What did the BaconMarathon just do?!

After months of racking our brains, we have officially pulled the "the invite only" lock down and made the site available! As of today, everyone can now become Persistent Fans of the stuff you love! (at least we'll call it BETA)

Feel free to go to http://www.persistentfan.com and play around.

To give you some ideas to get started, here are some of the topics Bacon is watching:
animal collective
artie lange
cheech and chong
Coming To iPhone
Conan O'Brien
fillmore SF
gilmor gang
guy smiley
Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret
Japandroids
jersey shore situation
koko cocktails
LCD Soundsystem
mavericks surf
Philadelphia Phillies
philly cheesesteaks
pitchfork tv
silversun pickups
techcrunch
The Simpsons


We've have been eating our own stew here for a couple months so we're very excited to see what you think.


Take care,
The BaconMarathon Labs Team

Mike (Bacon) & Dave (Marathon)

Introducing... (to anyone that loves to help early development)

After a little hiatus, we are full steam ahead with a brand new website called PersistentFan.com that we think users will find to be a lot of fun.

How did we get here?
From previous blog entries you can read about the steps we took towards developing top3Clicks within Facebook's "walled garden". After plenty of market testing it became painfully clear that the changes made to the user experience of the Facebook developers platform hindered ease of use for our users. Also, with the announcement of Facebook Connect, for us, it became increasingly more costly to take advantage of the initial goodness Facebook had once offered.

What is PersistentFan.com?
PersistentFan.com searches for terms from specific sites and notifies you to watch as new content that becomes available for that term over any length of time. While watching terms you can also monitor and participate in Twitter chatter of that topic.

Here are some of the new features users are in complete control over:

• Quick search of topics to see what content is available
• Maintain a topic list of terms that are important to you
• Get notified when new content become available (User controls notification frequency)
• Share cool videos on Facebook wall and participate in Twitter conversation
• Watch the Twitter chatter for specific topic
• Available as a website and modified iPhone website
  

So, as you can see, we rolled up our sleeves and took the steps to keep some top3Clicks concepts (and added a ton more) as a stand alone website.

As far as Facebook is concerned for us, we have enabled Facebook Connect and plan to continue to add features leveraging the 'new goodness' Facebook now provides.

Take care,
The BaconMarathon Labs Team

Mike (Bacon) & Dave (Marathon)

Smell Starbucks and Philz Coffee perculating again...?

Stay tuned...

It is all about sharing...

The BaconMarathon team just launched a cool 'sharing' videos with friends feature.

Here is how it works:

Step 1. Find a video that you either totally love or you think your friend will totally love and click on the red 'Share Video With Friends' button. (pic below)

Step 2. When the new pop-up appears, type in friend(s) you'd like to share with and hit 'Send'.

Step 3. On the next screen, type in a witty comment to entice your friend to waste a little of their time watching the video and hit 'Publish'.

Step 4. A message appears on your friends wall and they are notified that you requested them to watch the video!

I have been sharing videos that I have been watching over the last month to my friends all morning. It is a total blast!

As usual, feedback is mandatory and welcome...

-Bacon

What are the top3Click-ers doing?

We have turned our focus on adding features that make top3Clicks more compelling.

With that in mind, with the recent significant uptick in video watching, we added a new section called 'Most recently watched videos' that when selected will display in rotation videos that are being watched by everybody.

We're diving into helping users find new videos they may have never thought of watching in the past. (Even if they are frequent YouTube users!)

Users just need to click on the Watch Videos button (in red above) to see what everyone is doing!

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

- Bacon

Where have we been lately?

I love that title!

Over the last month we have been very focused on working on the user experience. We have been analyzing user behavior and making small tweaks, here and there, to see if users make better decisions.

One example, we noticed users were clicking on the 'Watch More Channels' button but a majority were not clicking to come back to watch the cool videos. We changed the button name a bunch of times starting with just 'submit' and ending with 'Click to Add List'. We have seen significant improvement. The tiniest of things matter in this game!

New Feature:
We also noticed a lot of users only tend to watch one video topic (i.e. Star Wars). To help give users some more ideas, we added a 'Watch Top 15 Items' button. (screen shot below)

When the user clicks on this button, a popup appears offering a list of the top 15 watched items, at that moment, from the entire top3Clicks user base.

We named it 'Got Brain Freeze?' because we want to help users that are just plain stuck trying to figure out what to watch. ;) (screen shot below)

When we took this feature live, we instantly saw a lot of people taking advantage of it.

We are so excited about this feature that we realized that this is now only the beginning of our plans for this direction of features.

So as always, stay tuned!

-Bacon