Today the Steemit Team released their Roadmap for 2017 which contains a wide range of information regarding their plans for the next year. Whether you're a developer, investor, or content creator, you should definitely check it out here.

For a great TL;DR summary of the Roadmap, check out this post by @thecryptofiend

It's About Customization

While I think there's a lot in the Roadmap to be excited about, the feature I'm looking forward to the most is "Communities" because it will increase the user's ability to customize their steemit.com experience by an order of magnitude. When steemit.com originally launched a "one size fits all" approach made all the sense in the world. Showing everyone the most rewarded posts was an efficient way of showing articles that the most users would be most likely to find most valuable. There are, however, obvious flaws with one-size-fits-all approaches, mainly that they aren't an especially good fit for any particular user.

A Simple But Dramatic Change

Changing the "home" tab to a stream of posts created by only the people you follow added a simple way of further filtering the content you were exposed to by an order of magnitude. Instead of seeing posts from potentially anyone on the platform you could now limit the posts you saw to the small fraction of users you chose to follow. It may sound like I'm over-using the term "order of magnitude" but it's technically true and I think this highlights the wisdom behind the choices being made. I personally believe that when one is trying to improve anything, whether it's a product or skill, one should always at least attempt to implement changes that have a dramatic impact. Striving for incremental improvements guarantees that only incremental progress will be made. At the same time you want the changes to be as simple as possible.

News, Photography, Travel, Food

The Communities feature promises to take this customization to the next level by enabling you to choose which fraction of the population you are exposed to depending on your mood. Imagine a "community" for News, Photography, Travel, Food, etc. Not only will this make it easier to find the content you're most interested in, but it could prove extremely useful when on-boarding new users. For example, what if after a new user has successfully registered they were given the option to sign up to some of the most popular communities? This would enable Steemit to immediately present these users with content that is far more tailored to their interests, thereby delivering a more engaging experience that helps ensure their long term use of the platform.

Valuable For Non-Users

It even seems like there might be potential value to communities beyond the borders of steemit.com. If we imagine a public "Tech" community that features a frequently updated stream of high quality tech-related posts, then the community itself could very well compete with publications like Engadget or Wired while at the same time serving as a subtle invitation to join steemit.

Public v. Private

The ability to create both public and private groups adds another simple, intuitive, and obviously valuable tool for further customizing our steemit.com experience. This highlights what I find to be an interesting paradox within Steemit. One of my favorite things about the platform is that it enables me to bond with people from all over the world based purely on the content of their minds and without interference from meaningless physical markers like gender, skin tone, or attractiveness. You really get to know people before you even learn (if you ever learn) about their "identity." I think that is powerful and profound, and this is enabled by the public-but-anonymous nature of the platform. At the same time, however, once you do meet these people it's only natural to want to interact with them privately. Private communities represent the opportunity to take the relationships we form on Steemit to the next level; allowing us to communicate with our anonymous friends without the prying eyes of the public.

Conflict Resolution

I also think this could help resolve or mitigate some of the conflicts that arise on the platform. For example, a common source of conflict is SteemSports. Some people don't like that it clogs up the trending page, but it is my belief that once we have communities few people will use the trending page but instead look to what is trending in their communities. At the same time, the decreased prominence of the trending page will likely change the reward dynamics making it less beneficial to upvote content simply because one anticipates it will be prominently featured there. Personally, I think SteemSports is an important part of Steemit's future and I think the communities feature will enable it to blossom in a healthy and sustainable way.

Conclusion

At Steemfest there was one consistent theme among the people there: community. Steemfest itself helped cement this idea for many of us by physically bringing us together. Once there we felt an immediate kinship despite the fact that few of us were even capable of recognizing one another. It seemed obvious to me that for the majority of people who attended (if not everyone) a "light bulb" went off where we realized that we were part of something bigger than even we had realized. We were part of a community and for whatever reason (I assume it's because we evolved to be social creatures) that is an extremely energizing and positive feeling. It is my belief that the upcoming community feature will help deliver that feeling to the Steemians who were not able to attend Steemfest and to remind those of us who did what makes this platform so special.

What's your favorite feature from the 2017 Roadmap?

@thecryptofiend’s TL;DR table

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Steemit 2017 Roadmap Table

Feature	Availability
AWS/EC2 Migration	Q1 2017
Lower Latency to Production	Q2 2017
UX upgrades	2017 and beyond
Drag and Drop Image Hosting	Q2 2017
Blockchain Data Microservices	Q1 2017
Comment Moderation by Authors	Q2 2017
Communities	Q3 2017
Official IOS/Android Mobile Apps	Q4 2017
Steem Login "Signing Service" for 3rd Party Applications	Q3 2017
Steemit.com rebrand	Q3 2017
Tutorials and Walkthrough	Q4 2017
Gamefication (Achievements & Insignia)	Q3 2017
New User Prompts/ Tasks for retention	Q4 2017
User Status Bar	Q3 2017
User Understanding Features	Q3 2017
Design Language Overhaul/UX	Q4 2017
Steem.io transformation to Steem Platform Dashboard	Q2 2017
Developer.steem.io (developer documentation)	Q2 2017
Officially Supported Client Libraries	Q2 2017
Reducing Blockchain Account Creation Cost	Q3 2017
Post Reward Sharing (Steem Blockchain)	Q2 2017
Multi Chain Parallelism (Steem Blockchain) - FABRIC architecture	Q4 2017
Decentralised Global Talent Pool, Asynch Comms etc	Ongoing/Multi Year
Decentralising the @steemit Account Stake	Ongoing/Multi Year

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