the new FIRST Objective

[rogerlsmith]

Over the past few years, FIRST Objective has tried to be a website to bridge the gap between the FIRST community and the outside world. We've had moderate success using our forums and video galleries.

FIRST Objective has recently released an entirely new version of their website and would like you to try it out for free! We offer the FIRST community the ability to post team videos to help FIRST gain more exposure. We also offer a Q & A environment, in hopes of helping existing teams and to also allow veteran teams to promote themselves.

There are many other features and more to come soon. Try it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Looks like Facebook for FIRST... :|

[rogerlsmith]

Thank you,

and don't you think FIRST could use some "facebook like" exposure?

Originally Posted by rogerlsmith

Thank you,

and don't you think FIRST could use some "facebook like" exposure?

Eh...To a point. A Facebook-like FIRST website is like a swerve drive. I love the idea, but you have to get it perfect for it to work, and any wrong moves and it fails. I see this as having great opportunity if implemented correctly. How? I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this goes. It'll either get really popular, really fast, or fall down hard.

Since I see this as an investment with the ability to work solely because of the FIRST community, I support you 100%! I've got a feeling this can be a huge success, but be careful. Triple think everything, and strongly look into user feedback. This has potential, so much potential.

Good luck!

[rogerlsmith]

thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I've been working on this for about 4 years now (in various forms). One of these times I'm going to get it right.

Originally Posted by rogerlsmith

thanks for the advice, I appreciate it. I've been working on this for about 4 years now (in various forms). One of these times I'm going to get it right.

Well, luckily you have the CD community behind you. We're kinda helpful at times.

[Kevin Selavko]

How do you upload a profile picture?

[akoscielski3]

Just registered
One thing i think would be better, is instead of having to be a friend with someone, you can just have it so everyone can see everybody's stuff. Like if the "wall" showed all activity through the whole site, instead of only showing a friends stuff. reason is that alot of people dont know somebody in FIRST until they meet some how (like using this site). If you could see all of the activity then you can easily get to know more people in FIRST, and learn about wat other people are doing in FIRST. Sorry if im bad at explaining. To summarize you may want to take out the "friends" thing and have a huge community of people.

Good job though, looks like a great way to show what kind of stuff your team may be up to

[Kims Robot]

Prior to logging in, its not exactly clear what the objective of the FIRST objective is... it sort of looks like a bland twitter feed or facebook newsfeed. Not to be harsh, but the point needs to be understood before the user spends the time and energy creating a login.

If this site doesn't really find its own niche (think TBA), its going to be hard for people to want to duplicate effort to put things on an unknown site. Right now FIRSTers can already tie together for FIRST and Facebook, and with both of those providing much much larger audiences, they are much more likely to gather attention for their teams by creating Facebook events, or sharing FIRST videos or clips on their feeds there. Those are both very good social interaction sites. CD is more of a technical "for FIRSTers" type of site, not as much intended for the outside world, but you can share documents, photos and interact on forums. Videos are easily posted on youtube and linked via any of these sites, so its hard to see a reason to post them elsewhere.

Ultimately its always worth playing around with ideas, and for every great idea there are hundreds or thousands of not as great ideas, so keep playing and improving... determine what the actual point of the site would be and what niche market it fills and very clearly communicate that and you may have yourself something popular.

Good luck!

[rogerlsmith]

Just click on your avatar in the upper left corner and select "edit avatar". you can then upload your own image.

[Kevin Selavko]

Thanks, the site looks like a good idea, but not to atract people to first who have no idea about it.

Joined. It's nice, but I can't access my profile settings nor add a profile picture. I understand server costs, however it randomly slows down sometimes, and if you expect this to have high traffic, you better be prepared to upgrade to more RAM, CPU, etc. I agree with everything Kims Robot said. You need to make it clear what your goal/purpose is the moment we type in FIRST objective.

Also some things for improvement:

-Love the blue/gray, however it makes things seem darker/small. A lighter color such as white works great for stuff like this, or at least for the feed.

-Like posted above, people in FIRST don't really know other people in FIRST. I mean, we're all friends here on CD, but if we were to meet IRL, nobody would know/recognize anyone. Even if we did, we're not actually "friends" yet. For example, if I were to go to Facebook and friend akoscielski3, assuming he has one, he wouldn't know who I was even if I told him I was SuperNerd256, and it could get awkward.

-Organize organize organize. I like how everything is now, however you could add more things with more things to make things clearer.


So far, great job, and let's see how this goes!

[rogerlsmith]

so I've been working on various versions of this site for close to 4 years now.

I've been able to attract non-FIRSTers to the site, but have not had a lot of teams helping support it. I'm hoping this will be the one.

PLEASE send me feeback! thanks!

I sign in using my Google account, and it says when I click on where the profile pic would be to access my profile, it says "Profile not found". I'm logged in, and everything.

[Anupam Goli]

It looks great and easy to use. I'm sure if more members are to join, it could grow and really help a lot of us!