Simler Steps Their Game Up with Redesign and Likes

We covered Simler just about a month ago and they have done anything but sitting at home eating snacks all day since then. The new Simler takes a lot of feedback from the initial user-base and puts it into action. If you recall, Simler lets you focus your online discussions with your friends and associates by centering them around tags. Once you sign up, you pick some tags or topics you want to talk about and things flow from there. With the new redesign and feature additions, Simler goes a little further in showing how useful it can actually be.

The Redesign

The redesign helps to focus on the basic areas of the site that deserve your attention. The Home feed is the standard one which includes your friends and tags that you have subscribed to. My Tags focuses more on the actual topics themselves that you have displayed interest in. This feed shows every post to those tags, whether they’re from your friends or not. My Friends takes the alternate approach of showing you every post made by any of your friends, regardless of what tags they go to.

So, if you are looking to stay focused and on topic, you would hang around on My Tags. When you start getting bored, jump over to My Friends and see what they are talking about. You might just discover some new and interesting topics and the added benefit is that they’ve already been vetted by people you like. If you’re feeling really adventurous, the latest five posts from across the entire Simler network are accessible from your sidebar so you can jump into any random ongoing discussion.

The SimKing

Being a FriendFeed fan, I can’t imagine a service without some way to Like stuff. Sometimes, you don’t really want to leave a comment, but you want a way to just show you liked something. FriendFeed started it, Facebook made it popular, and now Simler is continuing it. There is one major difference on Simler, though. They have actually turned Likes into a sort of competition. The user with the most Likes and comments on their content within a certain tag becomes the SimKing of that tag.

They get featured on that tag’s page and they get to rock a special badge on their profile. Of course, the tag has to have more than 100 users in order to be included in the rankings at all, which are updated at least once a month. Could this result in people trying to game the system? Probably, but anyone who has tried to reach the top ranks of FFholic (which ranks FriendFeed by number of Likes and comments) will tell you that the only way to win is to actually post good stuff and engage with the community.

Adding another level detail to their tagging system, Simler has also introduced Favorite Tags. This lets you highlight specific topics that interest you more than others and also brings those topics into your home feed. Overall, Simler is shaping up to be a powerful tool in the social media world and is only getting better. Definitely one to watch.