Annotation goodness!

Today, after a couple weeks of intense firefighting,  I finally found some time to open and read my feeldy. The first article I bumped into was the latest review from Louis TweetDeck: New Twitter AIR App With Summize …. annotated by bwana. Given the small number of people who use the annotation feature in feedly, this is still a rare event…but I really love it when I get the chance to scan an articles through the annotations of someone else. I am sharing this, hoping that it will inspire people to become early adopters of annotations.

(Thanks bwana, you made my day!)

Intelligent Reaction

If you have a few minutes, take a look at this 7-minute presentation from Adam Bosworth on Intelligent Reaction. This is a good description of what we are striving for, and the key reasons why we are very greatfull for all the feedback and suggestions we have been collecting.

feedly+friendfeed (iteration2)

We got a lot of interesting feedback regarding the first iteration of the feedly+friendfeed bridge. We pushed out this evening a new iteration. Here is a change log:

1) we cleaned up the user interface

2) we followed Bwana’s suggestion and broke down each annotations into its own comment:

3) we followed Chris and Steve’s suggestions and allow users to post to a friendfeed conversation directly from feedly (see picture 2) - the like action might make it to the next iteraction.

Tip: Bloggers can use this feature to view their own blog in feedly and see all the friendfeed conversations related to their posts.

Update: Some people experienced 404 problems when adding a comment directly from feedly. This bug has been fixed as part of 1.0b3.21. You should get the patch automatically next time you start the brower. Thanks to Susan, Jonathan and Olivier for reporting this problem.

friendfeed+feedly

This is a quick overview of the 2 way bridge we built between feedly and friendfeed: 1) you can share your feedly annotations on friendfeed and 2) you can view all the friendfeed conversations related to an article in feedly.If you are using both friendfeed and feedly, let us know what you think.

To testdrive this feature, make sure that you are running 1.0b3 and simply restart your browser to get the latest patch (aka 1.0b3.18).

Maintenance

Feedly will be in maintenance mode Friday night from 8:00pm PST to 11:00pm PST. We need to upgrade the memory and a few other things on our servers. Have a good Friday evening!

Update: 9:20pm The service is back online.

friendfeed integration marathon

Going to try to see if we can allow feedly users to push their annotations into friendfeed. Will also use this page to share our experience learning and using the friendfeed API. If you have ideas/suggestions on how the integration should be done. Let us know.

Update Friday 11:10am
Kicking off the 3-day marathon

Update Saturday 5:00pm
The API of friendfeed is very nicely done. We have a first iteration of the feedly + friendfeed bridge, allowing users to share all their feedly annotations on friendfeed. The experience is very similar to the tweet action. Video later this evening.

We are going to see now if we can build the reverse path and allow users reading articles to see all the comments their friends might have made regarding that article. Note sure if it is feasible because we need to be able to translate the article URL in the friendfeed id but I have seen this type of integration on Louis Gray’s blog so it is worth exploring a little bit.

Update Saturday 9:30pm
Done. Users will be able to both share annotations and review conversations while they are reading an article in feedly. The more I use and interact with friendfeed, the more impressed I am. We will try to see if we can push this feature out tomorrow (as well as a small video of how it works).

Update. Saturday 11:20pm
Available as part of path 1.0b3.17. Guided tour here.

more actions

we added a more popup next to mark as read to allow users to directly save for later and recommend from the overview pages.

Available in patch 1.0b3.9

(thanks to Jonathan and Shawn for raising this issue)

Mike Shaver

It is great to see Mike Shaver being recognized and rewarded for everything he has done for Mozilla and Firefox. I had the chance to meet him once in person and his passion for continuously pushing the limits of the open web is very contagious. He is one of those people who really make a difference. Kudos!

(via John Lilly)

Polish Day #2

FIXED. phil: “My favorite page format is the “cover” page. I’d like to have the option to set that to be the start page for feedly”. We added an extra knob in feedly > more > preferences called “”Start Page”, set the value to ‘cover’ to have feedly start with the cover page.

FIXED. phil: “There is a bug where if I am viewing a feed and select “mark this page as read”, the top three feed entries are not marked as read”. Now, when you click on mark page as read, all the articles on the page are marked as read.

FIXED. dave: “would like to have the ability to refresh the content of the What’s New or other category pages”. There is now a refresh link at top of each list to refresh the content of the list.

FIXED. jonathan: “Option to annotate disappears after recommending. Refreshing the page brings back the annotate option”. The annotate action remains visible when you recommend or unrecommend an article.

FIXED. fhanselmann :”Is it possible to configure the color of the links before and after viewing?”. Yes. we added 2 more knobs to more > preferences. One is called “Color of read article links” and the other one is called “Color of unread article links”.

FIXED. david: “Incorrectly labeled as recommended”. Bug where the “Recommended by” was showing on an article page. The “Recommended by” is only applicable to the category and subscription pages.

FIXED. tony, vasilis: “[error] failed to load page ‘today’ because TypeError — J is null [.../js/10101_feedly_1610.js@797]“

FIXED. justin: “[error] failed to load page ’screensaver’ because TypeError — g.href is undefined [.../js/10101_feedly_1610.js@773]“

FIXED. leigh: “[error] failed to unload the Feedly user interface because TypeError — A.unregisterObsever is not a function [.../js/10101_feedly_1610.js@208]“

(all fixes are part of 1.0b3.

Polish Day #1

FIXED. alex: “-1 — [error] failed to askEntries.onCompleteHandler for feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb , , null , 18 because TypeError — I is undefined [.../js/10101_feedly_1602.js@844]“

FIXED. daniel: “[error] failed to load page ‘entry/4357501223276271358′ because TypeError — A[B] is undefined [.../js/10101_feedly_1595.js@1240]“

FIXED. tigertwo: Improve the resiliency of the integration with the back end services so that users are not interrupted in their readings if the core is not able to interact successfully with one or many of the services.

FIXED. sebastianvoss: “Changed implementation so that feedly does not interfere with the firefox shutdown process anymore”.

FIXED. phil: “the +f icon feedly puts in the location bar when a source exposes an RSS feed does not have a tooltip”.

FIXED. chris: “Better support for the AppleGr Yummy theme. The +f bleeds”. Changed the size of the +f and f icons to 20 x 20. It seems that it is the size the AppleGr theme expects. You will need to overwrite your current extension to get the new images.

FIXED. mikeyk: “hate the popup whenever i highlight text . . i can’t be the only one who highlights when reading”. The annotation popup how appears below the highlight and it is semi-transparent until the user over on it. Thanks for the suggestion mikeyk!

FIXED. kerguio: “Broken links in empty wall”. Redirected links from old feeddo to feedly.

FIXED. closetgeekshow. “I need to actually download the files for Feedly to be truly useful to me” (Replaced quicktime with flash player and provided link for downloading podcast enclosures).

FIXED. ramage “Related articles from highlight search don’t stick”.

Just restart the browser and you should automatically get all these patches at part of version 1.0b3.7

Boost your feedly

If you are a technologist/geek/start up person, here is a list of people you might be interested in following in feedly - to leverage their reading and recommendation power:

Adam Ostrow / Mashable - follow
Andrew Chen / Futuristic Play - follow
Chris Brogan / ChrisBrogan.com - follow
Corvida / SheGeeks - follow
EngTech / Internet Duct Tape - follow
Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch - follow
Fred Wilson / A VC - follow
Frederic Lardinois / The Last Podcast - follow
Ionut / Google Operating System - follow
Jason Kaneshiro / Webomatica - follow
Loic LeMeur / LoicLemeur.com - follow
Louis Gray / LouisGray.com - follow
Mark Hopkins / Mashable - follow
Mathew Ingram / Mathew Ingram.com - follow
MG Siegler / ParisLemon - follow
Pete Cashmore / Mashable - follow
Robert Scoble / Scobleizer.com - follow
Scott Beale / The Laughing Squid - follow
Steve Rubel / MicroPersuasion - follow
Stephanie Booth / Climb to The Stars - follow
Tom Foremski / Silicon Valley Watcher - follow

(Thank you Louis)

Terminology Changes

A few people asked “what are the icon listed in the people module?” The people module is context sensitive. For a given context (cateogory or a specific source), it shows the list of all the people who have recommended an article related to the context in the last 7 days. Note: for privacy reason, the list is based on explicit recommendations and not subscription information. To try to make this concept more explicit, we decided to follow Susan’s recommendation and rename “People” to “Recommended by”.

We also had a few questions related to what does “No thanks” mean/do. So here again we decided to simplify and rename “No Thanks” to “Mark as read”.

If there are other terms you feel are not named correctly, please let us know!

Flexible Width

A couple of people raised issues regarding the rendering of feedly on narrower displays:
http://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/screen_is_too_wide
http://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/my_screen [..]_scroll_left_and_right

Feedly will now try to adapt it width to the size of the screen (note: screen and not window because the reflow on window resize would be too expensive). As a user you can also overwrite the width selected by feedly by changing the Customize Width preference knob (please reload the page after the width is changed to see the impact).

Please restart your browser to see these changes.

feedly+delicious

Four people requested that we try to better integrate feedly and delicious:
http://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/del_icio_us_integration

So we spent a few cycles on it today: if you are running feedly 1.0b3.2 and the latest version of the delicious firefox add-on and are logged in to your delicious account, you will see a “save to delicious” action appear next to recommend, tweet, etc.

Here is what it looks like:

The goal was to reduce the number of clicks needed to bookmark an article you are reading in feedly in your delicious account.

Dead Snake - Download Available Again - 1.0b3

Here is the log of the changes that were made to feedly 1.0b3.1 to try to better explain how feedly uses under the hood Google Reader as a feed management and force people to explicitely opt-in

Change #1 | First Run Screen
If you are a google reader and you install feedly. The first run page has changed to show:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65995199@N00/2593284562/sizes/o/

Change #2 | Explicit Permission Grant on Welcome and Add
Everytime a google reader user will try to use the welcome wizard to import source or connections, when he or she clicks on Apply, they will be asked to explicitely grant feedly to use the Google Reader database.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65995199@N00/2601706675/sizes/o/

Change #3 | Automatic Undo
We added an undo action for un-doing all the changes of the welcome wizard.

Change #4 | Explicit Permission Grant on Delete
We also add Justin Baum suggestions to have on unsubscription of a feed a modal confirmation dialog which reminds the user that the action will impact the google reader database:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65995199@N00/2597333482/sizes/o/

Change #5 | Automatic Backup of the user’s OPML
Finally, to be on the extra safe side, we also changed feedly so that it makes a local backup of the users OPML file before the welcome support is activated. The backup file is called feedly.backup.opml and it will be located in the root of your firefox profile directory so that even if you un-install feedly, it stays there.

With all these changes in place, we are going to re-open the download. We are, in parallel, going to circle back with the people who missed the initial set of notifications and make sure that the new approach is bullet proof.

Thanks to Justin to spent time to provide input on how to best address this issue.

To get the update, go to firefox>tools>add-ons>find updates and update to feedly 1.0b3

Download Offline

We just removed the download from the website. We are going to re-iterate on the design of the welcome process to address some of the concerns raised by Justine Baum: we are going to implement the UI he sketched for us as well as try to implement an automatic backup of your existing OPML as it looked like before you start using feedly. We will try those changes with some of the people who we made angry to make sure that it is the rigth thing. We will re-open the download only once we are sure that this snake is dead once and for all. Have a great week-end.

1.0b1.15

Here is the change log of the 1.0b1.15 patch we just release.

The main focus of this patch is to detect the cookie settings of the user and warn them before they run into the [reader][0001] count not load unread count bug.

We also fixed the Ar.split(”__utma=”)[1] is undefined [.../js/10101_feedly_1536.js@393] javascript exceptions.

We also fixed the bug reported by Sano regarding drilling down into flickr pictures when they are displayed in gallery mode.

Please refer to our getsatisfaction account if you want to report problems. You will automatically get the patch next type you restart the browser.

feedly and privacy

There has been a couple of questions regarding feedly privacy in my inbox. I will try to address the question here so that everyone benefit from it and the answer can be further clarified if necessary.

Question:
What part of the feedly information gets shared with other users.

Answer:
1. Other people can look you up on feedly using your name and email address. When they find you, they get to also see you profile picture if you have one set. They can at that point follow your recommendations and annotations.

2. When someone follows your annotations and recommendations, they only get to see that and nothing else. So your privacy is completely protected unless you *explicitly* take the action of annotating or recommending an article/video.

Other tools try to infer how interesting an article is based on how much time you spent reading it and/or if you clicked on a link or viewed a video. We consciously decided to do *none* of that.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Designers?

Are there any designers in the group of people who have started to play around with feedly? If so could you please send me an email to edwink@devhd.com? Thank you!

1.0b1.10 share vs. star vs. save for later

Here is the change log for 1.0b1.10

-> fixed Ar.split(”__utma=”)[1] is undefined [.../js/10101_feedly_1536.js@393]

-> changed recommend = google reader’s share & saved for later = google reader’s star
see http://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/recommending_star_share
thanks pb30

-> surfaced a global knob to set the default view for all the subscription and categories.
the global value can be overwritten at the feed level.
see http://getsatisfaction.com/feedly/topics/user_default_views_and_marking_items_and_feeds_read
thanks jican, pb30

(you will get the update automatically next type you restart the browser)

how to uninstall feedly?

Thanks again everyone for the great enthousiasm around the beta 1 release. The expectations are high and we are going to have to work twice as hard.

But realistically feedly requires a change of behavior and has still a lot of rough edges so if we are able to keep 5%-10% of the initial install base active, we will be in great shape. This document is to help the others easily un-install feedly if they decide to do so.

Steps to un-install feedly:

1. If you are an existing google reader user, go to more > undo welcome changes and use the undo wizard to undo all the changes feedly did to your google reader account.

2. Go to firefox > preferences | options > applications, find the Web feed entry, click on application details and remove feedly.

3. Go to the firefox menu > tools > add-ons > extensions, locate feedly and click on the associated Uninstall button.

4. Restart the browser.

4. That is it. You are done.

If you have the time and decided to un-install feedly for a specific reason, please open an ticket so that we can try to address the issue going forward.

Thank you for taking the time to try feedly!

friendfeed is amazing

I have been trying to listen to everyone reactions and feedback and I must admit that I am totally amazed by how useful friendfeed is for  tracking conversations. Interested in listening what people say about your company or product: just go to friendfeed, select the everyone tab and use the search box to look for it. Summize does the same thing for twitter but friendfeed does a way better job of capturing the context of the conversation and lowering the barrier to contribution.

kudos and thank you friendfeed team.

Fixed: The next 2 problems

Our goal this week is try to get as many of the bugs out of the beta and make sure that the server does not melt.

The next two rough edges some people are running into seem to be:

A) [reader][0001] failed to get initial list of unread counts because Failure: 401 — undefined

B) [error] failed to load page ‘entry/2057290018332682384′ because TypeError — Ar.split(”__utma=”)[1] is undefined [.../js/10101_feedly_1532.js@392]

We are looking into them. We will keep you posted!

Update on June 19th:

A) We have identified the root cause of this problem. Here is a simple temporary work around: Go to Firefox > Preference > Privacy and make sure that the “Accept Third Pary” cookies checkbox is set. Click on the feedly button and everything else should work normally.

B) Has been located and patched in 1.0b1.11 and if you were impacted by the problem you will get the patch automatically next time you restart the browser.

Sorry for all the frustration cause by A)!

Fixed: Undoing changes to Google Reader

We just pushed out the 1.0.8 patch. I tries to address the main issue raised by people so far by a) offering a more visible warning and b) more importantly by allowing users to automatically undo all the changes made by the feedly welcome wizard.

Here is what a) looks like:

Here is a video of b)

Transcript of the video: To undo the changes done by the feedly welcome wizard to your google reader database:

1. start the firefox browser
2. click on the orange feedly button in the firefox toolbar
3. login to your google account if necesary
4. once your feedly page is loaded, click on the more > undo welcome changes link (top right)
5. review the list of feed which will be removed
6. click on undo
7. open google reader (or reload it if already open) and see that all the changes by feedly have been undo.

Thanks for the feedback. With hindsight this is something we should have stretch to put in before the beta release.

The good, the bad and the ugly

You can find here http://friendfeed.com/search?q=feedly&service=&public=1&who= the stream of the initial set of feedback regarding the feedly beta 1. I am going to take some time over the next 4-5 days to summarize in more detail the good, the bad and suggestions.

But one thing is very clear:

1) people are asking for a better warning regarding the fact that feedly creates 4 tags in google reader.

2) people are asking for a better warning regarding the fact that the feeds imported during the welcome wizard are added to google reader as well (The warning in the first run page does not stand out enough).

3) people want an automatic way of undo-ing any change done by the welcome wizard.

We are going to make that our top priority and get a new revision out in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, here is a manual work around: Undo-ing the changes of the welcome wizard

feedly for firefox 3, chrispirillo Ustream.TV

Thanks Chris. I am not sure who told you about feedly but this video is great. We will use it as our default intro!

more about “feedly, chrispirillo Ustream.TV: .“, posted with vodpod

feedly: #1 trending term on twitter!

Nice! We are going to have to thank a lot of people tomorrow!!! (via Christopher)

Watching the announcement spread…

After a very long week end, we are here with the team, in our war room, looking at both how the system is behaving under stress and how the news of the beta 1 announcement is spreading.

Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=who%3Aeveryone+feedly

Summize: http://summize.com/search?q=feedly

Tomorrow, we will make a summary of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Special thanks to Louis Gray!

last part of the feeddo to feedly transition

When you get a chance, please un-install your existing feeddo extension (firefox menu: Tools>Add-on>Un-install), restart the browser and get the official feedly beta 1 build from http://www.feedly.com

Dead snake!

feedly guided tour

Here is a guided tour video we have put together over the week end to help our first time user and reviewers.

At some point, we expect Vimeo to turn on HD on this video. Between now and then, if you have trouble viewing the content, here is a link to a HD, download-optimized version of the video.

Do or Die

After almost a year of testing with your panel, it is time to open the doors and announce the public beta program. This is an exciting moment because we really put our heart and soul into it and we look forward to knowing over the next 12 weeks if the feedly concept as it stands today can fly or if we need to kill it and go back to the drawing board.

I would like to take this moment to thank all our panelist for their incredible support and guidance over the last 18 months: you kept our heartbeat alive, reported bugs and most importantly suggested tons of great ideas and improvements! Thank you!

Let’s see how the next 12 weeks go!

Caching bug

We fixed in 1.0b1.rc65 an important caching bug. Next time you take a feedly break, please restart the browser to get the patch. Thanks!

feedly.com/the story

BEGIN

DevHD was founded in Nov 2006 with the belief that cloud services, RSS+microformats, OpenID+social connectivity provide the foundation for new class of applications - aka mash-ups - which will transform the way people consume and share information. New because mash-ups dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of integrating content and services from multiple providers. New because more real-time. New because inherently collaborative.

To validate that belief, we decided to focus on two projects, streets and feedly. feedly is an attempt to use everything which is good in cloud service, RSS and social connectivity to create a more social and magazine-like start experience. Think MyYahoo meets Digg meets Wired. Streets is a more generic mash-up framework which tries to isolate and encapsulates things that are needed to build feedly but are not specific to feedly.

With the help of a panel of 200 users, we have iterated seven times since the inception of the project…and we expect many more iterations to come. If you are interested in learning more about the path we have taken and the lessons we learned, we invite you to read our blog.

END

feedly.com/features

Here is the content we are thinking of using for the features page. Imagine this content in a 2 column mold with some screenshots sprinkled around.

BEGIN

feedly is focused on creating a more social and magazine-like start experience. Think MyYahoo meets Digg meets Wired. Here are some of the core features…with many more to come:

Welcome Wizard
The welcome wizard can learn from your existing personalizations - bookmarks, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Netvibes, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Friendfeed - and apply them to your feedly.

What’s New?
The what’s new? page provides a real-time summary of the most relevant content available on the web based on your interests, your reading patterns and recommendations from your friends.

Annotate+Share
The annotation tool makes it easy to clip the most interesting parts of a an article and share them with your friends. It also allows you to easily search for related informations.

Twitter
The feedly+twitter integration allows you to easily spread the word about articles you find interesting. In context.

The Wall
The wall gives you a quick overview all the all the articles recommended and annotated by your friends. It combines your activity on both twitter and feedly.

Dashboard
The dashboard makes it easy to get an at-a-glance view and manage all your favorite sources.

Explore
The explore module adds a pinch of serendipity by continuously suggesting new sources you might be interested in.

Search
The search bar allows you to perform a personalized search across your favorite sites.

feedly API
The feedly API allows source owners to extend their reach by taking control over various aspects of the feedly UI. It will also allow third party developers to create new UI experiences (see cover, screensaver and feedly+flick’r for example) or weave in new annotation extensions (see Yahoo finance for example).

Google Reader
Feedly is powered by the unofficial Google Reader API so any subscriptions you add to feedly will be added to Google Reader, any article you read or recommend in feedly will be marked as read and shared in Google Reader. And vise versa.

We have a very iterative and incremental development process and look forward to listening to your feedback!

END

the feedly.com website

Taking a couple of days off from coding to try to help kill the “we need a website” snake. The current thinking is to have something as simple as possible: one homepage and five sections:

homepage <- introduction and get feedly action

section 1: features

section 2: support which will be a link to our newly created getsatisfaction account

section 3: the story <- a brief overview of what inspired us to create devhd, streets and feedly

section 4: credit <- a place for us to thank all the people and software which make this adventure possible

section 5: our blog <- a link to here

Will try to publish a draft of each section as we make progress so that you can participate if you want to

Google Analytics Goodness

Today, we swapped out our homegrown heartbeat monitoring system with Google Analytics. It was the first I was using Google Analytics and I must say that I am really impressed - it re-enforced in my conviction than that the future of software is about cloud services and mashups.

Here are some quick lessons regarding integrating Google Analytics in a firefox extension (should be applicable to gear components, flash components, etc..):

1) get a copy of urchin.js.

2) replace references to document.domain to the domain your component will be emulating. In our case, www.feedly.com

3) replace all references to document.cookie (both set and get) by calls to a custom component which can manage cookies appropriately. In our case, we have a “cookie monster” streets component which abstract out the firefox CookieService and CookieManager.

That is it. Everything else should work out of the box. The integration between the client and the GA server is done through an image with a very sophisticated URL. Clever and very simple to integrate. You can learn more about that here.

Finally, what is really nice about GA is that you can custom tailor it to track not only page views but also custom event

ReadBurner Podcast

Interesting podcast. The question about what is the future of advertisement in Tivo+Browser Ad Blocker world is very interesting: will new forms of advertisement emerge or will search be the only form tolerated by the user. This is one of the nuts we need to learn to crack to make feedly viable.

Welcome Process - Take II (continued)

As part of rc55, we are finally pushing out the ability for feedly to federate and import your existing social connections:

This means that feedly will analyze existing connections you have created in twitter, friendfeed, yahoo mail and gmail and if any of those users are existing feedly users, it will automatically subscribe you to the recommendation feeds of those users so that you can benefits from their recommendations and annotations.

(We also added in rc55, the ability to import an existing OPML file.)

feedly it is.

We are renaming feeddo, feedly. This was a hard decision because we usually do not like to make compromises and based on the feedback collected from our panel, people generally prefer feeddo over feedly. But at this point, our focus is really towards the launch and “the potential conflict between feeddo and pheedo” was a snake we wanted to see dead.

(You should see that change bubble up across the UI in the next few days!)

The Conversational Web

More discussions around the web on filtering: topical->social or topical+social?

Here is a extract from people supporting the topical+social side of the argument:

Fresh Perspective

I have been working on the re-design of the feeddo welcome process for a few weeks. The hardest thing sometimes when you are trying to solving a problem is to take a fresh perspective and look at the problem as a user and not as a developer.

In this specific case, I have been slowly - over the last 18 months - tailoring my feeddo, connecting it to a few hundred sources and a couple hundred people. That comfort made it really difficult to understand the needs and feelings of a first time user.

The solution: I went to Google Reader>settings>subscriptions>select all>unsubscribe. It was painful but I look at the problem totally differently now. Interesting experience. To be continued!

Question

What are the 10 best sources of information related to Apple, MySQL, Ajax/Javascript or Cooking? What process did you go through to create this list?

Google I/O ‘08 Keynote: Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud

It is great to see Gears making the progress it is making. I believe that Gears will emerge as one of the key change agent for the open web. Why? because it allows for innovation compatible with the existing web programming model. Which is huge both in terms of openness and leveraging existing skill sets. Something both Flex and Silverlight are failing to achieve. It would be great to see tighter collaboration between Gears and Firefox!

Welcome Process - Take II

It is not a secret that the current feeddo welcome process is not the greatest. This is all the more problematic that without the right set of sources and the right set of connections, the feeddo experience can loose a lot of its appeal.

Today, as part of 1.0b1.rc51, we push out the first of a set of changes we are working on to try to address this issue.

Here is what the welcome process looks like:

First, we embedded the welcome process right into the what’s new page so that 1… the user is exposed to a single context and that 2… the initial “welcome process” and the following “add a category process” are similar.

Second, we improved the bookmarks integration so that when asked to import bookmarks, feeddo no only looks for livefeeds but plain vanilla bookmarks. In the case of pain vanilla bookmarks, feeddo will take the first 50 bookmarks from the bookmark bar, find associated feeds, query delicious and google reader for additional metadata such as popularity, tags, velocity of publishing and number of subscribers and based on that metadata try to organize them into clusters and identify favorites. More tunning to be expected in the next couple of weeks but the foundation is in place.

To be continued next week. Have a great week end!

Filtering will change everything!

A couple of days ago, I linked to a couple of interesting tweets from @timoreilly regarding Yahoo’s desire to own the start experience and the importance of relevance and social connectivity. Today I would like to illustrate that with an example and try to explain why I think filtering has the potential of changing how media is produced and distributed.

Here is what I saw when I opened my feeddo this morning:

As you can see, new articles from all my favorite sources have been analyzed and filtered based on both my personal reading patterns but also based on recommendations and annotations from my friends and friends of friends. The reason why filtering is important is that it allows the most relevant content to bubble on top and allows smaller fishes (in this case the emerging Louis Gray to get the prime location in my attention even if he does not have yet the reach and audience that a TechCrunch has).

This is not new: Digg and Techmeme have been pioneering the concept of filtering. Feeddo in this example and others around the web are pushing this concept one step further by allowing more relevance. More relevance because you can define the set of sources, topics and as importantly the social connections you would like to use to influence the filtering.

I believe that this is important because this new kind of filtering will allow smaller, more talented and more focused sources of information to compete more effectively for the attention of users and will therefore promote diversity.

If we fail, newer media outlets (like TechCrunch) will gradually and irresistibly grow to loose some of the core community feeling and start to look a lot like the Old media they were born to kill.

What is missing? The filters need to become more sophisticated and more importantly, Google needs to find a more innovative way to help boutique sources of information monetize their efforts (micro payment, sponsorships, better and more fun ads available in a self-service adwords-like model may be).

Delicious RSS

Delicious has great RSS support. The general format of RSS addresses on del.icio.us is:

• Hotlist - del.icio.us/rss/
• Recent - del.icio.us/rss/recent
• Popular - del.icio.us/rss/popular
• A user - del.icio.us/rss/joe
• A tag - del.icio.us/rss/tag/bananas
• A tag from one user - del.icio.us/rss/julian/science
• Both of these tags from one user - del.icio.us/rss/alan/music+dance
• The history of a URL - del.icio.us/rss/url?url=http://www.example.com/

Custom feeddo plug-in coming soon.

(Thanks Orjan!)

Google App Engine

Great video introduction to the Google AppEngine:

This is how all developer demos should be: no hype. TextMate only. end to end. Awesome! I am looking forward to seeing Java or Javascript support!

“We want people to start their day at Yahoo!”

Hot cause! Looking for a cool solution!

Address Book 10.5.3

In Mac OS X 10.5.3, you can configure the address book app so that it syncs automatically with your Google Contacts and Yahoo Contacts.

This is a very simple way to get all your Mac OS X contacts available in feeddo (even if you do not use gmail or yahoo mail as your main email application).

Mock for feeddo.com homepage

Here is a mock of the page we are thinking of using to launch feeddo. What do you think? Would you click on the “get feeddo” button?

(Thanks to Ludo, Cyril, Elisa, Rajesh and Anshu for their feedback on the initial iteration!. We are looking forward to more suggestions on how to improve it!)