It’s been a month since we took our Social News system offline. Originally it was only suppose to be down for two weeks, but web development is just like construction in that delays are inevitable.

The shutdown wasn’t just for a redesign, rather a complete overhaul of the Social News application. You see, we’ve learned quite a bit from the data gathered over the past year and this revamping is a result of that research.

The main goal with the Social News application is to aggregate all the content from quality Asian website, organize it, and measure the popularity and thus quality of both the websites and the stories they produce. One crude analogy is a RSS reader plus a popularity index. However, our system goes beyond that in archiving the images along with the text and gathering summary data about websites.

To really emphasize the social part of this system, websites are treated as users and thus have their own profiles, are able to make friends, send messages, etc. We feel that websites are special members of the Asian media community and we’re treating them as such. Unfortunately those features are not fully implemented because we didn’t want to delay the re-launch too much longer.

Regular users of Social News in the past will find that while this new system may look different, the functionality remains the same. Stars are replaced with numbered scores, favorites are easier to add, and frontpage/backpage is replaced with popular/latest. We hope you find these changes will make the system more intuitive to use. After all, what’s the point of storing a large amount of information if you can’t find what you’re looking for?

Hopefully our Social News system not only helps you find information easily, but helps you to discover good stories and good websites.

Next up, a completely new application!