DISQUS

Allen Stern · 2 years ago

I posted my review here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/demo-feedhub-feed...

I agree that you have to train it - just like your iPhone.

My concern was around the feed analytics and what happens to my reader count if they switch to the FeedHub feed.

As I noted, I don't get why they aren't trying to capture all of your feeds, not just the ones you rarely read. There is more power there.

Clay Newton · 2 years ago

One thought on how they could make cash, and of course no one will like it: By getting trained, FeedHub is getting to know you very intimately. Selling this information to Doubleclick or GOOG could be a very profitable venture as targeted marketing fodder.

Just a thought.

whitneymcn · 2 years ago

It's probably worth keeping an eye on Yahoo in this area, too. Back at the start of the year they acquired the assets of SearchFox, which had a pretty nice personalized RSS reader.

I used the searchfox reader for several months and thought it was quite good; the only big concern I had was my usual (not specific to searchfox) "personalization" worry: in the absence of input from other sources, how quickly do you end up with a personal echo chamber, where you get more and more of what you're already interested in, and less and less of everything else that's interesting but outside your normal scope?

Not a killer problem, since there are a variety of ways around it, but worth noting.

Sean Ammirati · 2 years ago

Hi Robert,

I'm really sorry that it hasn't delivered the value for you yet.

One new feature in today's release is you can actually give FeedHub your linkblog as part of your digital identity. This may help it learn more quickly about your interests.

You can do this by visiting the 'my profile' page once logged into your FeedHub account.

- Sean

You can see a screen shot on Richard's R/WW Post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedhub_in...

SeekGround · 2 years ago

Conversations seem to become stagnant as we develop deeper information overload problems. We stop seeking new information as we try to deal with the information we already receive. If this softwear frees me up to continue finding new and better conversations, then perhaps it is wort a try. If on the other hand it becomes another time consuming attention grabber requiring continuos grooming, why bother?

How much of my time investment will it require before it knows me?

JoeDuck · 2 years ago

Wouldn't moving to this format makes most people's echo chamber even smaller? Even with TechMeme and random surfing I only see a fraction of the great stuff out there. I like bumping into *new* sites and people and topics so my favorite tools are those that let us bounce around from person to person (MyBlogLog, Yahoo Mash's new conversation feature, etc)

Ben Tucker · 2 years ago

I've been a beta tester for FeedHub for the past few months. I suppose now that they've launched I'm allowed to talk about it.

First off I love what they're attempting to do and wish them all the best of luck. Also, my experiences are based on the pre-release evolution of the product, so it may very well be getting better (in fact I'm sure it is).

My experience with the recommendation engine was that it certainly cut down on the posts I saw, but even after months of training never really chose the ones I would have wanted it to. I can't fault it too much for this, correctly filtering to an individual's taste is a really tough problem that to my knowledge has never been solved well.

Unfortunately, I have not gotten to the point with FeedHub where I could just look at my feedhub feed, and not feel I was missing what I really wanted to be reading.

While I appreciate their efforts to make the product work from within your existing feed reader, I think it would make the product much more compelling if they built a Google Reader-esque browser tailored specifically to the product. Or offered a firefox plugin which customized the Google Reader interface.

Joel · 2 years ago

I've been using FeedHub since yesterday. So far, it's doing a decent job of picking big stories. I don't think it has a chance of picking the stories I would want personally (I look for very specific things in my rss feeds) but I do like the idea of seeing what the "major" stories are for the day.

I still have to go through all my RSS feeds one by one to get the perspectives of different bloggers and find the specific information that I'm looking for. But if I miss a day or I don't have a lot of time, I can use FeedHub + TechMeme to catch up.

I think one of the best ways to use it is to exclude all of your non tech blogs, cause TechMeme is pretty good at that already.

Stu Smith · 2 years ago

A little bit of an ad here, but hopefully relevant...

We have a "prioritization" feature in our reader, FeedGhost, that allows you to read articles in the order that they matter to you. You can assign these priorities manually, let FeedGhost "learn" your reading preferences (which won't be instant, obviously), or add "boost" keywords to bring particular subjects to your attention.

It's a neat feature on the days when you're too busy to read everything, and you can just get rid of all your low priority articles, and be sure you haven't missed anything terribly important.

(Windows only though I'm afraid).

Paul Ogilvie · 2 years ago

Hi Ben,

I recently joined mSpoke to work on the relevancy aspects of FeedHub. I'm sorry to hear that FeedHub hasn't been performing up to your expectations.

It would be extremely helpful for me if we could talk some about which items you'd have liked FeedHub deliver to you that it has failed to deliver. You can contact me at pogilvie@mspoke.com .

Jon · 2 years ago

Robert, have you tried http://www.AideRSS.com ? I saw their demo at a conference and have been using their software for a little while now, and I have to say it does a REALLY good job of getting rid of the noise!

canyou · 2 years ago

This might be the first time Google is facing a real threat (too earlier to say?), similar to when Microsoft had to face internet boom 10 years ago, Google may find itself positioned on the wrong side of the fence this time.
More on this: http://kenqyu.com/2007/09/30/to-make-rss-reader...

John Ainsworth · 2 years ago

I've tried out feedhub for the past 48 hours - here's how I got on.

I currently read 38 feeds and that will probably increase over time. I'd like to cut out some of the stuff that isn't applicable to me.

Therefore this seemed perfect, so I tried it out and gave it 48 hours to see if it lived up to the hype.

I had to lose all my previous read posts, apart from the starred, shared or otherwise tagged ones to begin with - this was a little annoying
It took 36 hours before it started working (could have been a bit less, as it might have started working overnight)
Displayed very badly on my mobile (where I do most of my reading)
Updated irregularly
Lots of bugs in terms of items actually displaying via google reader (e.g. claimed there were only 6 unread posts when there were 41)
I had a few problems adding customised memes on their site
Their site kept logging me out during the time I was on there - which was frustrating
All posts showed up as "john's personalised feed" instead of telling me who they were from, and as the source of a story is pretty important this was frustrating

All in all, I found there were too many bugs for me to carry on using it, so I've resubscribed to all those rss feeds via google reader directly.

Great idea, but just not executed well enough yet.

Facts about New York City · 1 year ago

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