Better Tracking, Contentualize Plus, and Following Friends
There's a difference between saving something you want to watch and remembering where you left off when you finally watch it. The same goes for the book on your nightstand or the podcast you're slowly catching up on.
We've shipped three things in Contentualize recently, and they all point the same way. The app should know more about what you're actually doing with movies, TV, books, and podcasts, and it should make that more fun to share.
- Journey tracking now fits each kind of media.
- Contentualize Plus is out.
- You can follow people, so what they post shows up in your feed.
Here's what each one means for you.
Journey tracking that fits the medium
Journey has always answered one question: where are you with this title? You answer with a status: Planned, In Progress, On Hold, Finished, or Dropped. The Track Your Journey guide explains each one.
What's new is what you can record once something is In Progress. A half-read book and a half-watched series are different kinds of half, so tracking now works differently for each.
TV shows and podcasts track episodes. Your next episode is one tap away, and each show has its own progress line. Catching up is a tap instead of a menu.
Movies get a progress slider. If we know the runtime, it shows how many minutes you have left.
Books get the same slider plus a page number, so it's easy to find your place again.
Movies and books also take a quick note of up to 500 characters. Use it for whatever you want to remember, or say, when you come back.
A dashboard that starts with what you're in the middle of
Your Journey dashboard now opens with Continue where you left off, so the first thing you see is what you're partway through. Below that are your four media categories and your statuses, each with a count.
- Series progress. For a series, Journey shows how many of its titles you've finished, and it can prompt you to log the rest.
- Cleanup in bulk. You can select several titles at once to favorite them or remove them.
- Removing keeps your history. Removing a title clears its status, rating, and favorite, but keeps its history.
Contentualize Plus: a monthly subscription for discovery
Plus is a monthly subscription, and I want to be clear about one thing first. The free app isn't getting worse to sell it. Swiping, your daily For You picks, Journey, and Circles all stay free.
Plus is for people who want more out of discovery. It has three parts.
- No ads. Plus removes ads from Discover, your recommendations, and title pages.
- Picks ready every morning, plus a 14-day look back. Your recommendations are ready in the morning without swiping first. You can also go back over the last 14 days, including batches you missed.
- Unlimited taste tuning. Tuning is where you tell us what you loved about a favorite, and your picks lean that way (how it works). Free members can tune one favorite a day. Plus removes that limit.
The value is time and precision. You spend less time on ads and on the days you didn't get to swipe, and your picks get more specific faster. If you only want the daily loop, you don't need Plus, and that's fine with me.
Plus is bought in the app on iPhone, iPad, or Android. Then sign in with the same account on the web and you'll have it there too.
Follow your friends in Contentualize
I think discovery is better with people you trust. Until now, Circles were the main way to talk about a title. Now you can also follow people.
- Find people by name or @username, then follow them from the search results or from their profile.
- Follower and following counts show on profiles, and each count opens the full list.
- One feed that brings it together. Your feed in the Circles tab mixes posts from the people you follow, the circles you joined, and the titles you follow, so one place shows what your people are into.
- Activity on profiles. A profile can show someone's recent Journey updates and favorites next to their posts. It's a quick way to see what a friend is reading or watching.
Notifications you control. You can get a notification when someone you follow posts, when someone posts in a circle you joined, or when someone posts about a title you follow. Each one has its own switch in Settings.
Privacy and your profile activity
Privacy is the part we care about most here, so here's exactly how it works:
- Your Journey updates and favorites only show on your profile if you leave that setting on, and you can turn it off in Settings at any time.
- Your posts and comments always show.
- The first time activity appears on your profile, the app tells you.
What's next
This is the start of the social side of Contentualize, not the end of it.
If you follow someone and wish the feed did something different, or if a medium needs better tracking than it has, I'd like to hear about it. Updates like this one will keep landing here on the blog, and our guides will keep up with them.
Thanks for tracking with us.
Landon