Feature Release: Facebook “Like” and Popularity Improvements

Despite our recent DDoS attacks, we managed to squeak out a feature release for the site last Tuesday. Unfortunately, the DDoS attack resumed shortly after.

“For the love of Pete, tell me what was in the release!!”

While this wasn’t a huge release (those are being reserved for later this month), we were able to sneak a few improvements in that you may have already noticed. Here’s the rundown:

Facebook “Like”

Those of you with Facebook accounts will find that sharing Current TV with your friends just got easier. Have you met the Like button yet? Chances are, you’re already familiar with it on Facebook, and now we’ve implemented Like buttons on all of our content, too. Have you told your friends about Mariana Van Zeller’s recent Vanguard documentary “Missionaries of Hate” yet?

Make sure your Facebook account is connected to your Current profile, then visit the “Missionaries of Hate” page and click the “Like” button to share it with your friends and family on Facebook. Go ahead. Try it out. I’ll wait for you here.

Popularity and Voting Updates

A few weeks ago, we discovered a few kinks in our popularity-scoring algorithm thanks to a few cases where stories were pushed onto the homepage to prove a point. Your message was heard loud and clear, and I’m happy to report that we’ve deployed a couple of notable tweaks to the system that should vastly improve things going forward.

First, your red votes will factor in more prominently going forward. For those of you familiar with gaming mechanics, our voting system needed to be re-balanced to better account for red votes. No longer!

So, fire up your voting fingers. Vote up. Vote down. Vote often. Your votes help determine what belongs in the popular stories feed, so if something looks old, out of place, or you just don’t think it’s as important as other stories out there, you know what to do.

But wait, there’s more. We’ve received a plenty of feedback from our community about the ability to push stories into popularity based upon multiple comments from a very few people on a thread. It goes something like this:

Person 1: I think this is great.

Person 2: @Person 1 -- I disagree!

Person 1: @Person 2 – Well, I disagree with your disagreement!

Person 2: @Person 1 – OK, but your disagreement with my disagreement is disagreeable to me!

Person 1: @Person 2 – Sir or Madam, PLEASE validate my disagreement with you!

This exchange continues on for 40-50 comments, and the next thing you know the story is ranked in the top 10 popular stories on the homepage. Not cool, right?

Well, we’ve now implemented a new addition to comment scoring that will factor for this sort of thing. We would like to see stories containing a wide spanning discussion, with input from a variety of people via comments and votes, not just the back-and-forth between a select few.

So there you have it! We are already working on the next couple releases which plan to include revamped profile pages, new activity streams, and Twitter integration.

Stay tuned!