Why can't I follow a company or product?

tuffcustomer,

Posting from your dashboard is one of the plans we have going forward, but there is one specific issue holding us back at the moment. I'll explain:

Currently, topics exist within the "company space", and your dashboard does not. Your dashboard can, obviously, represent activity spread across 100 companies. We could not maintain the current flow for posting topics if we were to bake in dashboard posting.

That would mean some sort of method to pick which company a topic would post to from your dashboard, and we felt like such a step would clunk up the process if we just threw it together.

I think to achieve this in the most proper manner would require a de-emphasis of the "topic to company" relationship. Before we go down that path, I want to see how to general population uses the app, especially when it comes to multiple-company participation.

My guess is that for the first little bit most people will participate in satisfaction through one company. Obviously this doesn't apply to the early-adopter types who like to explore, but there are several reasons that I believe the normal person will at first constrain themselves to a single company.

Most importantly, the number of companies in the system is small (but growing). The normal man probably can't find 2 companies in the system in which they would be interested in participating.

It mostly just boils down to a "wait and see" attitude that will set the priority of such a feature. It has ramifications on how people perceive and interact with the system

If you're a company representative you should be getting email alerts on new topics. Also, there is an RSS feed for each of companies, products and tags you can always subscribe to (it updates upon topic creation). We're pushing out an rss feed that contains all updates (new topics and replies) within a company space shortly.

Also, you can now follow a topic. Just click the "Follow this topic" link under the original post.

Yes, you need to be set as an official rep. I'll look into it. Also, you'll get emails when a new topic is posted but not necessarily when a new reply is posted to an existing topic unless you've participated in that topic. We're working on more refined notification options, though.

Ok, you're set as an employee but not an official rep which means you won't receive email notifications when new Crusher topics are posted. Eric is set as an Admin so he can access the Role page of the Admin section to change your status as well as any of the other registered Crusher employees.