July 8, 2008

woot!  with our move towards beta in a couple of weeks, this page is being discontinued.  Effective immediately, all new product development announcements will be provided via http://blog.socialmedian.com main page.


July 1, 2008

Posted a general update on our alpha here.

recent features we shipped include:

• ability for a user to suspend his/her account if they so desire
• improvements to our "suggested sources" engine which suggests sources you may want to add
• Improvements to how we handle location based news networks

We're planning major feature releases for July 7th and July 21st.


June 9, 2008

Here are the new features we released today on socialmedian.

• Fixed our email alerts so that you should no longer see any duplicates in the top 5 stories in your networks.
• Your "mypage" now features your clipped stories.  This is an easy way for you to present what you think are the hottest stories that other people should check out.  Think of it almost like your own version of the drudgereport.  You can also change the name of your mypage -- for instance, mine is "Goldberg Says Read This!"  We're going to be enhancing this even more  in the  near future, enabling you to have featured stories, and then widgetize this so you can put it anywhere.
• Edit your mini-profile and extended profile from settings
• Added a two-tabbed view for "hot right now" feed items in your news feed -- "hot right now" & "recent".  This presents a once-daily item in your news feed with recent/hot news from each news network you belong to. We're still working on the design here, but it's already a big improvement.
• Added tag clouds for popular topics, recent topics, rising fast, and ABC...XYZ.
  

June 3, 2008:  Cleanup items

The following cleanup items were pushed to production just now.


1) Add topic on story page and News Network page, breaks the page alignment FIXED
2) Click on Share link on News Network page gives JavaScript error (ie-6 & opera) FIXED
3) On Add comment in hotlist should say "You" instead of logged in user name for new comments FIXED
4) Header menus for about socialmedian pages FIXED
5) News and snips are not getting added to the My Clips in home page in ajax fashion FIXED
6) Change border color of create News Network widget FIXED
7) Should not show getting started message tip for other users (who ever visits another person's page) FIXED
8) Search News Network, text breaks up (ie-6) FIXED
9) Roll over message box border is not appearing some times FIXED
10) Setting page message is reflecting in all setting pages FIXED
11) View large image on email alerts not showing properly(opera) FIXED
12) Add snip/news success message needs to be link to the story page FIXED
13) If I update my profile from "settings" link on header, still it shows "Who are you" message box FIXED
14) Not your picture change it? Should go to Settings->Picture tab FIXED


June 2, 2008 Update

We're pleased to report that socialmedian began rolling out "M4" (milestone #4) over this weekend, our biggest product release to-date.
 
M4 marked the first significant application of design elements to socialmedian as well
as the introduction of some key features requested by our alpha users.  If you haven't visited the site recently, pop on over and you'll see a whole new and improved socialmedian.
 
Below is a brief description of the new features.
 
New Features Launched with "socialmedian M4"

• We have now implemented a design template for the site!  The new design puts all primary content into a main content area on the left side of the page, while placing all related content and tools in a right-hand sidebar.
• The new design template also features navigation elements in the header for quick-access to key features such as "news networks" "topics" and "people."  We'll be improving on this more and also adding a navigation layer for "stories" in the coming days and weeks.
• Two of the loudest request we have received from our alpha users has been (1) make the site more social, and (2) enable users to more easily filter content by user or by network from their homepage news feed.  So.... we went ahead and came up with a solution to both request all in one.  From your homepage you can now roll-over any user or news network name and see a mini-profile for that that user/network.  From that mini-profile, you can click  to "zoom to" that use or network, and by doing so easily filter your news feed to just items from that user or network.  It's an easy way to narrow the content in your news feed while also helping users get to know each other.
• You may notice that some users have short bio's or quotes in their roll-over mini profiles.  You can update yours by editing the "N-E-Thing Box" in your settings.  (you can put N-E-Thing you want in that box.  Duh!)
• One set of new features that you may not notice as a more established user is that we have now added a get-started guide for new users, walking them through step by step how to get started on socialmedian with some of the key features. 
• Did you know that you can now email anything to your socialmedian page?  This is a feature we are still testing but so far it is looking pretty good -- easy way to send a picture to socialmedian from your mobile.  You can learn more here.  http://www.socialmedian.com/labs
  

Up next:

• We'll be finishing "M4" this week with a number of back-end performance enhancements as well as some additional front-end design work.  Look for a revamped "MyPage" (the page that other people see when they click on you), as well as improvements to the "hot right now" items that appear in your personalized news feed.
• You see those new elements under "People" in the top nav -- Newsmakers, Readers, Invite Friends .... coming very soon.
• And, as always, lots of other fun stuff that gets this puppy ready for prime time release to a global audience.
  

Working towards a major release on May 31, 2008.

Released May 28

• Enable members of a news network to identify a "suggested source" as not relevant

May 16, 2008

• Added ajax in-line comments and share options to homepage and news network pages.
  

May 15, 2008

• We are experiencing some issues with IE7.  Working on them.
  

May 15, 2008

• New Feature: Show all the users who have clipped this story -- you can now see who has clipped any story
• New Feature:  Enable users to edit name of News Network they created
• New Feature:  You can now change your user name (edit it)

May 13, 2008

• Enhancements to the RSS feeds on homepage

May 9, 2008

Here are just some of the new features shipped today.  (there's too many to list them all - happy discovering all of them)

• Auto-complete when adding sources.  Just start typing a source name →  No need to input the RSS feed name anymore (unless we don't yet have that source in our database).
• We're now starting to group sources in parent-child relationships.  As an example, this will enable you to just add the source "BBC" for every BBC feed, instead of having to enter their feeds for each of sports, news, markets, etc.  This should be fully operational in just a few days.
• There's now an "About socialmedian" section of the site where you can learn about socialmedian the product, the story, and the company.
• FAQ's (see anything missing here?  Please let us know)
• Clips are now counted like votes.  Whenever you "clip" a story, it's like voting for it, saving it to your page, and telling other people you think this story is worth ready --  all at once.
• We're starting to tidy up the design a bit.  Check out your homepage and I think you'll see what I mean.
• We've renamed "Hot List" to be "My News Feed".  My News Feed displays your personally relevant news based on the News Networks you belong to.  Every user of the site has a uniquely personalized My News Feed.
• Whenever you take an action on socialmedian, we now post your latest activity at the top of your My News Feed.  Try clipping a story and then refreshing your home page and you'll see this in action.
• We've now RSS enabled My News Feed, My Clips, and all News Network Pages, so you can get a live feed anywhere of your personalized news (My News Feed), stories you have clipped (Clips), and the most popular and/or recent stories from any News Network.
• We've done considerable work to reduce duplications in My News Feed.  You should no longer see the same story twice in your feed.
• Every user now has a mini socialmedian profile that they can edit and link to your profiles on other sites.  You can check out mine here.
• We fixed some minor bugs in the bookmarklet
• One-click to create a new News Network on any topic
• Edit and delete your comments
• Terms of service
• Privacy policy
  

Up immediately next (next 2 weeks):
1.    A bunch of back-end work to enable this puppy to scale
2.    Applying a global design template to the entire site
3.    Rich text editor for adding snips and news
4.    Edit name of News Network you created
5.    Change your user name if you so desire
6.    More profile stuff
7.    Some Ajax to make the overall experience better
 
Then:
 
Stay tuned.  We're having a hack-a-thon this weekend and some really creative ideas are being worked on.  Expect some features real soon that help you easily filter the noise, pay attention more/less to certain users, integrate socialmedian with your favorite services, add content easier, something with Twitter for sure ('cause i'm a Twitteraholic) and much much more.

Did you know?
•    2432 alpha users have created 686 News Networks on socialmedian
•    The most popular News Network, Web 2.0, has 649 users


May 5, 2008

• Updated clips functionality to represent voting a story up, saving it, and sharing it all in one.

April 28, 2008

• Introducing the First socialmedian Design Contest. $1500 in prizes available.

April 25, 2008

Shipped today:

• All news network pages are now RSS enabled.  You can take them with you and put their feeds where ever you want.  See here as an example:  social media watch News Network.  You can get a feed of popular and/or recent.  For those of you who asked if you could add your socialmedian news feeds to your blog, your Ning page, or your iGoogle, here's a start towards that.
  
  
• Preview External Links.  We now mark all external links with an icon which you can hover over to preview the external page.  Thanks to our friends at Snap for that!  See here for an example.
  
  
• Ticket #310 => Delete Source or Topic.  Fixed!  You can now delete any source or topic that you entered.  The person who first created a News Network can also delete any source or topic in that News Network.
  
  
• Ticket #474 => bug: 1024X786 resolution distorted -- reported by Rahul.  Fixed!
  
  
• Ticket #476 => Feature: Need a much bigger "Add This News Network" button -- submitted by Ardell.  Fixed!
  
  
• And a whole bunch of other stuff behind the scenes, including some bugs that were causing some non relevant stories to appear in location based news networks.  Those bugs should be fixed.

More on the way next week....

April 23, 2008

Shipped today:

• Unsubscribe links in email alerts
• Initial work towards making all "topics" on socialmedian function like tags
• Improved formatting of stories
• Auto-email to person who creates a News Network when we have first found some relevant suggested sources
• Tweaks to the popular stories algorithm
• Tweaks duplicates sometimes appearing in users' hot lists
• Fixed some photo loading bugs
• Some additional messaging to help users add topics
• Fixed the counter in the bookmarker

Scheduled for this Friday April 25:

• Preview for external links
• bug: 1024X786 resolution distorted
  
• Feature: rss feeds for all pages
  
• Ability to delete a source or topic
  
• Feature: Need a much bigger "Add This News Network" button
  

April 21, 2008

We doubled our invite-only user base in the past 3 days from 750 to 1500.  Now, we're gathering feedback and absorbing.

Next code push is Wednesday.

Subscribe to our twitter updates to track our latest developments.

Here's an example of what we work through each day.





April 18, 2008

The best NEW way to follow our product development updates, feature requests, bug fixes, etc. is by following Jason Goldberg on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/socialmedian

I'll post everything on Twitter as it happens.

You can see the latest updates here on the right sidebar too -->

April 16, 2008

A whole bunch of stuff went live today:

• User pictures.  Make sure to edit yours or people might mistake you for Oprah!
• Our first browser Bookmarklet should be going live today.  Drag it into your browser bookmarks bar and then you can one-click to send any webpage/article to social|median.
• Some initial clean up to the design on News Network pages.
• Hot Now in your News Networks.  You should now get a Hot List item twice per day with the top 3 stories in each of the News Networks you belong to.
  

April 14, 2008

Went live today:

• Enhanced functionality when you "clip" an article.
• "Hot Now on social|median" -- twice daily links in your Hot List to the 3 most popular stories across the entire site as decided by our members
• Comments are now sorted by time instead of alphabetically
• Fixed some javascript errors on story pages (thanks Russell W)

Testing today:

• social|median browser bookmarklet -- should be live to all users in next 48 hours
• Images -- as available, images should be presented in lists of stories in the next 24 hours!
• some other fun stuff :)
  

April 9, 2008

Next up (the following work items should be done within the next 2 weeks):

• Adding more functionality and UI design to Clips
• Cleaning up line spacing and strange breaks on story pages
• First bit of cleanup and formatting for News Network pages (they kind scroll on forever down the page right now without an inch of design to them.)
• Displaying images with stories
• Hot Right Now on social|median --> a periodic feed to your Hot List of the 5 hottest stories across the entire site
• Hot Right Now in your News Networks --> a periodic feed to your Hot List of popular stories from the news networks you belong to
• Firefox Bookmarklet tool so that you can click to send any webpage/news story to social|median
  
• User pictures
• Major enhancements to the setup News Network process
• Preview external links before you click on them
• RSS feeds for every page on our site, so you can get your Hot List or New Networks anywhere you want
• and as always, a whole bunch more fun stuff...

April 9, 2008

Look mom, there's icons and graphics, oh my! 

Still not much graphic design as we're more focused on features than polish, but users keep asking us to make it pretty so we we've started to add some touches here and there.







April 8, 2008:  And another one...

Our next request comes from an emailer from silicon valley, who writes:  "would be better to get my news via rss feed than email."  Yup.  We agree.  We'll try to launch that next week.

---


April 8, 2008:  You Asked For It, You Got It!

Remember that old Toyota commercial, "You asked for it, you got it, Toyota!" ?
 
That's how we're feeling today here at social|median as we just went live with some new features that respond to some of the most popular alpha user requests:
 

• Find News Networks.  A large number of users said that they wanted to join more News Networks but were having trouble searching and discovering them.  We have now created an easy way for you to search for News Networks by topic.  You can also easily browse news networks as well.

• Location-based news networks.  Many of you have already created location-specific news networks, e.g. "Seattle Tech Startups" or "Silicon Alley Startups" or "Liverpool" or "Incredible India."  The problem though was that we previously had no good way of narrowing the stories in location-specific news networks to only stories relevant to that location.  We now enable you to identify that your News Network is specific to a location -- and thus only feature stories from or about that location.  The person who created the News Network can modify this setting.

• Your home page Hot List.  Your "Hot List" on your home page on social|median now contains relevant activities from people in your News Networks.  Our goal over time is to make your Hot List your one-stop dashboard to the news most relevant to you.  We now notify you (in your Hot List) when other users clip or comment on stories that we think you might be interested in.  Coming soon to your Hot List:  images, popular stories in your networks, highlights from hot stories across social|median, and the ability to specify specific users you want to see more/less activities from.

• Suggested sources.   One of the biggest requests we've had is to offer users more suggested sources to choose from when they create a new News Network.  We've heard you and have now added literally thousands of suggested sources (ranging from popular news sites to blogs) based on thousands of topics.  As you add topics to your News Network, we suggest sources for those topics. 

NOTE:  If you add a topic that we have not yet found any suggested sources for, we automatically add it to our list of topics to search the web for -- so come back 24 hours later and by then we should then have a good selection of sources for you.  (We'll add a notification to this soon too so that you can be reminded when we have additional sources)

• Clip it!  See something interesting?  Clip it!  When you clip something on social|median we mark it as relevant to people who share your interests -- so you can help them discover news of interest, and they can help you, etc. etc.  It's easy, it's fun, and it helps people discover stories they might not have otherwise known about.  Also, want to get a story into our email alerts?  Clip it!  The popular stories in our alerts are in a large part based on how many users are clipping and commenting on them.

• Speaking of email alerts.  Based on user feedback, the standard settings for our email alerts are 3x / day, or every 8 hours.  In each email alert we present the top 5 most popular stories across all of social|median, followed by a summary of what's popular and what's recent in the News Networks you belong to.  These email alerts should now also be properly formatted for you to read on your mobile.  You can adjust yours settings to get more/less alerts.

• Invite a friend to social|median.  Know someone who might want to participate in our alpha?  You can invite them to use invite code = rolo.  We have opened up 300 additional alpha invites using that code just for our current users to invite people.

More on the way!
 
Thanks for being an alpha user.  Remember, alpha = feedback.  Keep it coming!


----------


April 4, 2008

• New and improved find / browse News Networks experience.  --> This was one of the biggest complaints from early users, that they found it difficult to search and find News Networks to join.  Should be much better now.  Please give us your feedback.
• From another frequent user request:  We are working on a easy way for users to mark their News Network as location specific.  That would focus the News Network on stories in the city/region/country.  This should go live in the next 48 hours.
  

April 2, 2008

• We added our first design changes today!  Just a little bit at a time but you should start to see the difference fairly quickly over the next couple of weeks. 
  
• The first considerable design update was to your home page.  Once you are logged into social|median, you'll notice now that the activities in your Hot List are now more organized. 
  
• We're also no longer showing you everything in your hot list, rather we have an algorithm in place which is designed to highlight key events in your news networks that you may find interesting.  We'll be adding to this more in the coming days. 
  
• Finally, we're also aggregating activities in your hot list so that you see "5 people clipped the story..." instead of an individual hot list item for each.
• In case you were wondering about our development process:
• We're currently building towards development milestones that bucket work into 10-14 day periods.  We started off with 3 week milestones but are now shortening to smaller buckets of work.
  
• Within those milestones, we're shipping as things get done vs. waiting to the end of the milestone.  We're adding new features (and fixing bugs) 3x/week as work is completed.
• What that all adds up to is that about every 2-3 days now you should be noticing some new features and updates on social|median.
  

March 30, 2008

• The big news this past week was moving from dogfood to alpha.
• The product is still really, really early so please forgive us for any bugs you encounter or any frustrating user experiences.  We went alpha very early on this one because we need user feedback early and often to make this work.
• Here's what were working on right now (up next):
• e-mail news alerts should start going out Monday.  Each user will get a personalized email containing the top 5 most popular stories across all of social|median at that moment and a summary of personalized news  relevant to you based on the news networks you are a member of.  You will be able to change the frequency of your email news alerts by going to your settings page on social|median.
• A lot of users have pointed out that the experience for searching and browsing news networks is kinda busted.  We're fixin it.
• Many users have created localized news networks on news topics about a certain city (e.g. New York, Seattle Tech Startups, Liverpool, etc.).  We're going to be adding some features to enable such news networks to hone in on local news better.
• Several users have asked for a better way to discover new news networks.  Working on that.
  
• Aggregated and more relevant activities on your hot list.  Our early goal here is to go from showing you all of the user activities in your news networks to instead just show you the most relevant activities, and not to show repetition.  We'll start with an algorithm we've developed and then modify it as we learn from usage.
  
• Tags.  Topics will start functioning like tags. 
  
• Some initial design changes
• Images
  
• Bookmarklet so you can easily send things you find on the web to social|median
• Being able to preview external links before clicking on them
• FAQ's
• And as always, a bunch of other fun stuff :)
  

March 28, 2008

• We're moving today from pune.socialmedian.com to www.socialmedian.com.  Still invite-only alpha.
• Based on your feedback, we've changed "News Circles" to "News Networks" -- users responded better to the idea of joining News Networks.  A News Network is a group of people who share news on a particular topic (or set of related topics) from selected news sources.  You can browse all of the member-created News Networks here.  As of our writing this, social|median users have created 204 News Networks.  All News Networks are currently public (i.e. anyone can join them and participate in them).  We're working on a private version soon where you can control who is in your News Networks.
  
• We have now shipped version one of "suggested sources."  As you add "topics" to your News Network we do our best to go fetch you some suggested popular news sources for those topics.  Give it a try please and send us some feedback.
• Our first version of e-mail news alerts should go live to all users in the next 48 hours.  You will be able to control how often you get alerts and which of your News Networks are included in the alerts.  In this first version of our news alerts, you will get one e-mail containing highlights from all of your selected News Networks.  In the future we'll enable you to get more detailed individual e-mails from each of your News Networks, as desired.
• We've also added a bunch of little helpful things such as auto-complete when searching for a News Network.
• We're starting to add some basic design elements.  Again, this will happen gradually vs. all at once as our focus is still foremost on getting the features right vs. the polish.

Next up:

• We're going to be cranking out a bunch of new features over the next couple of weeks, including:
• Some more design elements
• Improved "Hot List" on your homepage to aggregate user activities and bubble up the most relevant updates from your News Networks
• Images!
• And like always, a bunch of other fun and useful stuff.
  

March 25, 2008

• We're now starting to automatically suggest sources to users vs. asking them to enter all sources manually.
• We should have our first cut at personalized e-mail news alerts completed in the next couple of days too.
  

March 19 - 21, 2008 -- working on

• Suggesting popular feeds for users to add to their News Circle vs. having to manually enter (We're making some good progress here and will have an initial implementation available for users to try very soon).
  
• Automated personalized news alerts via e-mail
• Aggregate actions in Hot List -- too much noise now

March 19, 2008 - completed

• A bunch of admin stuff that users wont see yet.  Admin interface.  SVN changes.
  
• Added this page, "What we're working on..." which shows what features we are currently working on and what we've recently completed.
  
• Added 'User Submitted'  as a source for each news circle.  Users can now rank user-submitted stories vs. other sources as a source of content for a particular news circle
• Improvements to display of user comments in Hot Lists
• Added link to "My Page" to user's home page.  My Page represents that user's public-facing page that other people see when they click on their name on social|median
• Changed "unjoin" to "Quit" this news circle in all places.
  
• Created new welcome page for new users.
• Enabled users to remain logged in
• Some minor cosmetic changes to people's public My Page
• Implemented vote up/down a story 
• Added mouse-over tool tips for key functions
  

March 13, 2008 -- completed

• Changed clip icon from paper-clip to push-pin
• Added "feature this" and "not relevant" voting buttons to stories in news circle lists
• Added rollover user tips for key actions
• Cleaned up strange characters appearing in titles
• Added confirmation message when user attempts to un-clip a story
• Enable users to also post same comment publicly when emailing a story

Known issues:

• There's no graphic design yet.  We know it.  We aren't focused on it.  We'll get to it soon.

Coming Soon:

• Preview external links before clicking on them
  
• Images
• Firefox bookmarker tool
• Show me more / less from this user
• More improvements to your public my page
• Graphic design

Thanks.
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