Many social networks are working on ways to improve the relevancy of content - either through finding shared relationships between people through common people they know or through similar likes and dislikes. Simler, which I first talked about back in September, and opened in October, launched an array of new features this last week that offer the service's growing user base faster ways to interact with shared content, and improved abilities to discover new areas on the site where activity is happening.As outlined in a post on Simler by the company's CEO, Ryan Goodwin, Simler updated their site to include a new homepage, highlighting friends, tags and most recent content. But more interesting to me are the two new items they added - the first being the addition of "likes", a feature you have seen on FriendFeed, Google Reader, Socialmedian and Facebook, and the second, being "Favorite Tags", which lets you pick your favorite topics of conversation, and highlight them in conversations that take place on the service.
Users Asked for Likes on Simler, and Got Them
Now, as you make posts on Simler, about any topic, you can tag other users by adding a tilda in front of their user name (such as ~louisgray) or you can use the well-known @ sign to link out to Twitter. And topics can be highlighted through brackets to link to other topics on the site. (Such as [Simler] or [Apple])
The service is also highlighting its most active users, by topic, as the SimKing, which users will be given a badge on their profile page if their content is liked by other users.
The New Simler Divides Into the Main Page, Tags and Friends
The addition of likes, as with other networks, will enable users a more lightweight way to interact with content and show what the find interesting. The improved options to highlight other users and topics on Simler should also accelerate the activity there. I also hope to be talking with Ryan and team to help them gain more traction, as part of my role with Paladin, as Simler is a very new client. The efforts that went into this release were in place prior to our working together, and I'm looking forward to helping more going forward.
Disclosure: Simler is a new Paladin Advisors Group client. I am Managing Director of New Media for Paladin.