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Concept: Message Center — Description
During our technology summit in Belgium, $pachunka and I split off to take a first stab at the interface for the new message center.

It was really easy to nail it right the first time. Especially with my hyperactive user account that seems to attract about six trillion topics of conversation and tends to get responses on almost anything I write; plus the fact that I've been so pissed off at the current message center I've had a hard time responding... and thus it was full of thousands of messages of all types. We came at this from the perspective of: MAKE THIS STOP BEING HELL.

First conclusion was that the deviantART Message Center is RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE. The second conclusion was that it should mimic an email client as much as possible. And the third was that the key to this project was in building in huge flexibility.

FLEXIBILITY in this context means:

A) Back End Flexibility - A topic that $mccann , $dionyziz and $Morris88 would and could go in to great detail about. But for me ultimately this means; allow real detailed access to the database from as many angles as possible without creating bottlenecks. Also known as: a clusterf*ck if ya don't scale it right the first time.

B) Front End Flexibility - Which really means, provide a core UI that allows for many types of views to be built on top of it. The real flash of this project and what you're going to love most about it is how many different views in to every type of message you will have at launch and even more over time.

Functionality that will come with v1 of the new message center (not the initial BETA launch) will be a variety of widgets that give you insight in to various aspects of your deviantART experience and .... a feed reader, so that the community can bring in art related feeds from all over the web and swarm socially around what the best ones are.

Of course, this is just a CONCEPT drawing. Final message center will look quite a bit different.