... since knowing what's wrong with a user interface is the very first step to actually changing things for the better! Since we asked for suggestions last week now that we're actually iterating on our Web application screens, we were overwhelmed with complaints and suggestions, ranging from trivially fixable to catastrophic import gaps.

That request resulted in a lot of email to sort through, which pointed out that the most urgent feature we needed was a better feedback system. We're trying one out from our friends at UserVoice. They've been amazingly frank about blogging their own entrepreneurial journey, too.

So while our future features may be better-organized, for now we'll just have to anonymize the suggestions that just shipped out today -- our heartfelt thanks goes out to all of our users who deserve credit for helping push this forward...

• skip search-results page if there's only one match and go straight to news about the person or company in your network that you wanted (autocomplete would be even nicer)
• redirect anonymous users to a special "front page ticker" of all recently confirmed stories by visibly rewriting the URL to address a rare session-state bug.
• sharing a link from a story-view page correctly copies the title of the article into the Subject: line.
• more concise and easier-to-share email links for your desktop email application and Google Mail. This replaces the 'more' link, and is only visible while browsing the Web user interface.
• allow users to track anyone on LinkedIn, using any full profile URL for people beyond your first-degree connections
• the shortnames for sources are now visible, clickable links (e.g. epthinking.blogspot.com) that open in new tabs or windows.
• experimenting with new wording for the 3 key actions for training our matching engine: confirm, reject, or pass (formerly 'hide'). Also changed the sidebar Feedback menu to link to all of your Confirmed or Rejected selections.
• put back the menu option to Start or Stop Following a person or company entirely; it was only offered in Newspaper (Grid) view before.
• added new Share menu options for sending message using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• rearranged the feed to place more emphasis on headlines, less on the names of people mentioned within.
• our own url-shortening service, to make more room in your Tweets, such as http://angstro.com/11725507
• added a UserVoice feedback forum for future suggestions!