Our early users have probably seen a bunch of changes happening to our site during the last few weeks. As we’re getting ready to officially beta (not yet there even though our logo says ’beta’ 
), we’ve been working to make BlazingStreams easier and more fun to use, and the content more relevant to you.
So, what are the ‘biggest’ changes we made?
Follow Your Favorite Topics
You can now personalize the content you get from BlazingStreams. Here’s how it works:
- Click the 
sign located next to each topic or category throughout our site to add it to your BlazingStreams homepage.
- For each topic you are following, we will show you the 3 highest ranked articles (ranked by us) for a given time period (currently we are tweaking the time period based on user feedback). While there may be many articles on Twitter for a given topic, an article must pass through our quality filters to be added to our site. This means you may find articles on a topic on Twitter or other websites that you won’t see on our site. We are constantly working on improving our filters to make sure we identify content that you will like.
- You can view all the latest articles for a given topic by clicking the “View all” link displayed for each topic you are following.
- You can remove a topic from your homepage by simply clicking the 
sign.
- There is no limit to the number of topics you can follow on your homepage.
p.s. You need to sign-up for BlazingStreams to personalize your homepage.
p.p.s You can also follow our Twitter accounts if you prefer to get your information that way; the list of our accounts is on the top of every page of our site.
We know there’s a lot more work to be done to make this feature really really excellent, but we hope you find the first version to be valuable (and if you don’t please let us know how we can make it better).
Hot! Topics and Articles
You can now see what topics are hot on Twitter and read relevant articles for these topics. How do we identify whether a topic is hot or not? Like many sites, we use trending topics identified by Twitter. The problem with only using these topics is that you only see what ‘the masses’ are talking about. While knowing what the general population is talking about is definitely interesting, you don’t necessarily get to see what’s hot for specific interests you may have like Sports or Music. (As an aside, right now the hottest Twitter trending topic is ‘Follow Friday’ which usually is the case…every Friday.)
So to give you more insight into what’s hot for your specific interests, we also use our own topic system to identify hot topics. We identify topics with the highest growth rates overall and for each category like Sports. For these topics we find the most relevant article(s) based on the quality filters I mentioned earlier.
This means if you are a Sports fan, we want you to know that #Yankees is a hot topic (which Twitter tells us) AND that people are also talking about the San Diego Padres maybe trading Adrian Gonzalez.
So those are the big changes. We’re excited to have you try our improved site but we need your help. Tell us what you think…Love it? Hate it? Don’t even care? Leave us feedback here on our blog, Tweet us @BlazingStreams, or email us at feedback@blazingstreams.com. Your opinions and suggestions really matter to us.
Please also tell your friends if you like what you see. We’re a super young company and appreciate your help to spread the word.
Thanks for using BlazingStreams!
www.blazingstreams.com
