Community Feature Pack 1.2 -- April 1, 2007

Here are details of our the features we're releasing today -- but hey, if you've already built a Magnify.net channel, just sign in to the admin area of your site and see for yourself.

What you'll find is a whole bunch of yummy goodness with more plump and delicious community features, lots of new searchable video, and a powerful new suite of RSS features -- so you can discover new content, and folks can subscribe to your feeds.

So check out the Community Feature Pack - and watch our video intro - and of course, explore....

1. Home Page Members Listing What's the best way to build a community? To put the face of the community right up front. With this new home page module, you can do just that. Just drag-and-drop the Members List element onto your home page. The 'face' of your site, front and center!

2. Your Channel's New RSS Feeds How can visitors be connected to your site? With the new RSS feeds enabled across the Magnify.net service, visitors can subscribe to your channel and be alerted whenever a new video is posted, or a member adds a review. RSS is about sharing -- and we're all about that.

3. Show Any RSS Feed on Your Home Page Keep your channel's home page up to date with links to fresh content from a wide variety of sources. Just use the home page design tool to add a custom RSS module from Engadget, BoingBoing, The New York Times, CNET, your favorite blogger, or any other feed source. (Thanks to new Magnify team member Doug Vunic for putting this together.) Now, the world's content can now be delivered to your channel, piping hot.

4. Social Networking Widgets Provide more ways for users to interact with your home page with these new home page options: - Let your site's members talk amongst themselves, live on your channel's home page, using the chat widget powered by Gabbly. - Buttons from AddThis make it easy for users to bookmark or subscribe to your site using dozens of different social bookmarking and web-based feed reading sites. - Easily accept credit card donations from your site's visitors using PayPal.

5. Community Discussion Boards We've had a lot of requests for a way for channels to be able to implement and share ideas, conversations, and discussions, so with this release we've added a community discussion area. You can set moderation levels, control contributors, and adjust how this feature appears to meet your Channels' requirements.

6. New Sources of Video The list of of video sources we search continues to grow, with DailyMotion and MetaCafe the latest additions. (And more on the way...)

7. New Search Options We've added a new new suite of search terms that gives you the power to search (and auto-search) a particular YouTube user name, user favorites, and most popular videos. This is a powerful fun new search gizmo. Try searching YouTube for your username (user:prezvid) and you'll get just the videos that user uploaded. (Special thanks to Jeff Jarvis for suggesting this feature, and for Simon Cavalletto for bring it to life.)

8. New Design Templates We've added a suite of 5 new design templates to our collection of choices. Designed by Yana Kuzin-Illan (who also recently refreshed the design of the Magnify player page), these rich and rounded designs can give your pages a glossy new feel.

9. User Moderation Channel administrators now have the option to block the accounts of members who don't play nice. Now you control who can participate in your channel.

10. New Support Channels Get help when you need it. Check out these screen-cast videos for step-by-step instructions for managing your Magnify.net site: http://support.magnify.net/. If you need a hand with something more specific, just click and we'd be glad to help: http://www.magnify.net/support/request/.

# Sample Sites You can see live examples of some of the new features at these sample sites: - Corporate Site: http://www.corporateinc.magnify.net/ - Video Blog: http://www.myvideoblog.magnify.net/ - Community Site: http://www.411hoboken.magnify.net/