We’ve just pulled up the curtain and revealed the new face of ReadBurner! To see just how far we’ve come in the few short weeks since we acquired the site, here’s the before and after shot:

Aside from the shiny new interface (designed by Gary Bacon of PixelTalent), there are lots of exciting new features to talk about, so let’s dive right in:

Categories
We’ve got 3 main ways to filter news – Popular, Upcoming, and Most Recent. Here’s what each represents:

  • Popular: The most shared stories in the past 48 hours
  • Upcoming: The most shared stories in the past 24 hours
  • Most Recent: The most recently shared items

Sub-Categories
We now analyze each story in our system to determine which category it best fits into. This allows deeper filtering, for example, seeing the most popular stories about mobile apps, or the most recent stories shared about Apple. Each subcategory also comes with its own RSS feed (via the RSS icon in the top right of the page), so if you want to subscribe to Upcoming Desktop News, you can do that too.

Related Items
We now analyze each story in our system and group “related” stories based on similarities we find in the content. If a story has related items, they appear both in our story listings, and on an individual item’s page (for example: Google Jumps Head First Into Web Services With Google App Engine)

Comments
We’re quite excited to be using Disqus for our commenting system. With so much recent talk about “who owns the conversation,” Disqus and the blogs that utilize them enable readers to own their comments and build a reputation around them. The next step is making comments left on ReadBurner show up on the originating source – something we’re looking closely at with Disqus. Also, we’ve made it so there is one set of comments per each set of related items – we think this will also help keep the conversation together, rather than having 12 separate sets of comments for 12 different articles about the same topic.

Google Reader Integration
In an effort to drive further RSS adoption, more usage and sharing in Google Reader, and yes, to try and keep people on our site all day, we’ve integrated Google Reader into our interface. By clicking the Google Reader tab, Google’s most excellent RSS reader loads right inside of the ReadBurner interface, allowing you to read, write, and share all from within the same browser tab.

Top Sources
Our revised stats page has a new algorithm for determining the top sources on ReadBurner: total number of shares in the past week for a given source. This gives both established blogs and new blogs a chance to get on our leaderboard. Our stats page also shows the most recently shared posts from our top sources in an easy-to-view format.

Descriptive URLs
This is far from the sexiest feature in this release, but it’s a handy one. Want to see all the stories from Lifehacker that have been shared recently? Just go to readburner.com/source/lifehacker. Want to see all shared stories written by Louis Gray? Go to readburner.com/author/louisgray.

Update Frequency
We now scour for new items and run our algorithms approximately every 30 minutes. This should keep ReadBurner’s content very fresh.

Meanwhile, one of the questions we’re already getting a lot is “what’s next?” Beyond being as responsive as possible to the requests of our users that flow in over the next couple weeks, there are three key areas of product focus going forward:

Algorithms: Continually improving the core of our product – the news results – to make them more accurate and relevant.

Distribution: Offering more ways to access ReadBurner, and new ways for developers to leverage our data.

Users: Provide “sharers” with more information about themselves, content suggestions, and options for taking their ReadBurner data with them to other services.

Many thanks for checking out the site. We’re really excited to be working in what we believe is one of the next frontiers of the Web – aggregating the vast amounts of content being created and allowing users to make sense of it all in simple and transparent ways.

With that, welcome to the new ReadBurner! We welcome your feedback, and hope you’ll subscribe to our blog and follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest developments.

And last but not least, a huge congratulations to our awesome team, who at the moment, are all part-timers working on ReadBurner on nights and weekends in addition to their grueling day jobs: Drew, Thomas, Abner, and Alex (yep, the original Alex who started it all 5 months ago :)

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