Introducing a Richer, Better Feed: Links, Videos and More

Today we’re excited to announce many new and exciting features within the eToro OpenBook feed.

The feed is the place where the social magic happens at eToro, where people engage with each other and where you can get interesting content about your favorite markets.

Many of the features we’re announcing today have been developed as a result of feedback from our users. We’re happy to deliver what you’ve all been waiting for!

1. Richer Links – Title, Description and Image

We all like to share interesting links and articles from around the web, and we all like to read what other people think is interesting. In the world of investing, there’s lots of interesting stuff out there, but before you click on a link it would be nice to know what lies in store.

Today we’re introducing the support of “rich link” attachments – just type or paste in a link (URL address) and we’ll pull its title, description and image to complete your post. Once you paste the link, you will see a preview that looks something like this:

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All you have to do then is click on the “Post” button to share your interesting item with everyone!

The result – your feed item will appear in the feed together with the title, description and image, like so:

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2. Videos – YouTube, Vimeo and even SlideShare

Links to articles are nice, but videos are even nicer! When pasting a link to a video, we’ll embed the video within your post! The preview will look as follows:

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Once you click on “Post” your post will appear on the live feed as follows:

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Clicking the video will start playing it immediately. You’ll be able to embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo, as well as presentations from SlideShare!

3. Easier Tagging: Auto-Complete for Tagging @People and $Markets

When writing posts or comments, we usually engage with people and markets. Tagging a user or a market today becomes much easier.
Start typing $ and two characters more, and you’ll get relevant markets to choose from:

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Start typing @ and two characters more, and you’ll get relevant people to choose from:

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4. Better Pushing of New Updates (replacing the auto-scroll mechanism)

Our feed is a live feed. New posts and comments are added frequently. When you’re viewing a page with a feed on it, new comments and likes to all displayed posts are updated automatically. In addition, there are fresh new live posts that coming in to the same feed while you’re viewing it.

Up until now we’ve been using an “auto-scroll” update mechanism , where new items were being automatically added to the top, pushing the feed down. This mechanism interrupted the flow of reading the feed for many users.

From now on, new updates will be pushed to a notification tab, indicating that new items are available:

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When you’re ready, click the tab and the new items will be added to the feed. Until then, you’re free to read the feed at your own leisure.

The label appears at the beginning of the feed, or floating at the top of the screen when scrolling down the feed, so you’ll always be notified of new items once they are available.

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5. Better and clearer display of stock tagging

When tagging stocks on the feed, we used to show the stock tag only, for example, $KO for the Coca Cola stock. We understand that reading posts with $KO and $PEP is not necessarily comfortable,  since we don’t all instinctively know who the companies behind these symbols are.

As of today, we’ll be displaying the company name in brackets, next to the tag (once within each post or comment).
Take a look at this example:

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 Now you can easily understand that this post is about Coca Cola and Pepsi!

6. Hiding long text posts and comment

We want you to be able to say everything that’s on your mind, that is why we provide you with quite a lot of writing space for your posts and comments. That being said, we don’t want the entire feed to be covered with one long post or comment.

As of today, for long posts or comments, we’ll be showing only the beginning of the text, and you can simply click on “See More’ to view the full post or comment.

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7. Who liked my post?

This one is pretty straight forward – when multiple people liked a post or comment, you can see the full list and access their profiles via this new popup:

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8. Showing number of investors and sentiment on trading items

Trading activities within the feed are now showing the total number of investors for this instrument, as well as the current sentiment (buying or selling).

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All these new features are waiting for you on eToro OpenBook, now all that’s left to do is go ahead and try it out!

As I said before, your feedback has been a key factor in our development process, so please don’t hesitate to tell us what you think of the new feed in the comments below.