We are very excited to introduce Follow - a way to personalize your Android Central experience and get notified when new content is added. In addition to Android Central, the Follow feature is also available across our family of Mobile Nations properties, including 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.
Reader comments
New Site Feature: Follow the Android Central content you care about and get notified of it instantly!
cools
But how will trolls find us if we are only looking at the stuff we are interested in?? Cant wait to try this out!!! Nice
The trolls will find you with the "follow member", of course. Not sure AC thought that one through . . .
Posted via Android Central App
Mobile?
AT&T Nexus 5
edit: skimmed the article. got it. awesome!
Yep the latest Chrome supports push notifications through the browser, even if you don't have Chrome open. Give it a try by visting https://www.androidcentral.com/follow from Chrome on Android.
Integrate this shizz with pushbullet and you are golden
I think we can add Pushbullet support fairly easily, it will just be treated as another push endpoint. Will do some testing this week.
Is this going to be a part of an update to the app soon?
Posted via the Android Central App
Crackberry Kevin makes a rare appearance
Posted via the Android Central App
When will the AC app support push notification?
Posted via the Android Central App
One thing at a time. :)
Phil! You assured me months ago that it was coming, as well as the material design update. I still believe in you, Santa.
Posted from my Motorola Moto G.
I'm happy to announce here for the third time that we're 100 percent finally starting to begin work on Material Design. :) (And, really, we are. Like I said — changed developers and had to fix broken stuff first. Still have to fix broken stuff, actually.)
Very cool. Can't wait for this to come to mobile.
Posted via the Android Central App
Just remember that the Chrome service worker spec for push might change in upcoming releases.
It"s not yet a fixed standard.. but soon
Gotta love service workerd
That's pretty cool!
WOW AC went with material design! I think i have to turn down my screen brightness.
Nice touch to the Mobile Nations sites. I think I'm going to enjoy this a lot.
Posted via the Android Central App
Doesn't work for me in Chrome (Chromebook, or Chrome on my computer). When I get down to the bottom, I just get the spinning icon. When I try in Firefox, then more content loads at the bottom.
I just started to follow posts answered by ambassador Rukbat, as he has gems of wisdom, but volume wise that's not good.
Now if I were to get emails for every post by B. Diddy, the entire interweb, my email account, my devices and pc would all grind to a halt. :)
Posted via the Android Central App
Word!... ;D