We just pushed out a couple of new features on the main dashboard/home page that we think will help keep you on top of pending friend requests, unread messages, and game news as well as connect you with more friends with the enhanced People You May Know module. Also, to help you personalize your profile page, we’ve added some new editing capabilities that should help you jazz up your profile page.

Pending Friend Request / Unread Message Notifications and Game News

We added a new notification module in the home page that we think will help you never forget about another friend request or message from a friend. If you now sign-in to Raptr and have pending friend requests and/or unread messages, a notification module will pop up underneath your profile box letting you know how many friend requests and/or unread messages you have.

Also, to help you stay informed with the latest news about your games, we added a news module in the home page that will pull the latest news from popular game news sites like Gamespot and IGN.

Hopefully these two new features on the home page will help you never forget about a friend request from an old buddy and never miss another interesting news item about your favorite game.

People You May Know

When we first launched the People You May Know Module couple months ago, we promised that we would continue to improve on this feature to help you connect with friends on Raptr. Well, as promised, we updated the People You May Know module so that it now shows what friends you have in common with the person we recommended to you.

New Editing Capabilities for Your Profile Page

Are your friends having a hard time finding you on Raptr? Try updating your profile page using the new editing features to update your name, age, location and quote. We added inline editing capabilities, so that you can quickly edit your profile information straight from your profile page. Start connecting with friends and meet more new people by keeping your profile page updated now!

We’d love to hear from you on what you think of these new features and updates. Please feel free to drop by our forums and share your thoughts.

Game On!

We are thrilled to announced that the Webby Awards acknowledged Raptr as an Official Honoree in the Social Networking category! The Webby Award is the equivalent of an Oscar or Grammy Award in the online space, so being honored with one is quite a privilege. Just to give you an idea, out of the 10,000 sites that were officially submitted to the awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree. The Webby Awards site had this to say about how they selected an Official Honoree:

Some are beautiful to look at and interact with. Others are a testament to usability and functionality. And a handful excel across the board. To be selected among the best is an incredible achievement worthy of praise — and perhaps a little bragging.

We hope that our users also feel that we encompass most (or all) of the qualities mentioned by the Webby Awards. Thanks and please continue to provide feedback on our forums.

Game On!

We don’t do it for the awards but it’s nice to be recognized for our efforts. To quote the Morningstar article,

Each OnHollywood 100 winner demonstrated leadership in innovation, market opportunity, commercialization, media buzz, and stakeholder value creation.

“This year’s OnHollywood 100 companies represent the future of entertainment and spotlight how technology and digital media have and will continue to deeply impact the entertainment industry as we know it,” said Tony Perkins, founder and CEO of AlwaysOn.

We’re happy to have been named within this list and are also proud that we were named the category winner in Consumer Services! Thanks guys!

We have a huge list of new stuff for you this week. We’ve improved the profile page to help you express yourself and learn more about others and we’ve added to the games pages to give you more information about the games, too.

Compatibility

First of all, you may notice when you look at someone’s profile page, you will see your compatibility with them.

We’ll be steadily improving the fancy math that we use to determine how alike you are to someone else. Make sure you track your gameplay with our desktop client and add games to your library to get more accurate results!

Genre Chart

If you don’t think that’s enough to get an idea of the person you’re looking at, we’ve also added a fancy automatically generated genre chart that shows the kinds of games a person plays.

Rich Text Biography

Aside from improving your experience when looking at others, we’ve also added some things to help you express yourself better. You used to be able to enter a few lines of text about yourself. Now, you can use our rich text editor and include links, photos and fancier text to truly express yourself and own your profile page. Just go to your profile page to get started.

Latest Review and Loved Games

You can also express what games you’re into in more ways now. If you’ve reviewed any games on Raptr, your latest review will be shown on your profile page. If you’ve professed your love for any games, you’ll also be able to show that off.

Metacritic Score

Speaking of love, we’ve shown some love to the games pages as well. Just like the profiles, we want to help you find out more about a game and whether you’d like it. And what better way to show you that than including the Metacritic score for the game?

Raptr Support Levels

We’ve also added some additional information about each game so you know which Raptr features apply to the game. We call this the Raptr Support Level. For example, we currently can track play sessions for Xbox LIVE, PC, Flash and Mac games. For some of these games, we support One-Click Join and for most of the PC games, we also auto-update them for you. Now you can easily tell which awesome Raptr features apply to your game (and can tell us if your game isn’t getting enough love).

Wants to Play

Last but not least, we added two features to help you connect with your friends when you want to play a game. The first is a feature that we literally call wants to play. From your Raptr homepage, instead of setting a status, you can set “wants to play” and the game you’re in the mood for. Raptr will optionally let you message any friends who also have that game. So if you feel like a game of Left 4 Dead, Raptr will notify your L4D buddies for you!

Desktop Gameplay Notifications

On the PC client, whenever a friend starts playing a game, you’ll get a desktop notification that they’ve started. We’ve already found this pretty handy at the office to know when a Starcraft game is starting up.

And More …

That’s not even the entire list of stuff we’ve added. There’s a long list of smaller things that we’ll leave for you to discover. We’d love to hear what you guys think of these new features and what else you’d like to see. Remember to drop us a line on our forums!