First we have the communities feature.
A feature that I think is possibly the most important development steem has ever had.
It will literally change everything about the way steem operates.
To understand a little why I say that, here is a quote from 
"Content discovery and the ability for users to organize go hand-in-hand. Without the ability to organize, groups are working against the grain. Without content discovery, curation is more difficult than it needs to be. This leads to automation but the data is still noisy. Hive Communities will allow us to completely reimagine how we use the platform, and give everyone a voice."
People complain about quality content not getting rewarded and about how new users have such a difficult time being seen. Well, communities will hep with both of those, possibly in a massive way.
There will also be the ability for moderation within each community which will further help the higher quality content within each community to be seen.
Another interesting feature will be the ability to make communities private. Right now everything is one giant community with a shared reward pool and there is no ability to privatize any specific community.
This ability can be very important going forward, especially as it relates to SMTs.
Overall, helping like-minded people connect with each other easier will turn steem applications more into social networking sites as opposed to being purely content sites, which will likely be a big win in terms of future growth.
More about communities can be found in the recent post from the 
SMTs will give each community, business, brand, etc etc the ability to tokenize whatever they want.
This is especially important as it relates to communities.
With posts being paid out in steem, anyone can come along and do a drive by flagging of a post they perhaps don't agree with the rewards on. Which that part won't change, but now each community can have their own token to reward users as well.
That means that even if there were some steem flag wars going on, those wars would not be able to impact the rewards within that specific community.
This new token will also be extremely important as it relates to distribution.
A big part of the problem with building on steem currently is the distribution.
With a new token, the creator can decide how he wants the distribution of his/her token set up and how he wants it to function going forward.
The distribution will be very important for creating and maintaining value with a new token.
(Source: https://steemit.com/steem/@dannyzen/steem-update-communities-are-coming)
Communities will change just about everything on here.
SMTs will be crucial to making communities thrive.
The vast majority of these SMTs will not have value, but the ones that are set up well, have decent economics, and become popular will have value and that value will not be able to be influenced by the current distribution of stake on steem.
Which further helps decentralize the value drivers for the entire steem ecosystem.
Overall, Communities combined with SMTs are a very bullish development for steem in my opinion.
Now I just wish I could fast forward 6 months so they would be live and functioning already. :)
Stay informed my friends.
Image Source:
-Doc
