Monday, February 14, 2005

Findory Favorites

Findory's newest feature, Favorites, makes it easy for readers to easily see their favorite news and weblog sources.

For example, on the BBC page, clicking the "Add Favorite" button at the upper right will put a link to BBC articles in your "My Favorites" list. You can also mark weblogs such as Boing Boing or Gizmodo as favorites.

Reading news on Findory is easy. Read a few articles. Get personalized recommendations. Click on a few sources. Add a few favorites. Read more articles. Get more personalized recommendations. It's a virtuous cycle. The more you use Findory, the better it gets!

Contrast that with a using a normal feed reader. First, you hunt down a few RSS feeds. Manually cut-and-paste URLs into the feed reader. Hunt down more feeds. Manually add them. Skim all your feeds desperately looking for interesting articles. Realize that many of the feeds are boring and useless. Remove those feeds. Laboriously hunt down more feeds. Realize you now have too many feeds and can't read them all. Remove some feeds. Ugh. You spend more time configuring and customizing than reading news.

Customization and personalization are at opposing ends of a spectrum. Most feed readers are all the way at the extreme of customization, requiring readers to do work -- lots of work -- to be able to read news.

Findory is a different. It's personalized and learns what you need. It requires no effort. It's easy. It all just works.

4 comments:

Seun Osewa said...

Two words: Very Useful. I like the way findory is growing, taking shape.

Nathan Weinberg said...

Greg:

This makes Findory one step away from the one feature that will make Findory perfect: unfavorites - sites I don't want Findory to show me, either because I hate them or because I already read them. That single feature will make Findory several times more useful.

Seun Osewa said...

I think many people have mentioned how the ability to tell Findory "i don't want this" would be a good thing, even at the article level. About Findory becoming a blog reader: well, the only problem with that will be the need to have all blogs approved before being added to the 'Findory Ecosystem' - what if your favorite blogs are not approved? What if your favorite feeds aren't really blogs?

Greg Linden said...

Hi, Nathan and Seun. Great idea on excluding or rating sources. We at Findory tend to develop our features incrementally. I'm sure you can see how Favorites could evolve into a more elaborate feature.

Seun, on the approval process, we do that mostly to keep spam out of the system. It's an interesting idea to allow readers to privately list and read specific feeds or websites. I'll make sure that is on our suggestion list.

Thanks, Seun and Nathan!