Library clips

Feed Collectors is almost the same as Pulverati, I think it’s by the same people…Feed Collectors displays the data in more ways and also supplies OPML.

Features

Create a Collection (river of news)…soon all users will be able to create multiple collections.

A collection comprises of a Watchlist (river of news), Feeds page, Friends page, and Profile.

He is a user space, the default page is the All Collections Watchlist…you can change this view to see just one collection from this user.

Also change the view to see content from just one source feed…this drop down lists all your source feeds from all your collections.

See content by date, sort by newest, most relevant, or most popular…also view content by top topics, these must be the categories/tags used by the source feeds.

When you view the Watchlist (river of news) notice that you can click on a category/topic to see contents from just that category/topic, or just from that source feed, or even just from that author from the source feeds (handy for multi-authored blogs).

You can also comment and rate each post.

Even though your Watchlist displays an excerpt for each result it will search the full-text of each item
…you can also set up all your filters and limits and then enter a search term.
NOTE: it will also play items.

The feeds also keep up with your meanderings, when ever you filter or search it will generate a unique feed.

Next is the Feeds section, here you can choose a collection from a drop down menu, this will show all the feeds in this collection, and more…it would be good if it promoted the spliced feed.

Another issue is that the OPML Reading List is defaulted for All Collections, I’d like a separate Reading List for each collection.

Next is the Friends section, collect links to other user spaces, and more…even has a feed.

Lastly is the Profile page.

Here is the collections page, notice when you make a collection you assign tags, so basically you can discover a Spliced feed/River of News/Reading List by tag…nice!
It would be good if this page promoted the spliced feed, Reading List, and User for each collection.

The homepage lists Popular Collection Topics, and Top Collection Tags…these are both the same thing, and they are not limited to the tag field, it is just a search query in the collection title, description and tag fields…using the search box does the same thing.

I like the idea of displaying Most Popular Feeds from Collections, they could almost make a seperate source feed folksonomy section which aggregates all the source feeds people have used in their collections.
For this to work you’d need to not only apply tags to each collection, but also to each feed in each collection…may confuse things a bit but it offers people a directory/folksonsomy to find feeds in order to use in their collections.

I really like the many ways you can filter your Watchlist, the search function and river of news features are awesome…although I’d like to filter a collection or a feed in a collection when I’m creating the collection.

So far feedbite and Feed Collectors are the current Reading List folksonomies, with Pulverati, Kinja, and OPML Factory close behind…more.

Feed Collectors has some great potential as it is very social and has powerful content displays, I only wish the social aspect was closer to del.icio.us…some say del.icio.us is very simple, but this is just what I like about it.

[ADDED 1/05/06: Is a Reading List folksonomy appropriate?]

Smarking is a low scale social bookmark service built ny an Italian computer student…it’s got some great features.

See the latest, most popular, or most rated bookmarks, search or browse tags via the tag cloud.

Bookmark info page

Each bookmark can be rated and commented on (a bookmark has a permalink but not for each user, just a general permalink, usually labelled “? people bookmarked this page”).

Here’s an example of a bookmark info page, notice you can preview the actual website you are bookmarking in a scroll window.

From this page, view related sites and sites that link to the bookmark via Google “related:”, and “link:” syntax.

View descriptions, tags and comments assigned by users who have bookmarked this page.

Lastly you can link to each user account who has bookmark this page
…if you hover the mouse over the link there are plenty of action choices.

User space

Here’s an example of a user space.

NOTE: Notice the comments link also goes to the bookmark info page.

If you hover over a tag you can launch to that tag page in other tag services…great for external discovery.

Each user also has a profile page
- relationships (more specific than friends)
- friends (make a list of friends)
- similars users
- neighbours (geographic, I think)

If you hover over any user name one of the choices is to send that user a message.

Search

Search in the tile, description and tag fields in one go…this is keyword search
…also search for a keyword limited to certain tags.

The results page lists related tags.

Same search is available at the user level, but the tag field is a drop down menu.

You can even subscribe to bookmarks from 2 users as well as specifying the tags from both these users
NOTE: both users have to have these tags…I suppose if one of the users didn’t have one of these tags it would just be ignored.
eg. http://smarking.com/?mode=rss&users=John,Mary&tags=cooking,science fiction

Smarking is very similar in functionality to del.icio.us, there are even some unique features, and the search is clean, direct and intuitive.

The wiki lists the features, also see the blog for updates.