We're rolling out some long-planned upgrades to the site today that we're pretty excited about. The two big changes:

• Our "Friends" feature is evolving into "Favorites"

• Our cover navigation tool now lets you sort posts far more dynamically 

Your Friends will soon show up on the site as your Favorites, like on this blogger's page: 

We're changing this  for one big reason: We know from  your feedback and watching how you navigate the site that this feature works best as a way of bookmarking bloggers you are interested in following. (We also have heard repeated groans from many who didn't like the term "Friends" as a way of describing someone you wanted to read. We got it -- and agreed.) 

We also think the name change works better with the new cover navigation, which looks like this: 

The Cover hasn't changed, and continues to show off the stories we've picked to display. But the other tabs are all substantially different. The Editor's Picks tab now lets you limit results by "Favorites," so that you can more easily see the posts we've highlighted from your favorite bloggers.  We've also added an RSS feed. But you'll see here that we're also displaying significant new information for each post -- the number of times a post has been viewed (i.e., a "hit"); the number of ratings it has, and the number of comments it has:

The Popularity tab is new, and lets you sort posts using three criteria  -- the Top Rated, Most Viewed, Most Commented. You can also dig deeper, sorting those categories by looking at just your Favorites' content, and also specific time frames (from 4 hours to a 1 month) to more easily keep track of great posts you might've missed -- or are rapidly catching fire:

The Most Recent tab lets you breakdown the three elements we highlight in the Activity Feed -- new posts, comments, ratings -- and surf that data in much greater detail. You can also just monitor the  activity of your Favorites:

This is the first round of  planned navigational changes that aim to give members and  readers easier ways to find good content -- and rely less on just our  picks. We're also making the site more transparent, so you can see all the same metrics we see. 

Let me try and anticipate some questions -- and answer them, below:

Why don't the time intervals let us sort data longer than one month?

Any longer would tax our system, and slow down the site.

How far back does the Most Recent list go?

We show the most recent 1,000 activities (posts, ratings, comments)

Why are the results different from the lists (Top Rated, Most Viewed) on the cover?

The lists on the cover are not updated in real time -- they're often cached a few minutes. When you do your own sorts, those results will be as current as we can make them. 

I hope you'll tool around and check it all out. I hope you find it as addictive as we do. Please let use know if you have other questions -- either through a message or in the comments below -- and we'll answer them as we can during work hours Thursday.