Cool New Features That Shouldn't Fly Under The Radar

There's two brand new features to two apps that I want to spotlight to do my part in spreading awareness. So first and most exciting of the two, @steempeak has added a post search feature. I think they've had a search that could search post topics and usernames forever, but typically on a content sharing(primarily) platform like Steem, you want to be able to search...THE CONTENT.

You can check it out here

https://steempeak.com/search

After playing around with it I think it works quite nicely. The last post that I resteemed, I found via this search, so I think that this could be invaluable as an aid for curation. As I mentioned just recently in my last post. I don't believe the idea that there isn't any good content on Steem, I believe that you just can't find the content that's relevant to you. A powerful search feature could be a U-turn for Steem.

A couple of observations.

• It pulls up posts from all different time periods, so posts from yesterday are mingled with posts from over a year ago. I think this is great because it's geared toward you finding some relevant content over anything else.

• It seems it's looking through your body text. This would be a good note to self to use every keyword you think someone might search for in your post in some way to increase your likelihood of showing up.

• It seems like it might prioritize higher payout posts. I think this is a good idea too because that can act as a filter. I know there's plenty of good content that doesn't have high rewards, but there's also a million times more spam that could potentially have used one or more of the keywords you're using to try to find something interesting.

Thoughts moving forward

• I want MORE! So maybe a way to get additional search results beyond the first batch.

• A sprinkle of machine learning could go a long way with this. So for instance, to get the results I got for my thumbnail image, I searched #octane and #3d. I figured there's not many people here who use those two words together and the results were exactly what I expected, plus a few surprises. Anyway, Octane is the render engine I use and I mention 3d in my posts where I'm doing 3d work typically. I think what would be sick is if the search could take those keywords, figure out that those two together are probably referring to octane render the render engine, and maybe search for other render engines. I'm sure that's complicated, but it would be insanely powerful.

So be sure to play with the search feature, I think it could become really useful to the community.

One gripe, and it may be because it's still in beta, but currently it's pretty hidden. They have a search bar at the top of the interface by default, and you get to the search page by clicking the magnifying glass.

So nobody is going to click that. There is a search bar right there, they're just going to type what they're searching for in that bar, so maybe having a seperate text link that says "Advanced Search" or something along those lines would be better.

Up next

https://steemworld.org/proposals

SteemWorld has a new proposals page that to me is the best one yet. Out of the Steempeak one and the Steemit one. He's using universally understood visual language (green,yellow,red) to communicate the status of the proposals and if you click on the "Votes(SP)" next to a proposal you can see who all has voted for a proposal as well as what percentage of the total SP their vote represents.

The additional super important information on this page is the effect of witness proxies. If you have assigned another user as your witness proxy then your vote won't contribute anything to the proposal. So you can see here that @steemchiller's proposal for continued work on SteemWorld has 1.547 Million SP on his proposal that is having no effect. That amount would put him OVER the return proposal and green light his proposal. So I'm not really into @'ing people like crazy in my posts but I hope these users know that their votes are having no effect, because I love SteemWorld and want this proposal to go through.

This is also a good time to remind people that I have a witness proxy @theusersparty that is dedicated to supporting witnesses and now proposals that will improve the user experience of the Steem blockchain. The original idea behind it was to give some weight to smaller accounts. I feel like most of the smaller accounts are concerned primarily with the user experience here. They're not necessarily "investors" they just want this to be useful, easier, more friendly, better designed, more intuitive, etc.

So regardless of SP level, if you share the ideals put forward in the following post. Feel free to follow my proxy and I'll keep my ear to the street for the people and projects that will best support those views.

https://steempeak.com/theusersparty/@theusersparty/introducing-theusersparty

P.S. some witness votes have been shuffled since I made this original post, but it's about 85% the same.

As a side note, Steemit also added the same Beneficiaries feature that @eonwarped added to the tribes a while back.

So I've written about this before, but I think beneficiaries is an extremely powerful and valuable feature, and the current implementation I think needs some tweaks across all frontends that have a UX flow for it. It's powerful, but not obvious at all. There needs to be more explanation on what it is within the feature, and I think it shouldn't be hidden behind an additional click.

Also I think it should be visible in the feed when a post has beneficiaries, ie, you don't have to click on anything or hover over anything to see it, it's visible by default. I think this would incentivise people to use it more. And anyone browsing would immediately be able to see if someone has made someone a beneficiary on their post or not at a glace. While I'm rambling, here's a few scenarios.

• You're an OG Steemian with years worth of autovotes on your account. You know it's hard in the beginning. You onboard a new user. Instead of just resteeming their "introduce yourself" post. You make a post introducing them, and make them a 100% beneficiary to give them a little initial boost. People will see that you've made that person a 100% beneficiary and will maybe be a little more generous to give them a warm welcome.

• There is a cause that's worth supporting. To support this cause you make them a beneficiary on your post, you tell others about the cause. At a glance of your feed, you can see that others are also supporting this cause and the effect snowballs. People that knew nothing about the cause see tons of people with it as a beneficiary and are influenced by it.

That's just a couple of examples, but I could go on like that for a while. Anyway, play with the new toys. Shoutouts to the devs for keeping up the good work. See you all in the next post.