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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!

Most of you have probably noticed–and used–the option to share an item from Current with a friend. But before you click send, there are a couple of things to consider.

Think about who you’re sending to

We’re all passionate about things, and of course we want to share that passion. But it’s a good idea to think about who you’re sharing with. Sending an email to all of your connections and your entire address book (including people you’ve only ever emailed once in your life) isn’t effective, and is really only likely to get your emails blocked in the future. I’m sure your dentist is quite fond of you, but does he really need to get an email every time  you add something to Current? (Unless you’re talking about teeth.)

Sharing is intended to let people know about thinks you think they’ll be interested in, so take a few minutes to figure out who really is going to be into this. If someone is totally interested in politics, they might not be as interested in getting a link to that post about the really cool knit R2D2 hat you found and vice versa. And if you don’t recognize the email address in your address book, but you think it was maybe the guy you bought a couch from off of Craigslist….you might want to leave that one off the list.

Make sure you’re formatting your list correctly

As Mario mentioned in a previous blog post, we’ve truncated the list of connections to 100 when sharing. Since this change was made, a number of people have mentioned copying and pasting a list of connections and  email addresses as a potential solution. If you have a list of people you share stories with frequently, it’s important to make sure that you’re listing usernames or email addresses only, and that you’re separating them with commas. Using dashes, semicolons, periods, or emails in quotes will not work.

For example, this list will send:

fakeuser, notarealperson, notarealaddress@email.com, anotherperson@email.com

But this one won’t be recognized:

fakeuser. notarealperson; “notarealaddress@email.com” “Another Person”<anotherperson@email.com>

Consider breaking up your list

Okay, so you’ve got a lot of people who are really, really passionate about the same things you are, and you’ve gone over your list formatting with a fine-tooth comb. Great! Now it’s time to break them up…

No, I’m not talking about creating some sort of massive flame-war implosion to narrow down your list. Don’t be silly.

Here’s the deal: the more people on your list, the longer it takes to share an item, and the greater the chance that something will go wrong and cause the whole thing to fail. So if you’ve got a lot of people (say, more than a couple hundred), you might want to consider breaking the list up into a couple of segments. Not only will those process much more quickly, if you do have a formatting mistake somewhere, it will only affect a portion of the people you’re trying to share the story with and not the whole group.

So, you’ve got the sharing down–but you keep getting these emails about stories from someone you don’t know about things you don’t care about. What to do next?

Talk to them!

Amazingly simple, I know, but the first thing you might want to do is send them a quick message saying that you appreciate the thought, but you really aren’t intereted in recycling/cute cat videos/amigurmi and would they please refrain from sharing with you. The key here is nice–odds are, they really do think you’ll be interested, and aren’t trying to be annoying so there’s no need to go all crazy.

(Tip: if the person sharing random stuff with you happens to be related to you in any way, I recommend just letting it go. I love the joke forwards, Mom, really!)

Block them

Okay, so talking didn’t work. You’re still getting an inbox full of emails you aren’t interested in, and you’ve been soundly ignored or on the receiving end of a snarky message. Now what?

Well, you can always block someone. If someone shares a story with you, you’ll see a link at the bottom that says ” To block this community member from sharing items with you, click here.” Just click the link and you won’t recieve any more shares from that person. It’s that easy!

Oops! I blocked too soon..

Well, your inbox is devoid of links that you might like, and now you suddenly find that you miss those daily updates. Or, you realized that the random person you blocked is actually your sister-in-law and you’re on the verge of igniting a family feud that makes the Hatfields and the McCoys look tame. Don’t worry, blocking isn’t forever.

Just go to edit your profile, and click on the connections tab. You’ll be able to unblock anyone if you’ve had second thoughts.

And that’s it! Everything you need to know about sharing and blocking on Current!

–Steph (more…)

Mystery Bug photo by aussiegall on flickr

hey community!

we’ve been receiving reports that some community members are noticing issues when they try to share their stories with others. i thought it would be a good idea to clear up a couple of things, and let those of you who are experiencing this problem know that we are on the case.

first, a while back we noticed some strain on our submission tool, which we like to call “the clipper.” this strain was a direct result of pulling in a posters contacts list for the sharing portion of the clipper, so we revised this flow to only pull in 100 contacts at a time. we realize this isn’t ideal, and we are going to be making improvements to the clipper workflow in the future. for now, this helps reduce the load and keep things running.

second, let’s talk ghosts in the machines. a number of you have reported that when sharing items with some of your contacts, you are finding that those shares never actually reach their intended recipients. typically, this sort of behavior is a result of someone blocking you for oversharing, but for a few we’ve noticed that isn’t actually the case — shares are just not being sent out due to some unknown bug in the system. most cases center around people who copy and paste lists of usernames into the sharing field under the “invite a friend to chime in on this” section. our team is looking into the matter, and trying to get to the bottom of things, so we hope to have this resolved soon.

for now, if you’ve noticed any odd behavior when attempting to share items with people, please head over to our Get Satisfaction thread on sharing and post some details. your experiences could provide the necessary clues needed to get to the bottom of the case.

thanks!
– mario