socialmedian, which has come under fire as of late for trying to use Twitter as means of raising $500,000 in venture funding, announced Thursday that it has launched its first major upgrade since the company started and its improvements will finally address some of the concerns its users have had since its inception.
First off, the new socialmedian will make it easier for users to get content onto the site and enable bloggers to better promote their content. Dubbed “News-Streaming,” socialmedian’s latest foray into bringing only certain content to its users is quite complex.
News-Streaming lets users filter out all the junk from the social media that they broadcast through the site. According to the company, if users want to share their Twitter feed with the community, but only want their tweets that are actually newsworthy to be collected by socialmedian, they can first input their Twitter feed and next to that, place certain keywords into the field to help the service filter out the tweets that the user doesn’t want posted. In other words, if you want to only post your political tweets to socialmedian, add your Twitter feed to the service and select keywords that may have some relevance to politics. From there, socialmedian will grab all tweets containing those keywords and post it to the site. The same goes for Google Reader feeds, Digg submissions, and Delicious bookmarks, to name a few.
To make sure all that information isn’t annoying other users, socialmedian is adding a filter feature that will let other users “turn the volume up or down” on the amount of tweets and stories making their way across the pages. Those users can choose to see all updates or only those “relevant updates” that they preset.
Part two of socialmedian’s new initiative will make it easier for bloggers to promote their material. In order to do that, socialmedian will launch a “reverse-blog widget,” which after users place their blog feed into their updates, will be featured in the clips section to the right of the socialmedian page and display the latest stories from the blog.
Taking a page out of the Digg handbook, socialmedian is also offering a page displaying the most popular stories of the day, week, and month. Instead of calling newer stories “Upcoming,” like Digg, socialmedian has two new entries called “Rising Fast” and “Hot Discussions.” Genius.
Finally, socialmedian opened up its site to make almost every page available to search engines and users won’t need to register any longer to view different pages on the site.
All in all, socialmedian’s updates seem rather logical and don’t really break the mold in any way. The site was in desperate need of improvement and it looks like it has finally happened. Now we’ll need to wait and see if its users embrace it.
