all my groups to (maybe) find the information you are looking for. Each item in the list also serves as a bookmark - which is somewhat useful even if there's no status update to display.

Rest assured we do not want to lose these useful qualities. If necessary, we may reinstate the feature, which might require us to reorganize the whole page. We have some ideas for reorganizing the page so that the group list (expanded to 10 groups) might appear in the right column. We'd love to hear other suggestions.

Another option we're mulling is whether it might be possible to show this information in the main menu system. For example, we might list your groups at the top level of the "groups" menu (instead of in a submenu). For each group, we might show an icon (or icons) that indicate "new stuff". If there's new stuff, there would be a submenu to provide links to the new stuff along with additional information - e.g. "7 new messages", "5 new members." The obvious benefit of this arrangement is that you wouldn't even need to visit My Eons -- The information would be available *everywhere* on the site! (The downside is that we'd have to find a way to engineer it such that it doesn't bring our servers to their knees - but let's not worry about that just yet.)