socialmedian: Announcing the First Major socialmedian Feature Upgrade: Pioneering "News-Streaming" Features and More

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Announcing the First Major socialmedian Feature Upgrade: Pioneering "News-Streaming" Features and More

Submitted by Jasongoldberg from blog

Sep 04, 2008

Summary

We're very excited to announce and discuss a number of significant new features that went live on socialmedian just moments ago. This marks the first major feature release since we went "beta" 4 weeks ago, and is in direct response to more than 500 individual points of user feedback; thanks!

Today's major release addresses 4 big areas that you asked us to improve:

More and Easier ways to get your content into socialmedian
Enable bloggers to promote their sites on socialmedian
Better ways to find hot discussions and popular stories
Make the socialmedian site more publicly available

With new this release -- which enables socialmedian users to feed their newsworthy content from popular sites like Twitter, Google Reader, Digg, Delicious, and FriendFeed -- we hope to make some significant progress towards socialmedian being the site that Delivers the News that You Need to Know.

1. More and Easier ways to get your content into socialmedian. With today's release socialmedian will be pioneering a new type of automatic content importing and sharing, "News-Streaming." ...Read the full article

Comments (10)

Jasongoldberg,

Sep 04, 2008

Today's major release addresses 4 big areas that you asked us to improve: 1. More and Easier ways to get your content into socialmedian 2. Enable bloggers to promote their sites on socialmedian 3. Better ways to find hot discussions and popular stories 4. Make the socialmedian site more publicly available With new this release -- which enables socialmedian users to feed their newsworthy content from popular sites like Twitter, Google Reader, Digg, Delicious, and FriendFeed -- we hope to make some significant progress towards socialmedian being the site that Delivers the News that You Need to Know.

Jasongoldberg,

Sep 04, 2008

By now, many of you are familiar with "life-streaming" services like FriendFeed (which I'm a big fan of). Life-streaming services enable people to connect feeds from their favorite sites to automatically steam in their content from their other sites and share it with their social graph. This was a big advancement from earlier generation services which required the user to share one piece of content at a time. With socialmedian's new "News-Streaming" features, we're addressing a related but more challenging problem. Our users asked us if we could help them automatically share their "newsworthy" content with socialmedian. Meaning, they want to be able to automatically stream and share news-related content with socialmedian w/o also sharing their personal content or other non-relevant content.

Jasongoldberg,

Sep 04, 2008

For example, the user might want their Twitter tweets on the 2008 election shared with socialmedian, or their tweets on an article they are reading on Google Chrome shared with socialmedian, but they don't want their Tweets on their visit to the Shake Shack auto-shared with a news site. Similarly, the user might want their video or photos from the Obama rally or the TechCrunch50 event auto-shared on socialmedian, but not the video or photos of their kid's birthday party.

Jasongoldberg,

Sep 04, 2008

Adding another layer of complexity, once the content gets to socialmedian, we need to make sure to share it not only with the right people, but also with the right topical news networks. So, we had to create a News-specific form of content streaming which would enable users to easily hook up their feeds to socialmedian and get just the right content in and shared to the right people and pages. We call it "News-Streaming"

Eyebee,

Sep 04, 2008

That's the big challenge I feel - "Delivering the News that You Need to Know"
as everyone's "news that they need to know" is obviously very different.

Jasongoldberg,

Sep 04, 2008

Exactly. What we need to do is make it such that people feel like if they're not getting their news via socialmedian, they are missing out on news they need to use for their job, their family, their hobbies, etc. And the challenge is that such is personalized to each person's interests.