Competitious News

We added site thumbnails to the competitor overview pages today. For those of you with a long list of competitors this should help you visualize who each of your competitors are more quickly.

Here is a screen shot of what the new competitor pages look like:

We have received terrific feedback and lots of traffic from outside of the US. As a result, we have switched over to UTF-8 as our default character set and made the necessary changes to display international characters properly.

New users can now take advantage of our help icons to get instant assistance with our interface and the various features it supports. You can click on any of the question marks to the right of the headers to view the help content.

Comment Alerts and Invites are now emailed with the sender’s username in the from address. This should help your team members recognize who the email is from more and not perceive it as spam. The reply-to address is now set to be your email address so that team members can reply directly to comment alerts and invites as well.

We pushed out several new features and many improvements today.  A lot of you had some great suggestions, which we really appreciate.

The things we’ve added include:

• Added the ability to set your own website URL separate from the competitor list.  The main purpose of this for now is to compare yourself against your competitors in the feature matrix and traffic graphs, but you can of course add comments and clippings as well
• Feature matrix now highlights the features of your competitors that you are missing
• Comments and clippings can now be deleted by the admin, or by the creator, from the appropriate competitor page
• Adding features is slightly more intuitive, with better directions
• You can now view more than five related blog posts about a competitor
• Fixed the recent clippings feed so it no longer returns an error when there are no clippings

We’re listening to all your feedback, and have many more improvements coming soon.  Please keep your suggestions coming!

Competitious is a new service that lets individuals and teams easily track their competition. Our initial launch focuses on giving you the ability to organize your competitive research in a secure manner so that you and your team can collaboratively stay up to date on your competition. At this point Competitious provides you with the following features:

• Maintain a list of your competition with easy access to information on a particular competitor
• Get at-a-glance web traffic information for each competitor, or compare the traffic of your competitors on a single graph
• View a competitor’s latest blog posts, or blog news about them
• Clip articles or information on the Web about your competition
• Add comments about each competitor
• Build a feature matrix to compare the competition’s feature offerings against your own
• Create multiple projects, and invite other team members to collaborate with you on a project

We have a lot of improvement and feature releases on the way. Future releases will begin to help you filter and analyze more sources of information, in addition to organizing new intelligence about your competition. We’ll be discussing new feature releases and ideas here, and we love to hear your feedback. Stay tuned!