Currently, stars on GitHub are something in between a Facebook like and a plain old bookmark and nothing else (even in the oldest browser you sort your bookmarks). You can star something, search those starred repositories and that's pretty much it. But they could be so much more useful.

So, why do I star a project on GitHub in the first place? It could be an interesting library I might want to use for a project in the future, so I want to tag, say 'time series analysis' to find it later, otherwise, why bother starring it in the first place? Or it might be a (new) program I am using that has no proper website with a news-feed set up, so I'd really like to be notified of new releases.

But while GitHub itself is doing nothing like this, I recenly found two sites that enable exactly those usage patterns: Astral and Sibbell.

While Astral lets you tag your starred repos, Sibbell can show (and remind you via email) of all repositories that had a new release in the last week.

I'd love two see these (and more features like them) integrated into GitHub.