It’s been just over two years since SlideShare launched and we’ve spent all that time adding new features, fixing problems and most importantly, growing a large, loyal community!

Today we are proud to show you something we’ve been working on for the past few months. Our brand new home page! Check it out in the screenshot below or visit the site now!

If you’re still here with us, here’s what’s new:

• A more professional, clean, clutter-free design.
• The menu at the top is larger and presents logical options for you to browse through content.
• Prominent search box at the top and in the footer of the page making it easier for you to find what you want.
• Categories have been a part of SlideShare for a while now but we’re bringing them front and center to aid you to get to the content you want as fast as possible.
• We have a larger logo with our new tagline “Present Yourself.”
  
• Speaking of the logo, we’ve dropped the “beta!”
• Lots of little changes and tweaks, not to mention a lot of work still going on in the backend to improve you SlideShare experience!

As always, we look forward to your feedback! Let us know what to think, good and bad, so that we can continue to improve the site!

Our dev team has released an interesting feature to add to your Slideshare experience. The slideshare player now has an ‘autoplay’ button that plays the presentation for you (without having to click through individual slides).

See the button below in the screenshot, which will be visible on all presentations on SlideShare. We await your feedback- let us know what you think of this! Did you face any problems while using this?

Note: This is currently only on the SlideShare player on the site.. we’re adding this to the embed player in a few days… stay tuned.

We are excited to launch this amazing widget called SlideShare Presentation Pack. This widget will let you display a collection of presentations on your blog (from your tags, groups or events). Very useful for consultants (showcase your expertise), speakers (all your talks in one), conference organizers (a whole conference session/track in one)! Just customize and grab the code.

The settings allow you to choose from a variety of feeds – Featured, Most Viewed, Most downloaded, by group/event, by a specific tag et al. And there are two layout options- the standard “Landscape” and the “Portrait” for blogs with narrow widths..

To get a pack for yourself, go to the widgets page.

Examples below:

LandScape

| Get your Presentation Pack

Portrait

| Get your Presentation Pack

The icing on the cake: The Presentation Pack is inspired by a prototype that was built by Chris Heilmann (a UK based SlideShare user and a web hacker in his own rights). Thanks a ton, Chris, for sharing this with the community!

We just rolled out a bunch of new features & enhancements.

File Size 100 MB: Now you can upload files upto 100 MB in size. Woot! This is a 100% increase in the allowed size (earlier it was 50MB).

Speaker notes in Presentations : This has been one of our most requested features till date… now speaker notes in the presentation will be captured and displayed in the comments section. You will have to upload the ppt/odp file for this (not pdf). This should help many speakers who have valuable accompanying commentary in the notes section… this now gets shared with the audience as well. Screenshot below:

SlideShow page clean up: The slideshow page has been cleaned up a bit to reduce clutter; some of the GUI elements have been reorganised.

Tell us how you liked these changes.

When you invite someone to join an event or a group on SlideShare, an email goes out to them to confirm their acceptance.

Unfortunately, this simple act almost blew up in our faces thanks to an elementary mistake in interface design.

With the constructive feedback, we’ve now changed the content of the email to also include a link to the group or event too.

We have received a few complaints about bogus/spam voting in the World’s Best Presentation Contest. During the last couple of days our engineers took a detailed look at the server logs ti identify unusual voting patterns. We did find some suspicious voting behavior… after careful analysis, these votes have been removed. This is to uphold the fairness of the contest and to address the concerns of some of our users.

Just as a note, the number of votes removed is small compared to the overall votes cast. Hence its impact on the overall standings is unlikely to be big, though individual entries may have their numbers changed.

Let me take this opportunity to reiterate this:

- The judges for the contest are presentation gurus of global repute; they are also independent of SlideShare. Be rest assured that bogus voting is unlikely to help you get past their judgement.

- Some people have written to us asking for changes in the contest rules… this is not possible while the contest is running. We shall keep your feedback in mind while designing the rules for future contests.

- Given the enthusiasm of the community, we have decided to have contests on SlideShare regularly… not just yearly events. Stay tuned…

- Lastbut not least, SlideShare is currently also running Presentation Tennis, an innovative event in collaborative presentation design… please participate in it. This is the first time an event of this nature is being organised anywhere in the world, so make the best of it. Join the group now to get started.

Several of you have written to us about spam messages that you have received through SlideShare. This can come as a private message, a comment on your slideshow, or as a message on your wall.

We want to let you know that we are looking into some type of solution, so that these spam messages get flagged and never reach you. Please be patient while we work out some type of solution.

In the meantime, we do allow you to flag a message as spam. When you flag a message, we get a notification and the spammer account immediately gets deleted. So please do use the flagging feature. Also, if someone posts a spam message on your slidespace, then you can delete the message.

Thanks for using SlideShare!

We just rolled out a bunch of features and bug fixes…

Subscribe to follow-up comments: You can now subscribe to all followup comments for a particular slideshow. Just tick the “subscribe to followup comments” checkbox when you are posting your comment- all subsequent comments (starting from yours) will be mailed to you. This way you can track the conversation that is happening on a slideshow. And off course, you can unsubscribe from this anytime you wish to. (screeshots below)

No related slideshows in the player: Many of our users have asked for this feature. If you wish to exclude the related slideshows that show up at the end of the embedded player, just use the custom link (below the embed code on the slideshow page). The ajax light-box contains the code for the embed player without the related slideshows at the end. Just copy/paste that code and your concern will be addressed. (screeshots below)

Missing profile image bug fix: The profile image was not showing up for some users for the last couple of weeks; we have received many complaints about this. This annoying (& stubborn) bug has now been fixed. Users with missing profile photos (that uploaded successfully but did not show up on the profile page) will have to reupload the image again, though. Apologies for the trouble!

Jobs at SlideShare: We have updated the jobs/recruitment page. SlideShare is recruiting currently for our San Francisco office. In case this is of interest to you (or to someone whom you might know), please get back to us with your resume.