Marketplace Activity Feed

If you're a user of Facebook, LinkedIn, or practically any other social network, you're familiar with the concept of an activity feed - a "stream" of activity to let you know what's going on amongst your network of friends.

Over the weekend we introduced this same concept to Inkling marketplaces. Now featured prominently on the homepage of every marketplace is the marketplace activity feed. Currently in the feed we include trades, comments, and the introduction of new users in the marketplace. This can be configured to show you everything going on, or only events directly related to you, i.e. events occurring in markets you've traded in or created.



Notice the cute monsters? They're generated from the Gravatar service. Gravatars are a universal thumbnail/profile image service. Upload thumbnails of yourself to Gravatar and any site supporting Gravatars will automatically show yours so you don't have to upload profile images to each site that has profiles. If you don't have a Gravatar, you get a monster representation of yourself. (Any marketplace administrators who don't like this can request to have Gravatars shut off.)

We think the activity feed continues to make more headway in our never ending quest to make an Inkling marketplace an interesting and fun place to keep coming back to. In the coming weeks we'll be adding more events to the marketplace activity feed to make it even more interesting to track: new friend relationships, profile updates, market expirations, etc.

If you have other ideas for what we should include or how we can make the activity feed even more powerful, let us know.