Tailrank 2.0 is Live
After nearly a year of development I'm proud to say that we've just released Tailrank 2.0.
The first thing you'll probably notice is our slick new user interface. The new changes are a big step in the right direction.
The majority of the work on this release has been on our ranking algorithms. Tailrank now breaks stories faster, cluster them better, and generally does a better job at finding the hottest news in the blogosphere.
Some new features I want to point out.
Archives
You can now view the archives for a given topic. Been on vacation for a few weeks? Not a problem. Just check out Tailrank and we'll show you the hottest stories while you were away. Here's the archive page for tech for example.
Entertainment
We also now have a new category - entertainment. We decided to sneak this feature into this release due to popular demand. We're going to be expanding on this in Tailrank 2.1 (due in a few more weeks) so stay tuned.
Literally a memetracker
Want to follow a breaking story? You can now track stories via RSS or Instant Messenger. Remember that big YouTube story from earlier last week? I subscribed to it via IM and was getting deliveries every few hours while new stories on the subject were breaking. You can also set the threshold higher than the default if you just want to be alerted to the really important stories.
Expand and Collapse
A significant percentage of our users didn't want to see the full cluster exposed for a story. It made the page too hefty and difficult to scan. You can now easily expand and collapse the cluster view around a given story.
Here's a screenshot of Tailrank 2.0 with the articles collapsed.
Next Steps
While Tailrank 2.0 has been a big step in the right direction we weren't able to land all the features we've been working on.
Tailrank 2.1 will be out in a few weeks which should have a few surprises (so stay tuned). We have some really cool stuff we're working on!
If you have any feedback we're all ears! Feel free to send me a private email or just send it in via our feedback link.
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