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

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:

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.

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." 

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.  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.  

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"

Here's how it works.

We've added a "Site" option to the "Add something" widget on the top right of every socialmedian page.  This widget enables the users to add links and feeds to their favorite sites. (click on thumbnails to expand)

When adding a feed, the user can easily specify which of their content will automatically get added to socialmedian every time they post.  For instance, with Twitter, the user can specify to have all of their Tweets added to socialmedian, or just Tweets containing certain keywords, or any tweets tagged #sm or #socialmedian.  This also makes it really easy for news organizations to feed in their news reports to socialmedian.


Likewise, the user can have all of their Google Reader "shares" added to socialmedian, or only their shares which contain certain keywords.  (Users will also be able to have their "notes" from Google Reader shares added as comments on socialmedian. 

Same for their Digg submissions, Delicious bookmarks, etc.  Notably, as shown on the right here, as the user adds links to socialmedian, we'll also suggest other sites they might want to add.  We do this via our use of the Google Social Graph API.
 
The user can also add a feed for their blog and for other sites.

Once the user's feeds are added, desired shared content from those sites is automatically fed to that user's page on socialmedian.  Here, for instance, you see that the last 3 stories shared by Daniel Pritchett came from Google Reader and FriendFeed

While Louis Gray is sharing from Google Reader

And Michael Fidler is sharing from Twitter

Now, as someone who is following some of these people and other socialmedian users, I may not want to see all of their tweets, shares, etc.  So, we enable socialmedian to filter for each person they follow whether they want to follow "all updates" or only "relevant updates," with relevance determined as matching the topics in the News Networks I am a member of.  i.e. I may only want to follow Louis Gray when it comes to technology and politics, but not his interest in fathering.

From my socialmedian homepage, I can view updates from "My Newsmakers" (the people I'm following on socialmedian) per the preferences I've set for each of my Newsmakers, as described immediately above. 

Or, I can view relevant updates from all members of the topical News Networks I belong to on socialmedian.

In terms of how such news-streaming content is shared with News Networks, we match the streamed content with the topical keywords in the News Networks the user is a member of.  If their streamed content is a match, we auto-share it with that news network.  One caveat to that is regarding Twitter Tweets, which could be rather noisy.  To account for that, we will by default only share popular Tweets with News Networks (popular as determined by other socialmedian users have clipped it or commented on the Tweet).  If a user wants to see more Tweets, they can turn their volume up in a particular News Network, using the volume bar on the right sidebar of any News Network page, as shown here:

 
2.    Enable bloggers to promote their sites on socialmedian.  We wanted to make sure to give back to the folks who give us - bloggers in a large part fuel socialmedian by adding their great content, so we wanted to give something back to bloggers to help them better promote their sites and their content on socialmedian.  So, working with about 25 bloggers from around the world, we have come up with an initial version of what we call the "reverse-blog-widget."  While they typical widget is all about putting a piece of a particular website on your blog (e.g. a Facebook badge, or follow me on Twitter button, etc.), the reverse-blog-widget works the other way around, and helps bloggers put a meaningful piece of their site on socialmedian.  This is free promotion we are providing to any/all bloggers who wish to setup their reverse-blog-widget on socialmedian.

The setup process is shown here.  Users are prompted to setup their widget immediately after they add their blog feed to socialmedian.

Then, this widget is displayed whenever anyone is reading or commenting on a story from that blog on socialmedian.  This will also be the case if they are reading about someone's blog via a share from Google Reader or Delicious, etc.  (which is nice because it gives credit not just to the person who shared the content, but also to the original source of the content.)

In the near future we hope to enable users to personalize this widget too with their logos and colors, etc.