We’re thrilled to announce the upcoming release of the first version of “Streams” – a whole new feed experience on eToro OpenBook, scheduled to be live this Sunday the 29th!
We created “Streams” from the ground up in order to improve some of the existing feed mechanisms, as well as introduce many new and exciting features.
What were the problems with the old feed that moved us to write a new one?
- Markets streams weren’t flexible enough -Mentioning $AAPL wouldn’t make it into Apple’s stream, unless you post it directly on the Apple market page.
- You couldn’t start a discussion about $GOOG and $AAPL and have it on both streams, thus preventing interesting discussions across markets.
- Discoverability of activities from people you follow was lacking – you couldn’t discover the comments and likes that the people you follow had made, or the posts they posted on others’ walls.
- Some of the streams contained a max of 20 items (with no ability to scroll down for more).
- Copied trade activities (ones that weren’t explicitly made by the user but automatically copied from another) took up a lot of feed space at the expense of other, more interesting feed items.
Introducing: Streams
The major change in “Streams”, compared to the old feed, is how posts are added to different streams (user stream, market stream, personal news feed etc.).
Posts are added to different streams, similar to how Twitter works, based on who their owner is and what mentions the post contains (@username, $SYMBOL). The specific page (or “wall”) where the post was made is no longer relevant, but the tags within the posts are.
Tagging Markets
Whenever and wherever you’ll post a new discussion, if you tag a market (for example $AAPL), it will be included in the relevant market stream (in this example, Apple).
This also means we can create interesting discussions now, involving two different markets – for example, mentioning both $GOOG and $FB. Such a post will be added to both Google’s and Facebook‘s streams.
Better Discoverability
Up until now, feed items about discussions were added to your stream (the one on their personal profile page) only if you had started the discussion, i.e. created the original post.
From now on, the your stream will also include feed items that the you have commented on or liked, resulting in better discoverability of your activities by your followers, and vice versa – it will also be easier for you to learn about all the discussion activities of the people you follow.
Better Personal News Feed (“My Feed”)
Resulting from the change above, your personal news feed, where you see the activities and discussions of people you follow, will now also show comments and likes that the people you follow have made. Your news feed is going to be much more interesting now!
Feed Face Lift
We’ve upgraded the feed design, mainly in order to support the many new features to come. The main changes include:
- Translate and flag as spam moved to a separate menu – mouse over the post or comment and click on the blue arrow on the left
- Wider feed items – making room for more information on trading activities, as well as future rich media display (images, videos, etc.)
Like for comments
Praise interesting comments with one click! The new feed now supports the liking of comments. You’ll also notice that you can now unlike posts/comments that you previously liked.
Removed Copied Trade Activities
When using Copy Trader, trading activities were published automatically once copied from another user. These activities aren’t explicitly made by the user and we saw little engagement around them. They also took up a lot of feed space at the expense of other more interesting feed items. Therefore, we decided to remove them. You’ll only see trading activities made explicitly by the user (manual trading, copy/uncopy trader, etc.) on the feed from now on.
Removing “Everyone” Stream and the “User” Stream Filters
We’ve kept the general “Discussions” stream, which shows all discussions on the eToro OpenBook, but removed the “Everyone” stream that also showed the trading activities of all investors on our network.
We’ve also removed the “Trading” and “Discussions” filters on traders’ profile streams. These will be replaced with a new type of filtering in the near future.
What to Expect Next?
We’re truly excited to share some of our future plans, based on the new “Streams” system that we’re launching today. We will of course update you once these are launched in the upcoming months:
- Support of rich media – enabling attachment of pictures and videos within posts.
- Following markets – follow your favorite markets, as you follow people, and get updates on your personal news feed (“My Feed”)
- Sharing personal content within trading items (for example, share your thoughts when copying someone and have it appear within this trading activity item on the feed)
- Share posts, comments and likes to external social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
- Sharing other people’s posts within eToro OpenBook
- Tagging assistant – having an auto-complete experience (similar to the new Search), when tagging people and markets within posts and comments
- Much, much more!
We really hope you like the new Streams and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!