Newsfeedy Update: New features and marketing

I just rolled out a bunch of new features and design tweaks for Newsfeedy (my project that provides real news for trending topics from around the web) in to prepare for my upcoming marketing push.

I need to get Newsfeedy out to a larger audience in order to have any sort of validated learning on it. I need to find out if it has value for people and whether or not they return. But before I spent any money marketing it, I wanted to make sure it had some additional features that might make it more viral.

Features I added:

• Sharing for the whole website
• Sharing for individual trends
• Voting on trends
• Feedback

The sharing for individual trends required a bunch of backend work that probably needed to be done anyway. Hopefully both sharing features will increase my viral coefficient.

The voting is very rudimentary right now, but I may implement it more fully if there is interest for it.

Feedback was important because there is no other listed way to get in touch with me, and the more connected I can be to my uses, the better.

I also polished the UI a bit more (gradients, shadows, etc) to make it more pleasant to look at, although it probably needs more serious UX work.

I started a StumbleUpon Paid Discovery campaign with a low budget, to see what the engagement level was, and learn whether or not it was a) viral and b)useful. If it’s either one of those, I can move forward.

I’ll post the results of the StumbleUpon campaign as soon as I have some data.