We've improved the social sharing previews of streams and cards on Facebook, Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

ThoughtStreams Streams Tutorial

ThoughtStreams Quick Start Tutorial

ThoughtStreams Explainer Video

We've changed repost slightly to publish the thought on repost. It was cumbersome (and confusing) to have to explicitly publish after reposting and there just wasn't really any justification for supporting a repost that wasn't immediately published.

Note that if the stream you are reposting to is unpublished, the new thought will continue to not be visible to others.

Notifications

We've now built the foundation of a notification system. As with activities, it's initially limited to likes and favorites but we'll be adding more notification types soon, all individually configurable.

We'll also soon support email notifications, but for now notifications are onsite.

We've changed the right nav bar, adding a bell icon to indicate whether there are notifications. You'll notice we've also changed the Settings and Log out links to be icons too.

When you have notifications, the bell will turn red and you can click it to see the notifications. You can also clear notifications form here.

Note that if you are a member of a team, the notifications dropdown spans both the public site and teams.

Each notification type can be toggled under Notifications on the Settings page.

Activity Stream

We've replaced the per-user Firehose with a new tab called Activity which interleaves content written by that user with activities done by that user and done to their content.

At the moment, the activity types are limited to likes and favorites but we'll be expanding to include other actions shortly.

Viewing what from a particular user has been liked or favorited

There are now two new tabs on a user's page.

Favorited streams shows those streams by that user that have been favorited by others.

Liked thoughts shows those thoughts by that user that have been liked by others.

We've launched three new features today that:

• better show what from a particular user has been liked or favorited
• provide a stream of activities done by a user and done to their content
• lay the foundation for a notification system (starting with on-site notification of new likes and favorites)

Small improvement to unread counts: counts now only include content created since you signed up.

Good Examples of Streams

I just got asked for a good example of a thoughtstream. If you'll excuse me choosing my own here are some examples of varying usages.

• Oculus Rift is an example of a product review written over time
• TIL is an example of more tweet-like collection of unconnected thoughts under a broad category of "Today I Learned"
• Journeyman of Some is some ongoing thoughts on a topic I come back to all the time
• Julython is almost like a "tweet storm" of tips on a topic
• Prokofiev's D minor Toccata is a log of my (temporarily abandoned) piano practice
• Note Quantization is more of a research notebook as I explore some ideas

Besides this, how can we better convey the types of things people can use ThoughtStreams for?

This stream contains video and text tutorials, examples, and at times, reposts from other streams that may offer useful information to users on how to use ThoughtStreams.

Welcome to ThoughtStreams Documentation

Here you'll find the following streams:

• ThoughtStreams Changelog - This stream contains information on changes we've made to ThoughtStreams.

• ThoughtStreams Markdown - An explanation of the markdown language that's available for use in your cards.

• ThoughtStreams Tutorials - A stream that contains video and text tutorials that we've produced to help guide you through using ThoughtStreams.

What if I have feedback or find a bug?

If you have feedback on ThoughtStreams, or find a bug, please use the "Feedback and Support" link which can be found on each page.

We've tweaked the key bindings.

Firstly, we've changed the "Publish card currently being created" binding to ctrl + enter rather than the old shift + enter. The previous binding was causing accidental publishing of cards for some people when starting a new paragraph.

Secondly, we've fixed a problem where the regular binding for copy (ctrl-C or cmd-C) wasn't working.

To make it (much) easier to see what content is new on ThoughtStreams, we now show unread counts.

If you have any unread cards, the chevron in the top left will turn red. If you click on the chevron to expand the team switcher, you can see the unread counts for the public site and each team you are part of:

From there you can also Mark All Read.

On the latest updated page, each stream is annotated with an unread count:

And if you click through to that stream, the start of the new cards is clearly indicated:

This feature is somewhat experimental and still doesn't indicate new general thoughts. But let us know what you think!

We've extended our keyboard bindings to allow you to do more without leaving the keyboard.

• ? This help dialog
• c Compose a new Thought in current stream
• g Compose a new General Thought
• j or ← View previous card in stream
• k or → View next card in stream
• p View card details in presentation mode
• s Go to stream detail from card detail
• shift + enter Publish card currently being created
• alt + enter Save card in draft status that is currently being created.
• esc Close an open modal

We've now made it much easier to explore the content of a particular user by providing per-user tabs for:

• Updated Streams
• New Streams
• General Thoughts
• Firehose (the default)

Just click on a username to get the new tabbed view of that user's content.

Einstein said \(E = mc^2\) but he also said

Einstein said \(E = mc^2\) but he also said

$$R_{\mu \nu} - {1 \over 2}g_{\mu \nu}\,R + g_{\mu \nu} \Lambda = {8 \pi G \over c^4} T_{\mu \nu}$$

Math

Tex/LaTeX mathematics is supported via MathJax. Inline math should use \(...\) and display math should use either $$...$$ or \[...\].

ThoughtStreams now supports rendering mathematics using MathJax.

You can use TeX/LaTeX mathematics syntax, surrounded by \(...\) for inline math and either $$...$$ or \[...\] for display math.

ThoughtStreams now supports embedding gists from GitHub.

Just paste the URL of your gist and ThoughtStreams will expand it. We support multiple file gists and all the different content types that gists support.

If you just want the naked link to appear rather than the expanded gist, mark up the URL in <...> (as with any oembed content that would otherwise be embedded).

We've now added a bookmarklet to post links to your general thoughts.

Go to Your Thoughts and on the left-hand side there's a bookmarklet you can drag to your bookmark bar.

Then from any site, you can click on the bookmarklet and you'll be taken to Your Thoughts with the URL you were at pre-populating the text area.

ThoughtStreams now supports embedding content from other sites just by pasting in a URL.

For example, paste in a YouTube URL and the video will be embedded in your card; paste the URL of a tweet and the tweet will be embedded in your card.

Many different services are supported, including YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Flickr, and tens of others.

Note that we only embed based on naked URLs. If you markup the URL with Markdown's <URL> or [text](URL) it will just link and not embed the content.

Also, we have not applied this change retroactively, so if you want to take advantage of it on existing cards, just edit and save them.

Search now returns Cards as well as People and Streams in its results. This includes cards in General Thoughts.

It's clear that the majority of users, rather than using Markdown's <...> syntax, expect naked URLs to be turned in to links.

We now support this in our rendering of cards.

ThoughtStreams now supports authentication via Twitter.

New users can sign up with Twitter. Existing users can go to Settings > Connections to connect up their Twitter account.

After this, you can log in with Twitter and not need a ThoughtStreams-specific password.

Note that the Twitter connection is read-only and ThoughtStreams will not tweet on your behalf.

Editing a card no longer counts as an update to the stream it's in so will not cause the stream to appear on the latest Updated Streams.

Fixed a bug where a user's last posted included reposts of their cards by others.

Back in May we said:

To prevent double submissions, we now disable the Save as Draft and Publish buttons during posting.

This was not actually working as advertised. After noticing a few recent double posts from people, we now think we've nailed the problem.

You can feel free to delete one of the duplicate posts if you've experienced this problem prior to the latest fix.