M5 Release: Newsmakers, Notifications, Invites, & Nearly Beta

1. It is the last milestone before we move from private invite-only alpha to public beta.  Our next major milestone, "M6" will mark our beta release to the general public.
2. It marks the first time that current socialmedian users are able to invite other users to check out the service.
3. The features in this release go a long way towards making socialmedian an interactive and viable social news network.

• Newsmakers.
  
  
   
  
• This is a feature many months in the works that we are really excited about. 
  
• Here's some quick background on the need for this feature.  On socialmedian, users join "news networks" on topics like "web 2.0" "iphone" or the "olympics" or "madonna" and then are able to discover news by following the activities of people in those networks.  That works great if you are in a small network but has the potential to get kinda noisy if you are in a large network.  For instance, with only ~3500 alpha users on socialmedian, there are already >1000 members of the "web 2.0 News Network" -- tracking the news clippings of 1000+ people can get a little overwhelming.  So, we started thinking about, "what if I wanted to be in the web 2.0 network but often only really care about what some of the members of the network are reading?  Or, just my designated Newsmakers.  And, with some people who I really trust and look up to, I may want to discover everything they are reading, not just articles relevant to the networks I belong to.
  

• That's where Newsmakers come in.  The high level concept behind Newsmakers is as follows.  One user of socialmedian can "follow" another user by clicking on the "follow" button.  Once you are following someone on socialmedian, you can get the news through them, by following what stories they clip for their followers, comment on, submit, etc.  In essence, they become your Newsmaker.
  
  Here you see what someone's mini profile looks just before I decide to "follow" them
  
  Unlike other services (e.g. Twitter or FriendFeed) in which it's generally an all-or-nothing when it comes to following another user, socialmedian adds a new filter to following your Newsmakers.  When following someone on socialmedian, you can decide whether you want to follow all of that person's updates (e.g. every time they clip a story or comment, etc.), OR only follow that person's activities as relevant to the News Networks you belong to.  In the latter, for instance, if you only wanted to see Jason Goldberg's news clippings as related to technology, you could do so, and never hear a blip about my interests in wine or music, etc.
  
  Here, you see that I can set my preferences as to how I want to follow someone.
  
  And here, once I am following someone:
  
  
  
• Here, you can view the most popular Newsmakers on socialmedian.

• New Personalized Homepage News Feed Views
  
  
  
  
• Related to the Newsmaker feature, socialmedian users can now view their personalized homepage news feed in 4 ways: 
  
• My Newsmakers (just the activities of my Newsmakers
• My Networks (the activies of all the people in my News Networks)
• Me (my activities)
• All (the most recent activities of all the people on socialmedian)
  
  
• Notifications
• Pretty basic stuff here but we just hadn't gotten around to it yet.  We have now implemented notifications to let users know when someone else is following their updates, when a story they submit is getting popular, when they have comments, etc.
  
  
• Find (and follow) Your Friends on socialmedian
• Users can quickly find which of their gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or twitter buddies are currently using socialmedian.  Or, you can just search for a user by name.  Then, you can decide if you want to follow them.
• Oh, and in a really cool feature, if you have entered your twitter or friendfeed or other links in your profile, we use the Google Social Graph API to automatically suggest people we think you'll want to follow, based on the people you already know on other sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.
  
  
  
• Invite Your Friends to socialmedian
• That's right, current socialmedian users can now invite their friends to join them on socialmedian.  You can easily invite your gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and twitter buddies.  You can invite your contacts to join you on socialmedian in general and follow your updates, OR you can invite them to join a specific News Network.
• If you like socialmedian, please invite your friends to check it out!  (thanks)