PostRank logoYou know when you’re up to something cool? Something of super secret ninja proportions? And the only thing that makes it easier not to tell is that you’re so busy you wouldn’t even have time to leak the juicy news?

Yeah, it’s been like that around here lately… But today’s the day! We’re launching a whole bunch of things that will make the AideRSS experience even better!

1) PostRank.com website

We’re announcing PostRank as a service, independent of AideRSS. Any developer can now integrate PostRank into his/her application to take advantage of our social engagement analysis. We see PostRank as the de facto engagement ranking platform, and want to be transparent about it. On the PostRank site, you’ll find a lot of material that exposes how we track engagement: the AideRSS model of the 5C’s of engagement, which sources we track, etc.

2) Thematic PostRank™

Any user or developer can now use our platform to rank any arbitrary set of online articles, i.e. they don’t have to come from the same feed like before. We will still support the Feed-based PostRank model, but now you can also define your own context, e.g. a folder in Google Reader, a collection of technology articles — e.g. articles about Microsoft from ZDNet, TechCrunch, Mashable, etc.

3) Google Reader Extension with Thematic PostRank

To showcase Thematic PostRank, we have officially launched our Google Reader extension with the new built-in ranking mechanisms and a collection of other speed improvements. As a user, you will get Feed-based PostRank whenever you are browsing a single feed, and when you switch to a folder or All Items view, you will be using Thematic PostRank, which will help you find the top articles in that context.

4) New APIs and more data sources

Rebuilt from the ground up: faster, more sources, and no caching delays. Plus, we are now tracking clicks and views from Google Reader through our widgets and through our partners. In other words, if you install our widget on your page, PostRank will take into account the number of pageviews for each page, as well as clicks on the links. Last but not least, we’re also announcing live tracking of Ma.gnolia bookmarks and Pownce messages.

engagement sources

Big thanks to all of the team at AideRSS for their hard work. Super big thanks to our partners as well, Larry Halff and the Ma.gnolia team, and Leah Culver and the Pownce team, for all their help with the integration work. Our partners rock!

We really think these new offerings and improvements will take the RSS experience to a whole new level. We want to make it easy, seamless, and totally productive for everyone to Read What Matters.

And we’re just getting started…