You spoke and we listened. As of today, you’ll be able to track your Warhammer Online characters in your Raptr profile. Once you enter your character(s), we automatically track your characters’ items, levels, and Renown in your feeds for all you friends to see. So if you hit Level 40 before any of your friends, they’ll know about it. Of course, we created a custom module for your characters, so visitors to your profile page can check them out and see how you’re doing.

Timezone Support

For those of you not in the Pacific time zone, we’ve also added a timezone option that will update all charts to reflect your time zone. Simply go to your Account Settings page and select the proper time zone. Now you’ll know for sure when your friends around the world are playing Rock Band 2 at midnight in your own time zone.

Search Improvements

We’ve also made some big behind the scenes improvements to our search engine. First, we made the button prettier and easier to understand that you can change what you’re searching directly from the header. We made the search engine much faster, so if your friends joined only a little while ago, they should show up in search results in just a few minutes. Last but not least, we added way more information to the index, so you can now search for things like gamertags and character names and you’ll be able to find them in Raptr. So if you had a great time playing Halo 3 with “osunick” on Xbox Live, simply search for “osunick” in player search and you’ll be able to see if they’re on Raptr.

The FAQ has also been updated with answers to the most frequently asked questions from our community, so please check it out if you have questions. If we haven’t answered one of your burning questions, shoot us a feedback message via the “Beta Feedback” widget on Raptr, or post a message in our forums. We read every bit of feedback we get and it helps us decide what to do next, so please let us know what you think!

We’d like to think our launch last week was the biggest gaming news this weekend but there’s little doubt that the real news was the launch of Will Wright and Maxis’ much anticipated Spore. If you’ve been playing it, you’ll no doubt have created a ton of creatures and wonders to share with other worlds and civilizations.

Of course, we here at Raptr want to help you share these legendary lifeforms with your friends and have been diligently integrating Spore related features. You may have seen some of them pop up already.

Here are some of the things we’ve added since Spore launched yesterday:

• we automatically track Spore gameplay on Mac or PC when you have the Raptr client running
• we will update your activity feed with Spore gameplay
• when you add your Spore screen name we can automatically update your feed when you create new creatures or even when you make a revision to a creature
• your creatures can be viewed in a Spore module on your profile page
• any achievements you unlock in Spore can be shared with your friends automatically
• as with anything else we sync with, you can optionally send updates on your social networks when any Spore event occurs

We can’t wait to see what you all create with this incredible game and creation engine! As usual, if you have any feedback, please let us know in our forums.

No more secret handshakes, no more private invites; we’re proud to open the doors to Raptr and share the service in an open public beta! If you’ve already been keeping tabs on us and are just itching to get started, you can sign up for an account and take a spin now. Otherwise, we’d love to share with you a little bit about what Raptr is and how we hope it will help you and your gaming experiences.

Being social is hard

Raptr was born out of a stellar team of people who are passionate about playing and discovering games. Naturally, one of our favorite pastimes we love to do is play games with our friends. What should be a seemingly easy process can be surprisingly frustrating and difficult.

Our team plays a wide variety of games ranging from desktop to consoles to Facebook. In every case, each game or system seemed to require a separate login before we could even begin to see whether our friends were playing. There was no single place to go to see what your friends were playing – until now.

Know when your friends are playing

Between Raptr and our Raptr client, we’ve created a service that automatically knows if you’re playing a game across nearly any platform including PC, Xbox Live, Mac, Flash, Social games, browser-based games, Steam, and even some games on the Wii and PS3, then notifies your friends that you’re playing.

But notifying your friends on Raptr that you’re playing is only half the battle.  We wanted to be able to play a game, and without any effort, inform all of our friends so they might join us or such that we might join them in a game. So we also built integration into services such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to automatically update your status on those sites. Your friends don’t even need to be on Raptr to see that you’re playing.

See how your friends are doing in their games

When you watch a TV show, the experience isn’t only during the time you’re watching it. In fact, a lot of the experience is in discussing the show afterwards with your friends. We realized that games have the same property. Whether we’re comparing high scores, describing some quirky moment or organizing a time to play, we find ourselves engaging in games even when we’re not playing them.

Raptr tracks how you and your friends are progressing in games and helps facilitate such conversations. We built technologies that enable us to automatically pull events happening in games, such as a friend leveling up her character in World of Warcraft, playing a new game for the first time, noting a particular time a friend tends to play, completing a song on Expert in Guitar Hero, or unlocking an achievement on Xbox Live. These events are shared with whomever you choose to share and the ensuing conversations and events expand even single player game experiences to multi-player like social experiences.

But even with this rich level of detail, our philosophy is, “make it automatic, make it easy.” So we designed it such that you only need to enter the appropriate identities once (e.g., your Xbox Gamertag) and we will sync everything for you.

Discover new games you might like

In terms of conversations about games, what better conversation than, “you should check out this game”? One thing we think is pretty cool about Raptr is that we intelligently recommend games to you that you didn’t even know existed or that you didn’t even know were out yet.  We do this by making recommendations based on what you and your friends actually own and play, something that we think will constantly improve the more you and your friends use Raptr.

Just getting started …

We’re pretty ecstatic about what we’ve accomplished so far but we realize the product is new and may be somewhat rough around the edges.  These features are just some of the things we’ve been working on. If you play around with Raptr, you’ll find that there’s a lot more we haven’t even mentioned yet.

Now that we are in public beta, improving the product is going to be a joint effort and we’re excited to have you as part of the team. We have many more features in the works such as a set of open APIs to enable anyone to hook into our platform to surface cool information from their games or websites.   Your input helps shape where Raptr goes from here.  If you’re a game developer and are interested in working with us, please drop us a line at bizdev@raptr.com.

We’d love to hear from you and have made sure you have plenty of ways to let us know your thoughts. We’re always watching our forums as well as those who follow us on our twitter account but you can also contact us directly through our feedback module on the site or even emailing us at feedback@raptr.com.

Have fun trying out Raptr! Game on!