The holiday break has given me time to work on the next version of Hamster Soup, and if it turns out like I have planned, Big Brother fans are going to be very happy. Look for an update in spring 2012 with more information.

A major new feature has been added to Hamster Soup. Before the season, we got permission from SuperPass to link to the live feeds directly from the app. They have now been enabled, and a link to Mobile Live Feeds will be included at the bottom of every Daily Dish post. This is a feature that has been requested every year, and is finally possible thanks to SuperPass. Give them props- from production, to live feeds, to taking care of the hamsters and all their needs, Big Brother is a massive 3-month undertaking that never stops!

Mobile Live Feeds comes with one major caveat however- they will eat up your mobile data plan, at a rate of 200MB an hour. That’s as much as some people’s (mine) monthly plan! Pay very close attention to your usage on 3G. Hamster Soup and SuperPass are not responsible if you run over your plan. Hamster Soup also cannot do tech support for the feeds. See SuperPass for that. And Mobile Live Feeds require a subscription from SuperPass to view.

Again, thanks for making Hamster Soup such a success, and please don’t think we are resting on our laurels. Every year once the season starts and we see what we’re working with, new ideas, bugfixes and user suggestions drive Hamster Soup to new heights. Several new ideas are already in the works and will be included in an upcoming update.

Stay Tuned!

I had planned to make the new season purchaseable in last year’s app, but technical issues with that feature (and a series of impending lawsuits by patent portfolio company Lodsys) made me decide to hold that feature back for now. So an all new app named Big Brother 13 Hamster Soup was created.

Hamster Soup 3.0 returns with all the features you know from last year, and adds a few more, while fixing some bugs.

Alumni Alley is going to become much more robust, with every former houseguest receiving royal treatment. If they have a Twitter, you can still follow along there, but each alumni also has a Link Wall, where we’ll keep all the URLs and emails we can find so that fans can keep up to date and in touch. There is a reporting feature as well, so if you know a link that we don’t, you can send an email to bbhamstersoup@gmail.com suggest a URL. If it checks out, I’ll add it to the alumni’s link wall.

Also browsing around in a person’s Twitter or Link Wall is more robust, with browser controls so you can back up if you get too far off into someone’s crazy post-Big Brother life.

The iPad got the stepchild treatment last year, using just a sized up iPhone interface, but this season iPads will get native resolution so it will be less like holding an iPhone right up to your nose, and more like kicking back and reading a magazine.

Hamster Soup has a new look this season, a blue theme that turned out to be a lot like the Venice Beach, Pacific Ocean them of the show. There may also be more new looks, that is, themes, coming down the road as well.

SuperPass is offering a mobile version of the live feeds this season for the first time, meaning it is theoretically possible to embed the feeds right into the app itself. I expect other Big Brother apps to include this as it’s just linking to a web page, but I don’t believe in just hijacking someone else’s hard work. Hamster Soup got permission from Jokerette herself before creating this app and linking to JokersUpdates.com’s live updates, and has a special relationship with the site. I’ve already been talking to my contact at Real SuperPass, and if they decide to give me permission to include the live feeds in the app, a future update will include it.