We are very excited to introduce Follow - a way to personalize your Windows Central experience and get notified when new content is added. In addition to Windows Central, the Follow feature is also available across our family of Mobile Nations properties, including Android Central, iMore, Windows Central, CrackBerry and Connectedly.
We have built a system that is easy to use yet offers you maximum flexibility. You will now be able to follow:
- Topics - Follow companies, devices, or any other topic such as Apple, Asus, Galaxy S6, Verizon, Google I/O
- Authors - Follow your favorite writer, article, comments and forum posts
- Members - Follow members to discover when they post new comments and forum posts
- Article Comments - Follow an article's comment stream
- Forum Posts - Follow a forum thread's post stream
- Replies - Follow replies to your comments or forum threads you have participated in.
All of this activity will be displayed in a compact stream in the sidebar that appears when you tap on your user profile image at the top of the site (when logged in). If you follow content from more than one Mobile Nations site, it will aggregate the content from multiple sites into one single stream. We're also testing a "stickied" version of the follow stream as well as a full sized version. You can almost think of the full sized version being a customized homepage or dashboard showing you only the things you care about.
Follow is also the cornerstone of our new, much-requested notification system. For any of your follow activity, you can choose to get alerted using real-time push notifications via the Chrome web browser (both desktop and Android) and OS X Safari browser, or via instant emails. The same notifications will also be sent to upcoming releases of our popular apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry. With the plumbing for the Follow system now in place, we are also going to add new site features that give you further control over how you consume content, including Custom RSS feeds, Wildcard text search, and WebSockets for Follow Stream.
Be sure to watch the video above for a quick look at how it all works and be sure to give it a try. If you have any feedback or run into any issues, please report them on this Mobile Nations forum thread.
