Today we released an initial version of our new article classifier. We are now ranking each article in NewsTab for importance. We use various signals to measure importance, such as popularity of articles among our readers, popularity on social networks and media coverage on similar articles. The first visible implementation of that is exposed in the “Best” tab, added to our “Home” section. This tab shows the best stories of everything you follow on NewsTab. It is based on the article importance rank, as well as on the reading pattern of each specific user. This is still an experimental feature and as such is only exposed on our web version. We look forward to your feedback and hoping to improve and add to our Android app in next release.
In addition, we have added some new features based on user feedback as well as more backend improvements. Some highlights our below:
- Better and faster article loading experience in both Web and Android versions.
- Dynamic section bar on our Web version and better drag & drop functionality.
- OPML import and feed organizer were added to our Android app.
- More options to our Android app, such as Mark as read on scroll and the ability to hide read articles
This is also an opportunity to update about the status of our iOS app (we are constantly asked about that by our users)... Well, the development is progressing nicely and we hope to open it up for initial beta testing in February.
Finally, many of you have asked us to add notifications to our Android app… we haven’t done it so far, as we think it's critical notifications are smart and well targeted before introduced… and we are not yet ready for that...stay tuned for next release (in 3-4 weeks), for smart notifications on our Android app…:-)
