CubeTree's Feed System

Now that launch is behind us, I'm going to write a series of longer posts about our vision and our product. I'll start off with CubeTree's feed system, because it's one of CubeTree's great product strengths.

What's a feed? Why is it so important?

In CubeTree, your feed is where you see the activities of people and things you're interested in. It's just the opposite of your inbox, because you can control what you see. You tell the system what you're interested in and only the information you want enters your feed.

5 Cool Things about CubeTree's Feed

#1 CubeTree has 30+ Built-in Feed Items

CubeTree's built-in collaboration tools are designed around the idea that generating the right feed items is critical. For example, if you create or update a wiki page, you can choose whether to generate a feed item. Here are 30+ feed items in CubeTree and we'll keep adding more:

• Status updates
• Profile - write on people's walls, change profile picture, changed your shirt color, receive a kudo, new documents, follow users, follow groups, new goals, goal changes, goal posts, new links, new photos, photo tags, new profile polls, new profile poll votes, new tracked items, new trips, new profile wiki pages, profile wiki edits
• Groups - group wall writes, group doc posts, group links, group photo posts, group poll creates, group poll votes, group wiki adds, group wiki edits
• Company - invites, employee of the month nominations, employee of the month wins, quiz answers, quiz questions
• Comments

#2 CubeTree's Feed has 14 Integrations to External Systems

We believe that people will not only want to see activities within CubeTree, they will also want to see activities in external web systems that they use everyday.

• 7 consumer product integrations: Unlike many vendors who just support integrations to consumer services via generic RSS or proprietary APIs, we support built-in integrations to consumer systems. We support integrations to 7 consumer products: Google Reader, Yahoo Delicious, Twitter, TripIt, Google Talk, Google Calendar and RSS. We've found that CubeTree's Twitter and Google Reader integrations are the most popular.
• 7 enterprise integrations: CubeTree's enterprise integrations are: SalesForce.com, WebEx, Adobe Connect, GoogleDocs, 37 Signals' Basecamp, HRIS systems and the hosted version of Atlassian's Confluence (wiki).

#3 CubeTree's Feed Gives You Total Control

Feeds are all about control and so great feed architectures give the users as much control as possible without making the system so complicated that only power users understand how to use the system. CubeTree gives you two different mechanisms to control your feed:

• Following - To add things to your feed you follow them. CubeTree allows you to follow 4 types of objects: people, wiki pages, goals and groups. When you follow a person, you'll see all the activities that person shares via CubeTree. When you follow a wiki page you'll see all updates to that page regardless of who updates the page.
• Filtering - Filtering gives you even finer-grained control over what you see when you follow people. Specifically, we have added the ability to filter out the 6 feed items that users have complained the most about. If you choose to filter Twitter messages, you'll see all the activity from people you're following except their Tweets.

#4 CubeTree lets you aggregate feed items

There are cases where a user can get a lot of similar feed items in a row. So we're starting to experiment with combining similar feed items together on the user's "My Feed". If the user wants more detail, they can click through and see more detail.

#5 CubeTree's feed supports conversations

Once your system has all these users able to see what their co-workers are doing, you want to give people the ability to have group discussions about what each other is doing. Great feed items get other users to join in and comment.

We've found that several features are necessary to have a system that encourages dialog:

• Ability to comment on any feed item (including voting in polls)
• Email notifications of comments on your threads
• Ability to address comments to particular users (in case they aren't following that thread)
  
• Make it easy for people in the organization to find the most discussed topics

We believe that these capabilities are what gives CubeTree the best enterprise feed system in the market today. While we're proud of what we've done to date, there is a long ways to go. Over the next several months, we'll be adding some new capabilities to our feed system. As always, if you have suggestions for how to improve CubeTree, click on the feedback button on the right of the user interface when you're logged in.