Library clips

Feed Each Other (FEO) has come out of its invite beta mode, and we get lots more since I last posted, infact I think it’s pioneering what Google Reader plans to be, a social network RSS Reader with profiles, Shared items, feed and people recommendations, messaging, etc…

From the blog post release:

“Feed Each Other lets you harness the power of your network of friends and colleagues to help you filter and explore the web […] Wouldn’t it be nice to know which feeds your friends subscribe to? Shouldn’t you be able to find new feeds by topic? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse feeds related to your subscriptions? Shouldn’t you be able to share things that you find in your reader without clogging up your friend’s email? How great would it be if your reader could automatically point you towards other interesting, like-minded people?”

Udi, ex Yahoo! Answers, and the creator of FEO has really honed in on the power of people as your information filter, and what better than to drop your RSS Reader into a social network…see more on people as your attention filter, I quoted an excerpt on my previous FEO post.

It’s really giving Streamy (another social network RSS Reader) a run for its money, basically the same thing without IM, groups, lifestreams/friendstreams, and blog notes. Without these features FEO is still feature packed with the essentials, and the design is very easy to understand.

Plus FEO has lots of recommendation and discovery.

Both FEO and Streamy are the ideal RSS Reader environment, just a glimpse of the future readers to come.

The FEO RSS Reader is what lets it down for me, I need to be able to mark stuff as read, but according to their FAQ, they have intentionally gone with a different approach.

Let’s revisit the functions and features.

RSS Reader

- feeds with new items are starred (instead of the regular bold)

- read by feed or river of news (called a channel…what we call tag or folder)

- we have a problem, you can’t mark/unmark read items (as soon as you click a feed to read the star disappears and it’s considered read…next time you click this feed all items will be there but you won’t remember if you have read them or not)

- options allows you to re-title, automatically expire the subscription (never, day, week, month), make it public/private, change the folder it lives in

SOCIAL/RECOMMENDATION

- the subscribers link is an info page about the feed and it list other FeedEachOther users who have also subscribed to this feed, and also recommendations of other feeds based on what other readers of this feed read…clicking one of the feeds takes you to that feeds info page.
Just like Streamy, a feed profile page, reminds me of a feed community page like MyBlogLog

- when we are reading a feed, our sidebar again has recommended feeds and also related tags
(these tags must be channels people use to organise a feed)

Clicking on a tag takes us to a discover page, so basically you can discover feeds by channel names people assign to them…we also get a cloud of related tags to the tag you are viewing, and also a list of feeds with this tag, also showing latest shared items from the FEO community (all these shared items must come from feeds which are tagged with that channel)

Whoa, this is great for discovery and recommendation of people and feeds.

MyBlogLog really needs to add something substantial to its service, otherwise what do you do there, if they added an RSS Reader and link sharing, then we’d have a reason to hangout…they are only winning people over with a feature, it’s recent readers widget.

RSS ITEMS/ARTICLES

- see comments from the native post
Marshall from R/WW seems to like this one and wishes you could post a comment to the native blog post from within FEO (there is an RSS Reader that can do this, I forget which one).

- clip it to read later (feeds that have clipped items have a blue icon)

- share it (with your FEO fans, co-workers, family, friends or indivduals, even create your own contact groups)
What about sharing items with people who don’t use FEO, see more.

- Leave a comment (note) on the shared item
When you share an item you can annotate a note (commenting)
The first person to comment on this item will have the annotation on the top of the article, if you comment on this item later on, your comment will be in the comments section.

Keep in mind, in order to comment on an item, you have to share it…this is inbuilt so your network is notified of your comment.
I guess you can share the same item lots of times if you keep commenting on it…not sure if this is true, I can’t leave 2 comments in a row, maybe I have to wait for someone to reply to my comment, before I can comment again.

- archive it (save it)
There is also a way to tag items, if you tag items you have not archived there is no way to see them, but if you tag items you have archived, then you can browse your archived items by tag; if you archive items without tagging them you can still see them but not browse them by tag…there is even a related archive tags
Archive and tags should be in the one button.

At this stage, could FEO not only be a social network RSS Reader and link sharing, but a social bookmarks or memedigger service as well…since we archive and tag items doesn’t this make for a social bookmarking framework.

It’s a toss up between Share items and Archive items, which one of these features could be a social bookmarks. You share items because you think their hot, or you could share an item that doesn’t interest you, but you know your friend will like it…you archive items because you like them.

So that’s feeds, what about my stuff.

Here we have a link to all our Shared items, clipped items, archive items, and inbox (that’s right you can add friends and send/receive private messages)

You can visit another user, add them as a contact, share items, and private message.

Profile

When you visit a users profile you can view their
- shared links
- contacts (network, fans)
- subscriptions (and OPML)
- like minded people (people who are similar to you, probably based on subscriptions, what they archive, clip, share, and contacts).

Contacts

Network - people we have added
Fans - people who have added you
(manage your network into groups, create your own groups to organise people).

Shared items by your network

A stream of stuff your network has shared.
- also has a feed
-filter by contact group…these also have feeds

I’d like to see this when I visit someone elses profile, see what there network is sharing, maybe I could find a few items/feeds/people this way

Dashboard

This is basically like the Facebook News feed, see your contacts activity, what they are:
- subscribing to
- sharing
- adding contacts, and other activity

Mirror

This is basically like the Facebook Mini feed, how your activity will look in your fan’s dashboards
- I can’t see another users Mirror, this would be handy so you can check out their activity to get to know them more before considering requesting to be a fan

More

Share
- search and browse people via the Share icon.

Discover
- the Discover icon is the latest shared items in the FEO community organised by category, each item having related tags.
Clicking on a tag shows a list of feeds with this tag, also showing latest shared item from the FEO community (all these shared items must come from feeds which are tagged with that tag…also shows related tags).

Search
- subscribe to keyword search, lists some tags similar to that keyword, and lists feeds with those tags

What’s missing according to me

- mark/unmark read
- comment wall
- note blogging
- mutual friends
- lifestream and friendstream
- IM

FEO and Streamy have lots in common, especially the network type features:
- profiles, messages, adding friends, shared items stream

FEO goes the whole way with recommendations and discovery, and the marvellous dashboard and mirror activity streams.

Streamy has a few other features like; lifestreams, IM, groups, drag and drop, note blogging.

Either of these new breed of RSS Readers are killers!