In the first two parts of this series, we explored carrot campaigns and the simplified process for starting campaigns. In this final part of our preview, I’ll highlight a few of the little touches we’ve added to make The Point more fun and easier to use, as well what’s on the horizon.

Clean, functional design

We took this opportunity to refresh The Point’s look & feel. The design is simpler and more functional, giving user content the center stage.

Campaigns are less noisy, with a stronger focus on the information a visitor needs to decide if they want to join. Campaign descriptions, which would sometimes run on for pages, now have a hard limit of a thousand characters. The idea is to force the creator to make “the pitch” for joining the campaign inside a space that people will actually read, and then add the details in the discussion, where it can initiate conversation.

Better Discussion

Previously, campaigns had a single threaded comment stream. That got messy, preventing users from holding focused conversations. Now, each campaign has its own discussion forum, with as many separate topic threads as needed.

Further, the new user profile makes it easy to track the discussions in which you participate, so you’ll never miss a reply to one of your posts.

Faster

The anonymity features on The Point added some coding complexity that at times made things a bit sluggish. Our engineers have reworked our anonymity engine, and The Point is now zippy as can be.

Coming Soon

In the next few weeks, we’ll release a campaign widget that will you to embed a campaign in your website, blog, or social networking profile. Your guests will be able to join the campaign without ever visiting thepoint.com. We’re extremely excited about this feature; it’s a key part of our mission to offer The Point as a tool for existing communities to use.

Shortly after that, you’ll be able to search campaigns by location, and we’ll add a community area for site-wide discussion.

After that, you ask? Well, we’ve got a lot of exciting ideas, but we’re interested in what you want Let us know what you’s like to see on The Point in the comments.

And, by the way, if you’re interested in seeing the “sneak peak“ in action, it’s up now.

-Filed in The Point