MyTweetMag Blog

New features: MyTweetMag quietly became social

Without much public noise we released some fancy new features, that make MyTweetMag a bit more social and involving. Here are the main features, that we added with the last release:

• social graph and similar mags
• new start-page
• notification system
• improved media-display
• erase-button for your account in the settings

Your “Social Graph” on MyTweetMag

Do you wanna know, which of your twitter-friends are already active at MyTweetMag? Most people want to know that, so we added your twitter-friends into your setting-page. But as we are focused on content and as we faced, that the search for interesting magazines is a main demand of our visitors, we also added some recommendations for new magazines into the left sidebar of each TweetMag. The magazines displayed there usually cover a similar topic and share some tags with actual magazine. Here are both features:

Notification-System

We also added a notification-system via twitter and rss. In future, you will get a note, if a friend of yours started a magazine or if a new magazine might be interesting for you because it covers a similar topic. We turned these notifications on by default, but you can turn them of in your settings, if you don’t like them:

Twitter Web-Intents

Only some weeks ago twitter has released the “Web Intents”, and we have rapidly integrated this nice new feature. So what is it? It simplifies your tweet reactions and interactions with each post-entry: You can now directly “retweet”, “reply”, “favourite” or “follow” any tweeted news without leaving MyTweetMag. Simply click on one of the new buttons that you will find beneath each post:

Help getting started

Ok, we understood that point: Seeing a blank magazine after finished your setup is not too fancy. That’s why we added a new welcome page after the setup. At this welcome page we explain the next steps to get the magazine filled up with content, we display some similar magazines and some example entries like the explanation-video of MyTweetMag. The welcome page will disappear as soon, as you have made your first own entry.

Improved Media Display

A little improvement with the media-files that you integrate in the daily media-stream: Of course it is no fun to watch a video on a 20x20px-display. So we added a layer that displays the video in full size now:

What is next?

MyTweetMag hasn’t gained a lot of attraction so far, which is ok because we are still in beta and so we could experiment a lot with new features in the past 12 month (didn’t count them, but we probably added more than 30 new features and functions in this time).

Facing the growing discussion around the so called “content curation” (look for steve rosenbaum’s book about it for example), we are quite sure, that the future will bring a lot more attention to this topic and the growing number of curation tools. I think we are quite unique with our service, even if there are similar concepts like scoop.it, storify or paper.li. But once again: Our main focus is to (manually) curate collaborative news-streams for specific topics. MyTweetMag is dedicated to help you to navigate your audience through the never ending stream of news. I bet that your audience will appreciate this, so don’t hesitate: become a curator of your topic and enrich your website with a curated MyTweetMag-stream!

So what is next now? In the next step we won’t add a lot of new feature, because I think that MyTweetMag now provides a good bundle tools. Instead we will fully concentrate on the user experience. So be sure to face a NEW DESIGN in the next month!