Thoof, the personalized news discovery service, has released its first set of site upgrades since its launch earlier this summer. See here for our initial review.
Included in the upgrades are ThoofRank and Thoof it. ThoofRank is a numerical ranking that indicates the percentile for your story. It will show the percentage of other Thoof stories that your story is better than. The Thoof if feature is a browser add on, letting you submit content to Thoof as you surf the web. This works in a very similar manner to a Digg button, or the StumbleUpon browser add on.
There's also the ability to search content by the user that submitted it--this is done by clicking on the user name and seeing all other posts from the same user. This function works for a story's source, too. Completely new stories were already colored in blue, while stories that have been viewed are gray. But now there is a green hue for those stories which are new to only you, making the site more personalized within its larger community.
The changes reflect ways to improve an individual's use of the site, which are helpful, though there are still some larger aspects to Thoof's community that could be tweaked as well, such as the voting system and its potential impact on the validity of Thoof's recommendation and promotion system.