We’re delighted to announce the launch of some major new features today (think of them as a Christmas present from the dev team!). In all, they are intended to make competing on Hubdub easier and more exciting. They are:

• Net worth graphs - ever wondered how your net worth has changed over time? Over the last 24 hours? Now you can see this via an interactive chart (like Google Finance) on your dashboard. Your net worth is shown hourly for the last 24 hours, daily from December 13th, and weekly back to around April time.
• Star levels - the competition on Hubdub, we hope, just got a lot more interesting. To make it more exciting to increase your net worth we’ve introduced 20 levels of Hubdubber from Newbie (anything up to H$1,025) to Hubdub God (H$5,000,000). No one has yet made it to God status so good luck everyone! You can also snoop on other Hubdubbers’ net worths by hovering your mouse over their star. A full list of stars and net worths can be found in the FAQ here.
• Improved prediction management - predictions are now searchable and sortable by default. You can switch back to the old screen if you need to with a link in the top right corner. However, the new screen gives you search, sort, filter by market and daily change for each prediction (so you can see what’s moving in your portfolio).
• Simplified navigation - we’ve combined the two Dashboard and My Predictions tabs back into a simple starting point: My Hubdub. Your predictions screen is still accessible in one click from any screen: just click your predictions worth in the top right. This top right area now also shows your net worth and star level.

So, come check out these new releases when you get a chance.
As ever, we’re eager to hear your feedback on these developments. Please feel free to contact us or post your thoughts in the forums.

Enjoy! (and good luck climbing up those star levels)

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Image via Wikipedia The brand new Hubdub Dashboard is now live. It’s intended to make it easier to see your and your friends’ predictions, activity and performance on Hubdub at a glance. It replaces the old My Hubdub area, and your predictions can now be found on the new My Predictions tab.

The Dashboard shows your latest activity on the site (with links to e.g. manage your recent predictions), as well as replies to your comments and comments on your questions to make discussions around questions easier to follow. It also shows your friends’ activity (predictions, comments) to help you find interesting questions and comment on your friends’ wagers.

In the top right there are tasks to complete (so new users can begin to understand how to play Hubdub), and just below a zoom into your position on the leaderboard, with the people just ahead (so you can try and beat them) and just behind (so you can stay ahead of them!).

It also gives you some stats on your performance and activity.

Check out your dashboard here: http://www.hubdub.com/p/MyDashboard

Hopefully it’ll make it easier to keep up with the activity on Hubdub, and make things even more fun as we develop it over the coming months.

As always, any thoughts or feedback most welcome. Enjoy!

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Image via WikipediaAs you may have noticed, we have carried on working on the tagging system, putting lots of pretty tag clouds all over place. I hope you’re finding this useful - all feedback welcome as ever.

We don’t use these tags for news gathering any more, so there is no longer any need to type contorted and repetitive phrases to try and find news articles

Just a couple of other tips for question creators, so that we minimize duplicate tags:

• The best tags autocomplete when you start typing - we like these tags best because we know they already exist
• Tag the country in the world section (except in UK, where we already know it)
• Tag the league or competition in sport (unless there’s actually a subcat for it, eg. MLB). ‘English Premier League’, ‘Bundesliga’ and ‘Wimbledon’ are good tags. Also try to tag the team/teams (’toronto blue jays’, ‘fulham fc’, ‘ny mets’, ‘la galaxy’ are good examples)
• Don’t put in a tag that means the same as the category or subcategory (eg, there is no need for ‘us election 08′ or similar on a question when that is the subcategory. Same for ‘mlb’/'major league baseball’ etc.
• We prefer full names for people, eg Barack Obama rather than Obama, and Didier Drogba instead of Drogba. Dubya is ‘George W Bush’, and I don’t think anybody has ever mentioned his dad on the site anyway
• Avoid plurals ‘republican’ is better than ‘republicans’

Hope you enjoy anyway

Chris

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