After what seems like a few months of radio silence and plummeting Steem prices, Steemit Inc has come alive. Recently we've seen a hardfork to 0.15.0 paving the way for future acceleration of development, a massive economic proposal to address the price issues by shortening power down times and ending hyper inflation, new notification alerts, profile avatars, a test version of an upcoming wysiwyg editor and they've frozen the failed promotion tab.
All this was done before their big Steemfest event this week in Amsterdam. I'm guessing if they were willing to let all these great features and plans out of the bag prior to Steemfest they must have something really big up their sleeves to unveil at Steemfest.
My Predictions for Steemfest Announcements
Advertising
This is the big feature everyone knows has to come. Steem's future and value will depend on being able to profit on it's community content and traffic and the most sensible way to monetize the attention economy is with advertising. If you didn't know already they have now frozen the promoted tab and taken away the option to promote posts. The promotion tab was a nice experiment but it's days were always numbered. I mean who visits the promoted tab? Anyone?
I expect to see the unveiling of a plan for useful advertising in much more prominent places. From listening to @ned's various YouTube chats I'm guessing this will be based on Steem, Steem Power or SBD. I'm not expecting them to include traditional adsense banners like some have suggested.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we see some form of ad monetizing announced. To me it is the last piece in the puzzle for the Steem economy to make sense.
Private Messaging
To really put the nail in Facebook's coffin Steem is going to need to some sort of private messaging feature. Some of it may be reinventing the wheel but there is a definite need for secure private messaging on this social network.
While I personally don't expect this feature to be live by the end of this calendar year I am hoping they do unveil plans and a road map for its integration.
What do you think?
Well Steemians what do you think they will unveil at Steemfest? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.
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Private messaging is mostly implemented on Steem but not widely tested, yet! In fact eSteem will have that feature soon after few tests and Steemfest :)
is the messaging system decentralised?
It is implemented/provided by blockchain so it is decentralized. As far as I know, it is just like an email. So multiple type of usage is possible e.g. Private Messaging and SteemMail, etc.
So it must be something like bitmessage. Cool. I also see the json metadata field your app uses is now used by steemit.com.
Yes, if you were making avatar and cover images through eSteem, you would get them automatically when steemit.com implement them. ;)
Yay! Private messaging is what i've been waiting for!
I hadn't even thought that there would be any announcements like that at steemfest but of course it makes perfect sense. I suspect you are right!
I am curious about the advertisement part. I agree they may be necessary, but isn't it so nice to be able to quietly browse Steemit without being bothered?
I'll be interested to see what control we have over messaging. We'll need to be able to block spam. I don't know how social Steemit wants to be. Will we have 'special friends' who get more access to us? I'm excited to see new developments
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