the new surchur

We’ve launched the most recent update to surchur with a new design, a much faster backend and several fun features.  We’ve had a lot of fun testing concepts and coming up with new ideas about how to make the “now” more interesting for our users.  Over the next several posts we plan on highlighting in more detail the different features but for now here is a quick overview of what you’ve got in the ‘09 model of surchur:

The surchmeter:

The surchmeter is a new concept we came up with while realizing that we have all of these topics floating around on surchur and no sense of just how popular they are on surchur and around the web.  The surchmeter helps to solve that so you have a relative sense of how popular one topic is versus another.  On the meter a “10″ means the topic is pretty much as popular as it gets and a “1″ is not so much.

The surchmeter

History pages

The new surchur history feature

The history feature for a topic gives you the opportunity to see what was going on for a topic in the past.  We are caching the pages of our most popular surch topics so that you can go back and view them later.  Simply click on the “history for topic” link and you’ll find a list of all the dates for which that topic has a history page.

RSS enhancements

We’ve enhanced the RSS feature of all of our pages to give a simple summary of what’s going on from a variety of sources for a given keyword.  Simply click on the RSS button in the upper right of any surchur page to see the RSS feeds available.

More sources for popular topics

surchur's new sources for popular topics

We’ve added several new sources that allow you to track what is hot on the internet - on blogs, social media, pictures, videos and more.  We now have Yahoo Buzz, CNN Topics, Google Trends, Twitter Trending and Technorati popular topics available on the home page or by clicking on the “catching fire” link in the navigation bar.

We hope you like the new design and additions to the site.  In coming posts we’ll go into a little more detail about how you can use the new features.