Subject: Product Feature Roadmaps - v0.10
Product Feature Roadmap - DRAFT 12-31-09
for NewsCloud Facebook Application
Purpose of the draft roadmap is to facilitate continued discussions around Facebook application feature set.
Positioning
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- Your Facebook application is the ideal landing spot in Facebook for your readers.
- Your Facebook application is the place for the most interactive community features offered by your organization.
Getting readers to your Facebook application
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- A URL e.g. yoursite.com/facebook can redirect to the Facebook application home page
- Headlines from your facebook Page can direct people to stories and features within your Facebook application as well
- Links from your web site can land on whatever features in your Facebook application you want to offer
- A new Application Tab for your Facebook Page can offer highlights/links to your application
- Note: Facebook is removing profile boxes from the Facebook Page feature in 2010
Required Functionality
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Integration with Facebook Pages
- Application tab
Home page
- Featured stories (~1/3+ of real estate), perhaps schedulable
- Highlights popular, current features inside the application
- Live discussion element (e.g. from the forum's sitewide/general category)
- News tip button
- Fan the application button
- Highly placed sponsor graphic
- Ad banner
- Featured elements (rotating, navigable):
* best of reader blogs
* featured video, image, audio clip
* best comment
* best forum post
* best question
* best deal
* upcoming event
* who's on/how many people are on
* 3rd party widget e.g. polling
- Defining the home page can be done by editors...selecting features/widgets to place in specific locales on the home page
- Features/Widgets can update dynamically on the home page and in some cases (e.g. top stories) can be scheduled to change
- More compact, less scrolling
Story page
- Importing original content - would be good to get sample xml output from your CMS system e.g. title, headline, abstract, body, lists of images, video embed, etc.
- Facebook application story page may contain a subset of the full story or all of it
Member Leaderboards
- Points accumulated through online participation
- Challenges allow partners to set point levels
- Leaderboard can be displayed weekly or all time
Infrastructure:
- Tags/Categories
- Multimedia: Photos, Audio, Video
- Widgets for placement on home page and sidebars of the site
- Moderation, backend management
Tier 1 Functionality
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- Tier 1 list is made up of items that we're hearing a lot of from partners
Reader blogs
- Posting original textual content
- Uploading photos and videos
- Showcase of best posts, incl. widget for the home page with best reader post
- Could offer a farm system to find new bloggers, top member content generators for your website
- News gathering/news challenges - points offered for blogging
Forums
- categories
- one sitewide/general category
- perhaps in the future, integrated via twitter or mobile app for mobile two way participation
- searchable
- possibly offering private categories
Event Calendar
Resource Directory
- Organized by category with a home page
- Free & paid placements
- Content is largely member driven and member ranked
- Advertising space available
Tier 2 Functionality
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Idea boards
- Two possible uses include
a - Driving community discussions e.g. Ideas for your community
b - Ranking topics to report on e.g. Spot.Us, possibly integrated with News Tips feature
Q&A Knowledge Base
Deals/Member Benefits Page
- free and paid placements
- advertising space
Tier 3 Functionality
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Deputized Moderators
- Members that can highlight best of content, ban users, hide abusive materials
- Possibly two levels
Classifieds
- free stuff
- paid placements - leverage trust of local community, Facebook identity to encourage use
- sharing items (some sites can turn this off)
Games
- predictions
- Making predictions about local news events e.g. sports
- Predicting stories in the news in your community
- Tying to virtual currency
- news quiz
- crosswords
Store
Extended Demographic metrics
- for future advertising
SEO Optimization
- Generate a sub-file for Site Map standard
Feature Areas Not Discussed
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- Ad rotation. We'd like to suggest Google Ad Manager or discuss integration of your current ad system.
- Rewards
- Twitter
- Mobile
- Making news matter e.g. story page enhancements to leverage interactivity of Facebook, Facebook as platform
- Disaster readiness e.g. after Katrina, could this Facebook community provide needed services?
- Real time reporting e.g. could Facebook community complement real time reporting via Twitter, e.g. allow for commenting on Tweets, other.
2 Posted by sgunn on 04 Jan, 2010 10:42 PM
This is a great summary Jeff.
Two quick things:
1. url name -- maybe you should encourage folks to use a naming convention that sort of brands your facebook work. for example, if every mainstream media partner agreed to PICKANAMEonfacebook.com to use for redirection, then you'd have a whole network with a similar naming convention. Whether the "pickaname" is the name of the paper, or a totally different name picked by the paper could be a user option. Its a bit long, but maybe something along those lines. For example, we might use eyeonfacebook.com or charlotteonfacebook.com or observeronfacebook.com, etc
We see two kinds of rewards -- one would be more points in the points system, but we'd also be inclined to give a small gift card or something each week to the winner, put their name in the paper, etc. This would also help promote the page. So, we'd have to discuss how to integrate this with other rewards on the site.
--
I'll have more specific thoughts on ads in a few days --- gotta talk to some folks.
Thanks
3 Posted by gerardf on 09 Jan, 2010 12:39 AM
One major issue here is maintaining our brand/publication as the expert source. Giving users too much voice can potentially dilute the impact/engagement of our content/editorial.
Social media is the perfect platform to bridge the divide between the community voice and expert source.
This can be a delicate balance, so it is necessary to allow for various features to be given the proper constraints depending on the need of the source.
For example, it will be hard/impossible to convince our editorial team that users of this app should be allowed to publish stories. However, getting users to share their ideas would be greatly supported. Another publication's needs would be very different from ours, I'm sure. That's why, the more feature-rich this project becomes, the more flexible/dynamic the constraints/rules of the system need to be.
4 Posted by smcnary on 13 Jan, 2010 09:36 PM
Jeff -- terrific summary of features, I don't have anything in mind that I'd want to see on the site that you haven't already mentioned.
The games feature can be a big deal for us eventually. Serious games produced by American Public Media -- Consumer Consequences, Pick a Candidate, and Budget Hero have been huge generators of participants in our Public Insight Network of news sources, so I think there is some good potential in having games and quizzes available.
Gerard -- I'm not too worried about the public percieving the public poster as more expert over our own reporters or our vetted Facebook co-hosts. I'm seeing this Facebook community as the place where people who already value our content go to hang out with each other, so I think it would be great to see people establishing trusted public profiles in our site. It's like a party. Some people may shine more than the host, but that's a party I want to be at.
I would prefer to have the yourname.com/facebook url for our facebook app. Easy to remember, and easy to read.
Sharon
Support Staff 5 Posted by Jeff Reifman on 13 Jan, 2010 09:38 PM
Sharon - you can set up a redirect for yourname.com/facebook to your
apps.facebook.com/appname at any point.
6 Posted by smcnary on 13 Jan, 2010 09:45 PM
I also like the idea of a store where people could get our t-shirts, mugs and pledge gifts. Could it also be set up to sell memberships? When you donate to a membership, you also receive this solar phone charger....
7 Posted by sgunn on 13 Jan, 2010 09:56 PM
i agree on the issue of the public posters knowing more than us -- we just want to be the place everybody turns. it's just fine if they shed light for all of us.
Support Staff 8 Posted by Russell on 14 Jan, 2010 05:33 PM
We can easily add a visual distinction for the primary users of the site, such as admins or moderators or editors or whatever your classification is. We also already distinguish between user created stories and stories that were submitted, so we can make it apparent when a normal user is creating content of any kind and when someone associated with the site is posting content. This can be across the board, stories, articles, comments, ideas, etc etc.
9 Posted by NancyA on 26 Feb, 2010 12:37 AM
To Russell -- yes, I like that distinction of users.
Overall, we hope we'll get better user content here on this APP so we embrace the user content and want to really make it grow. Agree with this is a community place to hang out, might be good to take actions as well. Users can participate, but how might organizations that have fan pages?
I have a question -- upon reading some of facebooks terms... Can we use facebook terms such as "like." And while I like the ...onfacebook names is the use of the word "facebook" prohibited in the APP? There seems to be a lot of language attempting to differentiate the APP from facebook. Just some thoughts