Spotback News Weblog

Our goal has always been personalizing the web and helping each user get his own personalized web experience.

Our long time mission has been recently supported by the 2006 ChoiceStream Personalization Survey.
The survey provides insight into consumers’ interest in personalization.
Some of the 2006 survey findings are:
79% of consumers are interested in receiving personalized content.
75% of consumers believe that personalization would improve their social networking experience by introducing them to other members with similar interests and preferences.
We believe this is the first indication the web’s new frontier in personalizing users' content in order to maximize their personal web experience.

Posted by Orit Mossinson at 03:23 AM | Permalink

Spotback underwent a major code rewrite to improve the speed and responsiveness and is about 10(!) times faster according to our benchmarks.

Did it improve the experience for you? We will be happy to hear - drop us a note.

Posted by Micha Kaufman at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (32)

It's been almost three weeks since our last version update. In case you are wondering what we were up to all this time... well, we've been reading through your feedbacks and requests, analyzing usage patterns, figuring ways to make Spotback better (oh, and coding, designing, traveling to conferences and sleeping in the remaining 3 hours).

This release introduces a new and powerful tool that allows you to track things that are important to you inside Spotback. The Personal Tag Tracker allows you to:
- Track any single word or combination of two words.
- Tracked words are not limited only to tags defines by the authors of the stories, but rather cover the entire title and text of the stories.
- Highlight tracked words to help you spot those words when they appear within the titles and text of the stories.
- Unread story alert (on top of the new 'Tag Tracker' tab) shows how many unread stories are there that contain tags that you defined.

The tag tracker also affects the stories that Spotback chooses for you. This means that when Spotback chooses stories for you it gives extra weight to stories that contain tracked words. You can also limit each tag to specific categories to filter out irrelevant stories.

Read more about how you can make the most out of the new feature here.

Here are some screenshots of the new features:

Personal Tag Tracker explained

This is how the new user interface looks like

Add a new tag button (closed)

Add a new tag dialog (open)

Tracked tags page

Highlighted tags

Unread tagged stories alert

Posted by Micha Kaufman at 07:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (91)

This update includes:
- Changes in the user interface (less icons under each story to make reading easier)
Before

After
Explanation: In this screenshot the 'more' and 'less' menus were combined into one menu that is accessible by moving your mouse above the sub-category (in this case: 'Apple'). The rest of the options, such as 'email story', 'add comment' and 'save story' are now in one menu that opens when you click the (+options) at end of each story

Why change?
The problem with visual elements that repeat too many times on the screen is that you get used to disregarding them... We do not want that to happen - we want you to use those features whenever you need them. Your comments on the change are more than welcome.