Feeding Content

Our latest High Fidelity Beta release builds on June’s proof of concept, which suggested three visitable places above the address bar. Now we’re extending that with a snapshot feed. This should assist people in finding new and exciting content, and seeing what’s going on across public domains.
Just The Basics:

I. There is now a snapshot button in the toolbar: It works in HMD, and removes all HUD UI elements from the fixed aspect-ratio picture. If you are logged in to a shareable place, you also get an option to share the snapshot to a public feed. (Try doing View->Mirror and taking a selfie!)

II. The “Go To” address bar now offers a scrollable set of suggestions that can be places or snapshots: The two buttons to the right of the address bar switch between the two sets, and typing filters them. Clicking on a place takes you to that named place, but clicking on a snapshot opens another window with more info. You can then visit the place that snapshot was taken by clicking on the picture, explore the other snapshots taken by that person or in that place, or share the picture to Facebook if you choose. If your friends follow your share to the picture on the Web, they can click on the picture to jump to the same place – if they have Interface installed.

(None of this has anything to with our old Alpha Forums picture feed, which isn’t public or scalable, nor are there changes to the old control-s behavior.)
Where We’re Headed:

There’s a lot more we can do with this, but we wanted to release what we have now and find out what’s important to you.

1. We’re also thinking about other activity and media you might like to share and see in the feed, such as joining a group or downloading from marketplace.
2. How might we use the “wisdom of crowds” to score and order the suggestions, based on real activity that people find useful?
3. The community is quite small right now, and often your real world or social media friends do not have HMDs yet. So for now there there’s just one shared public feed of snapshots. As we grow, we’ll be looking at scaling our infrastructure, and with it, more personalized sharing options.

As we move forward:

• We don’t want to require a login to use High Fidelity or to enjoy the suggestions made by the feed. We do require a login to share, and we’d like to offer personalized feeds in the future based on your (optional) login.
• We don’t want to require connecting your High Fidelity account to any social media, but we do want to allow you to do so.
• We don’t want to share anything without you telling us that it is ok to do so.