Alltop, a new startup creation founded by Guy Kawasaki, just announced a simple landing page product for those looking for the top feeds for a number of different vertical categories. Taking inspiration from popurls which aggregates the top urls on the Web, Alltop offers pages filled with feeds on a various topics.
Continue reading "Alltops Pre-configured Topical RSS Pages" »
Techmeme, the popular news aggregator, just released a new feature today which will allow anyone to keep up with the news as it flows into Techmeme called the Firehose. In the past Techmeme has only released feeds for items that were above the fold on the site (maybe 20 to 30 most popular items from a day). With firehose, Techmeme and all its vertical brands, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip, ballbug for baseball news and memeorandum for political news, will offer a constant stream of news from every headline and discussion link that ever appears on the site. As explained by Gabe Rivera on his blog:
"Any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which exclude "Discussion" links) will appear in the feed within 5 minutes. This means well over 100 headlines per day for Techmeme Firehose, so casual news readers will want to use the Main feed (i.e. the previous, standard feed) instead."
Gabe has also put the firehose to Twitter so you can monitor the pulse of news on the go and as it comes in. This is great news for the tech, celebrity, baseball or politic news obsessed! TechCrunch also has more on the new Techmeme stream.
FeedHub, the Pittsburgh-based startup created by mSpoke, has just announced an update aimed at improving the relevancy of its personalized feed creator. I covered FeedHub when they launched back in September 2007, since then they have received a lot of user feedback which they used to plan and execute on this latest update.
Managing information overload is not an easy task these days with all the blogs, feeds and other content options filling up my feed reader. How can a user better navigate to the items that might interest them the most? This is a tough problem to solve as every users is different. AideRSS is trying to solve this problem by helping to filter out the noise and deliver only the content the most popular content by sampling the wisdom of the crowds.
Continue reading "AideRSS Helps With RSS Information Overload" »
Having problems getting through all of your feeds in your reading list?
Keeping up with the latest news from all the various publications can
sometimes be as difficult as keeping up with your email where "email
bankruptcy" runs rampant. FeedHub, a product of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke,
has launched its personalized feed and recommendation product at the
2007 DEMOfall Conference. I was part of the FeedHub private beta program. FeedHub creates a personalized RSS feed from you
reading list and intelligently displays the most relevant post.
Photo of the Week: This illustration titled cubs by greasy chicken face is my attempt to will my favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, into the playoffs. I know it's not very web/tech related but its the Cubbies, it is mid-September and they are still leading the National League Central pack.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 09.16.2007
I am not a huge fan of email as I have continually mentioned, however, it is better than snail mail and currently the industry standard communication method. When I do use email I use AOL Mail with my FREE personalized email address on the frankgruber5.com domain. The new AOL Mail has made quite a transformation since its beta launch in March as it continued to add features until it officially launched last week.
Though an early Twitter adopter, I found that when Facebook came out
with its open application platform which included mobile and web status
updates I stopped updating my twitter page as frequently. I just
couldn't keep up with updating two places with my status updates. When you also factor in Flickr photo uploads, myAOL 'Mix & Share' Favorites and regular blog posts (on Somewhat Frank, TECH cocktail and myAOL Blog) I had to start to looking for a way to cut corners. I recently found twitterfeed.com, thanks to my good friend Eric Olson. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates together to be published on twitter.
Continue reading "Use twitterfeed.com To Aggregate Your Facebook Status Updates On Twitter" »
Engagd, created by Faraday Media, has launched to offer web developers a toolkit of services for tracking attention data (the things users do on the Web). Leveraging Attention Profiling Mark-up Language or APML, Engagd offers a few different Web services empowering users to control their own personal Attention
Profiles, and developers to quickly and easily add Attention Awareness
to their applications and mashups.
iTunes has been offering personalized recommendations within the iTunes application for quite sometime and I have found them to be very accurate and helpful. I have often discovered new songs that I like within the recommendations and downloading them quickly for instant gratification. iTunes has started to role out syndication of personalized music data as My iTunes Widgets, making it easy to share your music interests.
Photo of the Week: A couple of Maine Lobstahs! from a surf & turf event I attended on Friday. It doesn't get a whole lot more "summer" than this.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.12.2007
Global Grind, currently in private alpha, is a New York-based web 2.0 personalized home page startup that is said to be focused on the "hip hop" generation. Being a "hip hop" listener I was curious to see what this intriguing value proposition was all about. Driven by curiosity, which was said to have killed the cat, I was expecting Global Grind personalized home page to bounce with a Jay-Z hip hop beat or something. That was not the case, Global Grind is a personal home page product with parity with a number of personalized home page products on the market (i.e. widgets, drag and drop, etc). I thought that some of its design element decisions and button placements were a little odd.
Continue reading "Global Grind: Startpage For Hip Hop Gen?" »
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of bub.blicio.us at the TechCrunch event in Menlo Park, California on Friday evening (Suits Suck tee shirt photo explained in first story below).
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.29.07
TechCrunch 9 & A Funny "Suit"?
I was in attendance
for the event on Friday evening at August Capital in Menlo Park and had a great time. There were loads of interesting web 2.0-fabulous guests in attendance. Thanks to Mike Arrington, Heather Harde and the rest of the TechCrunch crew for a wonderful evening. The guest (who I won't name publicly) wearing the "Suits Suck" tee shirt (shown above) said he was a
Google employee in the marketing department and made me laugh. As I sipped on some Stormhoek white wine, he asked me and Nick Gonzalez, also a TechCrunch contributor, "what Mike Arrington looks like?" because he
was looking to connect with him at the party. After both Nick and I took our best cracks at explaining what Mike Arrington looks like he left us to continue on his mission. So let me re-cap, the guy shows up
wearing a colorful "Suits Suck" tee, works at Google in the marketing
department, attends the TechCrunch party looking to connect with Mike Arrington but
doesn't know what he looks like. Doh! Solid strategy, I wonder if he is a "suit" himself in disguise? You be the judge. ;)
Fichey: New Web Discovery Player
Fichey is a little player that float on top of the page and lets you navigate and discover new sites and links from the Web. Display search results from : Del.icio.us, Digg, Downfly, Reddit and StumbleUpon.
The many paths of personalization
Greg Linden explains at some point, the only way to further improve the quality of search results will be to show different people different search results based on what they think is relevant.
At that point, we have personalized search. Showing different results to different people based on what you know of their interests is personalized search.
Social Network Exhaustion (or Facebook Bankruptcy Redux)
Jason Calacanis gives up on Facebook and tries to rationalize by saying: "Facebook
is a multilevel marketing platform where you agree to pay attention to
people's gestures in the hopes that those people will pay-attention to
your gestures in the future. It's a gesture bank."
Video Review: Mini Moo Cards
CenterNetworks offers a video review of MOO and its print 2.0 ways.
Dear Podtech: I’m Not Your VP Marketing
Mike Arrington explains that Podtech is on the right track by focusing
on aggregating third party content under its Flash player and
advertising network and moving away from the highly-competitive content
creation game.
The new Particls Sidebar
The new Particls Sidebar launched to offer a personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online.
First Look: AideRSS Feed Filtering
AideRSS, which launches today, is a new type of RSS filtering service that uses a proprietary system called PostRank to determine the best posts on each blog.
iRazoo Latest to Launch Human-Powered Search Engine
A new social search engine that is looking to promote human-powered recommendations the foundation of its service.
Truncated RSS Feeds Kill Conversations and Long Term Traffic
Ed Kohler of Technology Evangelist explains why truncated feeds offer a pretty terrible user experience thus killing conversations and long term traffic.
Top 5 Chat/IM Apps for the iPhone
Before the iPhone, swarms of Blackberry and Windows Mobile users accessed instant messengers through a variety of different downloadable clients and websites. The iPhone, however, forces developers to create something that’s usable in the browser. Rev2.org takes a look at the options.
RSS Mixer is a simple application for mixing multiple RSS feeds together into one feed. Interestingly, you can then take the new feed and output a custom feed for your iPhone, an Apple Widget, snaggable widget or feed reader.
I created a feed mashup for TECH cocktail and Somewhat Frank here. Of course you could give myAOL Favorites feed reader if you create a folder add a bunch of feeds and click the green "Mix & Share" button.
Today myAOL, a personalization product suite, has officially been released to the beta. As the myAOL Product Manager, I feel like our team just gave birth to triplets, as myAOL offers up three applications into one integrated dashboard experience with various levels of personalization. We hope you like it.
I previewed myAOL a few weeks ago and now you can try it out for yourself. myAOL includes the following:
myAOL myPage is an Ajax, personalized homepage which offers applications and content to be your dashboard for the Web. It offers AOL content and applications (i.e. Truveo Video Search, AOL Mail, AOL Video, AOL Music, TMZ.com, etc.) in addition to 3rd party applications (i.e. eBay, Netflix, YouTube and many more coming soon). It offers a push down express widget tray, separate widget gallery, and drag and drop functionality to help make organizing your page a breeze. It also offers pre-configured,
Ready-made pages which makes adding pages full of content easier (e.g. news, celebrity, technology). With partnerships with Google and Goowy Media, myAOL will offer an assortment of Google Gadgets and Goowy yourminis among other 3rd party widgets.
myAOL Mgnet (pronounced “Magnet”) is an innovative and fun, visual content discovery and recommendations engine.
Mgnet offers a visual approach (using image clouds) to finding new content that you might be interested in on the Web. By using both collaborative filtering and active inputs to provide Web recommendations to users
Mgnet pulls in images and content (videos, articles, blogposts, podcasts, etc.) based on the user's likes and dislikes – users able to rate and save individual stories/feeds.
Mgnet leverages Truveo and Sphere for robust offering of Web content
Mgnet also displays “What’s hot” which taps into the hot items in the myAOL suite. Some additional social aspects will be integrated soon to make it easy to share your recommendations with your buddies.
myAOL Favorites is a combination feed reader & bookmarking product with a built in feed mashup creator (making easy to create your own feed mashups!).
Favorite's feed reader offers a robust and easy to use feed reader for fast content updates from your favorite sites with shortcut keys and previous/next buttons make it easier to get through a lot of content quickly.
Folders are setup for easy organization
Integrated bookmarking and sharing features
Import/Export feeds from other readers synched feeds via mobile. Bookmarks
are integrated with the feed reader experience making saving your favorite items a one-click process while reading your favorite feeds. Finally, one of my favorite features of the suite is "Mix & Share" within Favorites which allows you easily create a mashup feed which also renders as a page. You simply just added your favorite feeds or bookmarks to a folder then click the green "Mix & Share" button to see you options which include creating a public feed and page which can then can be leveraged in a widget, shared via email, AIM or AIM Share. This really makes creating mashup feeds easy and understandable to someone that may not understand everything about XML, RSS or feeds.
The entire myAOL team (dev, design, product, ops, qa, etc) has worked hard developing this personalization product suite, with some help from other groups at AOL and partners - thank you to all for the hard work and dedication. We hope you like the new myAOL and if you have any suggestions or feedback on something that you would like to see us add or change please let me know. Be sure to check out the myAOL Blog to stay updated on the latest happenings in the myAOL personalization suite.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
