Investigating performance issues

The dev and ops team are doing some performance tuning on the feedly Cloud to address some of the slowdowns identified last week. The service will be slower as a result today (Saturday April 23rd) and tomorrow (Sunday April 24th).

We might need to take the service offline for 2 hours later today to upgrade and restart some of the data nodes.

Sorry for the temporary inconvenience and have a great week end!

Update: Tuesday April 26 Morning – We are still suffering from waves of short 5-minute slowdowns / micro-outages. The dev team has increased the log level on our Hadoop cluster and servers to determine what is the component of the architecture which is responsible for those hiccups. We are also working on doubling the size of our servers in case we hit some limit somewhere. We will report back as soon as we have finished crunching through the logs (we generate about 100GB of logs for every hour of operation).

Note: collecting the logs and testing various hypothesis will likely continue to generate some slowness this morning, Wednesday morning and Thursday morning. Sorry for the inconvenience. We look forward to having a speedy feedly back.

/Seb, Kireet, and Edwin

 

Trend Report: The Rise of Live Video Streaming

We’ve been talking a lot at feedly about how trends are coming and going at what feels like a faster rate than ever. That made us think: What can we do to help you stay on top of these new ideas? So today we introduce a new series on Trendspotting—one look at something new that is changing the way we work. Are you spotting a trend that you want to know more about? Please leave us a note in the comments below!

The Trend: Live Video Streaming

In our increasingly digital and visual world, businesses across industries are fighting attention amidst the noise. Video as a medium has become one of the most effective ways to stand out and connect with an audience. Video quickly conveys meaning and emotion. It’s memorable, and it catches the eye in a sea of text and static images.

To hit home the growing popularity of video: Over one billion people use Youtube (that’s almost one third of all people on the internet), and the number of daily Youtube viewers has increased 40 percent since March 2014.

Accordingly, many social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have integrated some form of video content on their platforms. Additionally, new social media platforms have recently emerged that feature video as the central medium for interaction.

More and more, brands are recognizing the value of video as an online marketing strategy. Demand Metric completed a survey of 398 marketing, sales, and business professionals which revealed that 69 percent have used video marketing and another 31 percent are planning to. A recent study of 200 executives by Brandlive found that 44 percent held a live streaming event in 2015 and 39 percent believe live streaming video will be important to their marketing efforts going forward.

Learn more about Social Selling and feedly

The video trend is growing alongside the surging smartphone use trend, as more and more people use phone cameras. Daily mobile internet usage continues to grow year by year, on a global scale. Of all mobile traffic, online video now accounts for upwards of 50 percent.

The prevalence of both video and smartphones have paved the way for newer social platforms centered around live streaming video, like Periscope, Meerkat, and now Blab.

6 Great Resources to Learn about Social Selling

If you’re like us, you might have been hearing the term “social selling” at an increasingly frequent rate. We hear it at conferences, in LinkedIn forums, in team meetings, on Twitter, and on billboards.

With social experiences like Twitter and Facebook becoming core to the web, this concept of social selling has become a definitive new approach for the ways that organizations think about building relationships. It is a methodology that embraces at its center a driving belief for us at feedly: Content is a currency. That is, that high quality content is more than just an entertaining read. Content builds relationships, drives business, and steers innovation.

In fact, as we’ve talked with more and more of you as part of our regular product development process, we’ve learned that many of you are using feedly as a core content engine to drive your social selling. Many of you are using feedly as your main hub to organize your favorite sources, feed yourself with daily reading, and then deciminate the best stories to your customers.

But just what is social selling?

Social selling is the idea of using content—mostly online—to help educate prospective customers, build a relationship with them, and help guide them to a purchase decision.

How feedly Changed My Career as an Art Curator

You, our users, use feedly for such a wide range of jobs. Today we’d like to showcase a member of the feedly community who uses it as a curator of digital art, a burgeoning sector. Ryan Cowdrey, of the young startup 23VIVI.com, shows us how you can use feedly to leverage content as an art curator. He provides a guest post for us today.

My name is Ryan Cowdrey and I’m the Director of Curation at 23VIVI.com, an online marketplace that offers rare and limited edition digital art. For your enjoyment, I pose the question:

“With so much digital media content at one’s fingertips at all times, how does a creative individual discover the latest trends amongst all the noise out there?”

Being an art curator in the digital age requires strategic tools for effectively treading through the massive amount of content that we can access. Curators are relying more and more on internet sources to get content updates that they need on a daily basis. (Blouin ArtInfo, ArtNet News, Design Collector, Fubiz, BOMB Magazine, Colossal, to name a few.)

Not to mention that if you curate digital art exclusively, you are now relying solely on internet sources to get your art fix. The tools that one uses to augment their curation efforts will set them apart from the rest.