According to a comment from @ned, on this post, by @schattenjaeger, the long awaited Steemit roadmap for 2017 will be out in about 10 days.
To be honest, I like the fact that decision makers in charge of Steemit are not rushing it. We're in a very volatile market and opportunities may appear at any moment.
Take that Medium stuff, for instance. If you don't know what I'm talking about, recently Medium announced they'll scale down their operations, by letting go of 50 people, because they business model - advertising - seems to be inefficient. After his public announcement, the founder of Medium was pretty much hammered with suggestions on he should follow the Steemit way, somehow, by integrating the technology, by merging, etc. Nobody knows if this will happen, or if there are any official talks about that, but my point is these situations can appear at any moment and in order to make the best out of them, one must be flexible and adjust fast.
Now, back to the roadmap.
Since we know it's gonna be out in 10 days, let's speculate a bit. It's Friday evening, it's been a long week and we can all afford a little bit of daydreaming (or eveningdreaming, to be politically correct).
Here are 3 things that would be very neat to see - at least for me - in the upcoming roadmap:
1. Integrated Marketplace
It may happen in many ways: by acquiring PeerHub, by integrating some open source marketplace code with Steemit codebase or by building it from scratch. Having a marketplace will work wonders for users retention here. Steemit is in the unique position of offering people money first, and only then something to buy with them. Most businesses work the other way around.
Joke aside, I can clearly see a huge benefit by having a marketplace built into the core Steemit codebase.
2. Direct Advertising
By direct advertising I'm thinking of a way to let writers "co-brand" with certain advertisers, which will then have a visual on their page. It will be a transparent way of promoting brands or products and I think everybody will have something to win. I can even think of a way to let people know that some posts are already paid, by having an extra option for rewards (besides declining payout, 50/50 and 100% SP). It can be something like: "post pre-paid with 100 Steem by advertiser name".
Advertisers can also be contributors to the reward pool, in the same transparent way. Instead of having roughly $7000 per day as reward pool, as we have right now, they could contribute, let's say, an extra $3000/day and choose which tags / authors will they allow their pool to be shared with.
Something like that.
3. Oficial Curation Guilds
Given the link between SP and curation rewards, I think the platform needs a built in mechanism for creating and managing curation guilds. As the platform grows and people will have less and less time to get involved directly, it only makes sense to automate a part of their activities, but in a sensible, manageable and transparent way.
Again, there are many ways in which curation guilds can be implemented and we already saw at least 2 projects gaining visibility in this area (Streemian.com and SteemVoter.com). That means there is already a demand from the market for such a service.
Ok, now it's your turn. Name at least one thing that you would like to see in the upcoming roadmap.
Let the games of speculation begin!
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses