Release 27: Housekeeping before the US Football onslaught

Housekeeping stuff this week, but let us wade into the details.

1. We optimized the experience for first-time users coming to us from Twitter. They were churning off of the site at a higher rate than other users, in part because they didn’t have great context when they came to an article or video. We have a small welcoming experience for users who come to the site from Twitter, as of today.
2. We also optimized the first-time user experience for people coming to us from Facebook, so that they get the initial welcome screen exposing them to the site’s functionality
3. We created a series of feeds for our API partners so that they can get the full firehose of data, or a subset according to “strict” rules or the much sterner-sounding “severe” set of rules.
4. We changed our feeds that we publish in Twitter to adhere to “Severe” filtering, thereby optimizing our feed results in Twitter (so that users there don’t get content about other teams.)
5. We made sure that football boxscores work. They are functional for the NFL, and the NCAA will be up and running next weekend.
6. We added about 50 news sources, including Dime Magazine, news about the University of Hawaii teams, and more.
7. We also did some UX housekeeping as well. Look for a simpler interface next week, as we take to heart the usability testing we have been doing over the last two weeks.

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we have missed anything using the Feedback tab on the left of every page.

Ty