Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve been wearing my administrator hat and working my fingers to the bone while working to prepare the SiliconANGLE community features for the next level.  I just wanted to take a minute and outline some of the new Alpha-ish features we’re rolling out in the next several days, and some changes you may have noticed with your SiliconANGLE account.

Upgrade to the New BuddyPress

On the face of things, the new BuddyPress isn’t much different from the previous version, but the new version does a lot of backend fixes when it comes to theming, so hopefully we’ll soon get the inside of our site, the social networking side, to come into line with what the outward facing side of the site is.

There also seems to be a great deal more thought put into the table structure on the new version of BuddyPress, which thankfully makes my job easier in developing extensions to the community, and makes it easier for me to integrate new features.

What are some of those new features?  We’ll, I’ll talk a bit in a second about what’s on our product roadmap, but we got a couple of biggies out of the way this weekend.

Introducing: Live Chat

For quite some time, we’ve had the editorial backchannel, or /SAbackchan, which has proven quite useful for connecting the community and allowing us to collaborate on projects. We’re trying to take that one step further today by allowing all users who’ve taken the time to create an account on the site to chat with one another.

It’s a good place to share links and information, and as we evolve the feature a bit, it’ll be a good way to collaborate further on projects, stories, link-sharing or anything else that can be tied to our group functionality.  All data in a chat can be stored on the server, so once private and group channel functionality is finished (still in the Alpha testing stages), we can add hooks that will allow you to save portions of your chat to the group forum or group blog.

Give it a try – I’ll be around on the site at just about any time of day or night you could pick, so it’s just about as effective a means of reaching a SiliconANGLE member as picking up the phone.

Introducing: Group Blog Functionality

One of the toughest things for us to manage, given our shifting face of our core team and regular contributor roster, is who has access to post at the /SAbackchan, and who we should invite to participate.

Eventually, we hope to see the backchannel play a much bigger role in what SiliconANGLE is, but as it now stands, it’s mostly a cool toy for those of us who like to stay loosely tied to the news cycle and have fun conversations about whatever it is we’re focused on at the moment.

Given that, rather than try to browbeat our fellow community members into using it, the “Group Blog” functionality that we were able to add with the new version of BuddyPress is a very attractive alternative.  If you’re not familiar with the SiliconANGLE group functionality, just think of it as a cousin to the Facebook Group functionality, with it’s own timeline, conversational tools and media sharing functions.

So what does that mean for you?  If you’re interested in playing in the /SAbackchan pool, simply click here and join the group. It’s as simple as that.

Some Bugs from the Upgrade

You may have noticed that your avatars are somewhat … missing.  An unavoidable partial data loss occurred in which some friend relationships, some avatars and some private messages were lost.  Most of them were recovered, but some remain missing in action.  We’re working to recover most of this data, but thankfully most of the data loss has been more or less inconsequential.

On Our Roadmap

We have a lot of things planned on our roadmap, but two major things stand out that I’d like to tease: open authentication and lifestreaming.

One of the things we’re realizing, the more John, myself, and the rest of the crew try to innovate in the “real time web” space, is that the borders and boundaries of what is a “web site” are rapidly deteriorating.  Most of the members of our community here at SiliconANGLE access our site not at the actual site itself, and much of the content we feature at the site didn’t originally get written inside our little WordPress editing window.

Some of the content we feature here is syndicated from our member blogs, and where it ends up is on handheld devices, on Kindles, in an RSS reader or on Twitter or Facebook.  Some of that data is tracked and counted in our stat counters, and some of it simply can’t be tracked.  We like it when we have higher stats every month, because it makes it easier for us to market ourselves to new members and sponsors, but we don’t live and die by those numbers.

That’s why we encourage conversations about our content elsewhere on the web and try to bring those conversations back to the site as an aggregation point.  It’s also the reason why we’re trying to find the best solution (and implement it) that allows our users to integrate their profiles and logins from Twitter and Facebook, instead of forcing them to recreate that data and remember Yet Another Password.

Also, as I mentioned above, we’re working on ways to streamline and make more open the editorial and community processes and conversations.  The editorial backchannel was one step in that direction, and we’re working with a few select contributors and developers to advance that to the next level. 

A lot has been said recently about the death of Friendfeed, and if asked, I’d be forced to agree with Robert Scoble’s recent roasting of the service.  I remember when the community on Friendfeed was limited to the developers, some ex-Googlers, MG Siegler, Steven Hodson, Jason Kaneshiro, Tony Hung, Louis Gray, Aaron Brazell and a few other tech bloggers.  Those were fun days – you could turn to Friendfeed without any filters and find an interesting conversation around topics you were interested in.

I don’t think there’s a way to turn back the clock on Friendfeed (and I can’t see Facebook turning into the ‘exclusive hangout’ for the technorati), but we have an amazing community of contributors, many of which were amongst the first Friendfeeders, and one of my personal goals is to try to evolve our site into a place where the tech crowd can call home again.

That’s the tease for now.  Keep an eye on the site for future developments, and as always, your thoughts and input are welcome.