Whether you are a member of a project or simply interested in an app, sometimes you want to receive timely notifications about the activity in a project space.
Up until recently it was possible to check the timeline page periodically or for those of us that still use an RSS reader you could subscribe to the timeline’s feed (see the icon in your browser or the link at the bottom of the page). In line with the latest buzzwords and social sites we have now added the ability to "Follow" a project. If you visit the summary page, for example of Podcatcher, you can see this bar with a link to follow or unfollow (i.e. stop following) the project.

As you can see from this image we also show the number of followers.

So what does it mean to follow a project? Well, it means that you will receive an email when something happens, be it a code update, a message in the discussion boards, a Wiki page.

Email notifications are great. Oh no, wait, my inbox is flooded with notifications, friend requests from Facebook, messages from Twitter, Quora, etc. Maybe you want to be alerted as soon as something changes in a project because you are a member, but maybe you want to have weekly updates. That’s fine, we can handle that. Go to your preferences, there’s a tab labelled following. There you can configure how frequently Projects will alert you and you can do it for each project that you follow. Perfect combination of timely alerts and periodic updates, exactly the way you want them.