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In part two of our series entitled, “Why did you build that feature?” I’m tackling our URL shortener and the Current Bar. We posted a quick run-through for these features last week, but considering the questions surrounding them it felt right to take a closer look.

“Why make a shortener that is 26 characters when others are much shorter?”

Great question. Our URL shortener is truly designed with one intent in mind: providing a better experience when viewing and sharing Current.com content. While it’s not the shortest shortener around, at 26 characters this is a massive improvement — shaving off 11 characters from the shortest Current.com URL previously available. But shortening is really just half of the feature here. Our shortened URLs combine with our new Current Bar to make browsing, sharing, and discussing content on Current much more enjoyable.

Take this story on Current.com for example, “Last of Africa’s desert elephants ravaged by severe drought.”

Comparison of Current.com shortener and Current Bar use on source stories from Current.com

Originally, when you would click on source URLs, a new window would pop open to load the source article. This still happens, however there are two distinct changes to this flow now — when you click on the source URL (found below the title of the story) or the image of a story on Current.com it will open the original story in a new window/tab along with the Current Bar at the top of the page, and a shortened URL in your browser bar (see below).

That’s right, the original source URL is automatically shortened for you when you click through from Current.com — just in case you decide to share the story with someone else via Facebook or Twitter.

So, why the Current Bar at the top of the page? The Current Bar offers voting buttons, the title and full source link, and buttons to respond to the discussion back on Current.com and to share the story with others via your various social networks.

Note: We’ve received a lot of feedback from our community around the use of voting on Current.com, specifically around the fact that many people in our community tend to vote on items without reading the original source story, OR that they click through to read the full source and forget to vote on the story.

The Current Bar attempts to solve for this problem. Gone are the days of clicking through to read the source only to forget to vote or respond back on Current. Have faith, the Bar is there to help remind you. Plus, it gives you an easy way to jump back into the discussion on Current.com after reading the story for yourself.

As Steph pointed out last week, the shortener can also be used to shorten any URL for any story you happen to find around the web. So for example, if you are reading a great article about how the creators of Delgo are hinting at a lawsuit after watching the trailer for Avatar, you have a few options:

Take the original link:

http://www.movieline.com/2009/08/delgo-creators-hint-at-lawsuit-over-avatar-connection.php

Type in current.com/ between the // (doubleslash) and the www in the original URL, and you get this:

http://current.com/www.movieline.com/2009/08/delgo-creators-hint-at-lawsuit-over-avatar-connection.php

When you browse to this new link you will see our shortener in action, and you’ll end up creating this URL:

http://current.com/1eg6m4c

At this point, the story still hasn’t been submitted to Current.com, so the Current Bar looks a little different:

You can submit it easily by clicking the “Add to Current” button. If you don’t want to add it yourself, you can still use the shortened Current.com URL to share the story with people on other social networks. Who knows, maybe one of your followers or friends will submit it to Current for you.

So what are you waiting for? Try it out for yourself, create and share some shortened Current URLs, and most importantly shoot us some feedback and let us know what you think!

House on Fire by dvs on flickr.com

Here’s the situation. You come home from a nice night out only to find that your next door neighbor’s home, and everything in it, is on fire. This isn’t just a tiny fire, this is a full blown blaze. So, what do you do?

You could:

1. Rush inside in an attempt to put out the fire, or save anyone who might happen to be trapped inside.

2. Take the “who cares as long as it’s not me” approach, ignore the flames, and settle into bed for the evening.

3. Call 911 and report the fire to the fire department.

Let’s consider these options.

Choice #1: While altruistic and noble, puts you at great risk. You’re not equipped with fire retardant gear, and you could easily find yourself sucked into the blaze, injured, or even blamed for having something to do with the incident.

Choice #2: This is obviously the selfish route. No one would blame you for wanting to avoid risk, but option #3 is really not that difficult to do, so why not lend a helping hand?

Choice #3: Let’s face it, you share a community space with your neighbors. A burned up house will only drive down the value of your own home, so you’re somewhat invested in taking some action. The fire fighters are only human, so they can’t patrol every cul du sac looking for imminent fire hazards. Reporting a fire is a really easy way to help others out without putting yourself at risk.

Obviously this is a hypothetical situation, but it definitely relates to some of the issues that arise in online communities such as our own here at Current.com. Our site is designed to facilitate discussions. We welcome all points of view, and we encourage debate.

Wherever debate exists, differences of opinions are sure to crop up, and when those rear their heads, things can easily spiral from debate into attacks in a very timely fashion.

As a member of our community, we ask that you avoid taking option #1 wherever possible — no matter how heated an attack on you or your connections may be. If you step in and attempt to put out the fire yourself, there is a good chance that you might find yourself surrounded by flames, or resorting to actions that are in violation of our community guidelines.

We also ask that you refrain from taking choice #2 as well. We’re all in this together, so please contribute to making Current a better place for everyone to debate and discuss.

As a community member, please take a look at our newly refined community guidelines, and help out by reporting any potential fires you happen upon while participating on Current.com.

Sending a flag to the online community team is not a negative thing, it’s a good thing. It helps us keep abreast of some of the things going on within the community. We do our best to be everywhere at once, but even with our internal tools this isn’t always possible. So we enlist your help. If you’re not sure, flag it. You may find that what you report is not actually a violation of our community guidelines, but it is still helpful and we appreciate it.

Also, reporting a flag doesn’t give you the right to attack someone on the site. Just report it and let us take a look. We have a 24 hour response window, so you should get feedback on your flag in a relatively short amount of time.

Similarly, electing not to flag comments doesn’t give you license to respond in suit. You may not be responsible for the fire down the block, but that doesn’t mean you get to set fire to your next door neighbor’s house because the one down the block is on fire.

Thanks!

hey currentians,

i know, i know…it’s been SOOOO long since our last feature release. all jokes aside, the second part of our feature release doubleheader just rolled out, and it introduces a brand new concept to current.com called “bundles.”

Q: what is a bundle?

A: a bundle is a group of stories packaged together based on their relationship to one another. these stories usually come from different sources, but are all related based on keywords and other similarities.

Q: why are you calling these “baby-bundles” then?

A: well, the bundling concept is still in the infancy stage — hence, the use of the word “baby.” we have much, much bigger plans for these once they reach the “adult” stage, but we are not quite there yet in this release. so let’s get into some of the details.

Q: where can i find these baby-bundles?

A: each homepage channel on current.com (news, music, movies, tech, green, gaming, comedy, and art & style) has a new module in the right rail of the channel homepage. this module is titled, “real-time news” and it includes a cloud of trending terms and links to the most recently created bundles for that channel.

Q: how do baby-bundles work?

A: for our first iteration, we’ve deploying a team of current bots (e.g. current_news_bot, current_tech_bot, current_movies_bot, etc.) to scour the web for stories to turn into baby-bundles. these baby-bundles are created specifically for the current.com community to engage with and discuss. baby-bundles are similar to individual items on current.com — you can comment, vote, and share them with others.

Q: what can i do with a baby-bundle?

A: when someone comments and/or votes on a bundle for the first time, the bot associated with the bundle’s channel will place the bundle in that channel’s stream. by voting and commenting, you tell our bots which bundles are interesting enough to place in the channel. so, if you see a bundle in the music section that looks like something the current.com/music community would be interested in, vote and comment! the bundle will automatically be added to the current music channel, where others can vote and comment on it as well.

Q: can i create my own baby-bundles?

A: baby-bundles? no. full-blown “adult” bundles? yes! as i mentioned, this is just the early stages for bundles, but we plan to roll out the ability for our community to bundle stories together when we get closer to releasing the fully matured bundles.

Q: what do the trend links mean?

A: these are terms that we recognize as trending within our bundles creation flow. clicking on these links will take you to the bundles that directly reflect those trends.

so, take our new baby-bundles for a test drive and let us know what you think. we’ll be tweaking the process for bundle creation over the next few weeks, so any feedback you have will be very helpful. you can ask questions or offer suggestions over on our Get Satisfaction page.

in the meantime, here are a few bundles that caught my eye:

• Movies: Orci and Kurtzman talk about deleted Shatner cameo (in the new Star Trek film directed by J.J. Abrams)
  
• Music: Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse, and David Lynch album, Dark Night of the Soul, scrapped
• News: Tamil Tiger rebel leader dead, Sri Lankin state TV reports
• Tech: Wolfram Alpha: The Beginning
• Green: Northern Florida burning more wood to meet renewable energy targets

shoot us feedback, and feel free to share some of your favorite baby-bundles with me,

– mario