Boxee Updates its Web Site with Social Features, Support Section

In a post on his company's blog, Wednesday, Boxee CEO, Avner Ronen, announced a new version of the company's platform, as well as various enhancements to its Web site. The most significant of the Web site enhancements is a new feature that allows users to find and follow their friends on Boxee and see which of their contacts on several supported social networking services--Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and FriendFeed--are also Boxee users. The feature is accessed by clicking on a "Friends" link at the top of the Boxee home page, and then selecting "Find." Users can then conduct a search on Boxee itself, or, if they log in to Twitter or FriendFeed, or agree to provide Boxee with access to their Google, Yahoo! or Windows Live contacts, they can access a list of their contacts on those services who are also Boxee users. The Boxee Web site interface has also been updated, and the site also now includes a support section (support.boxee.tv) that provides an FAQ, a knowledge base, and information on submitting questions to Boxee staff.

The new version (0.9.14) of Boxee's platform, meanwhile, offers 1) Geo-based filtering of applications, enabling application developers to indicate in which countries their app works, so that people who cannot access its content will not see it in the Boxee app box (note: users can disable the filtering by going to Settings > Appearance > View Options); 2) An adult content filter for applications and RSS feeds, allowing apps, RSS feeds and also specific terms to be marked as "adult" by the app developer (note: while the default is to hide adult content, users can control whether they want to see adult apps or not by going to Settings > Appearance > View Options); 3) A list of unresolved videos: "Under browse there is now an option to view unresolved videos," Ronen wrote. "There you will be able to view the latest video files Boxee found on your home networks, but could not determine whether they are specific TV shows or movies. You can use the 'recognize' feature to try and manually tell Boxee what this video is." The new version of the Boxee platform also pre-installs the winning applications from the company's recent App Dev Challenge: BBC Live Player, OpenCourseWare, DropBoxee, WeAreHunted and Facebook Photos.