Toluu Archive

Feed discovery service Toluu has rolled out another enhancement to help with feed discovery. Toluu now allows you to tag your feeds which will help others find feeds they might be interested in. While this might seem like a simple update, the idea of tagging could introduce readers to more feeds than before which drives user engagement with new blogs and more content. My hope is that Toluu is randomizing the feeds that show up in the list for each tag so users can see a sampling and not the same 5 blogs each time.

The tagging feature uses Ajax to suggest tags based on what you type into the tag box. This is crucial for making sure that tags remain as consistent as possible. Toluu launched a friends-feed discovery service back in July. I like Toluu because the service focuses on discovery while minimizing the "popular" effects that so many other feed services suffer from.

Feed discovery service Toluu has rolled out a minor update that is geared towards helping users decide if a suggested feed is something they might be interested in before visiting the actual Web site. I’ve embedded a screenshot below of the new functionality. When you put your mouse over the name of a blog anywhere inside the Toluu application, you see the latest five posts from that blog. This can help you determine if it’s a blog that you would like to visit and/or subscribe to.

Could Toluu slowly create a custom version of popURLs and Alltop start page? They know what you like and what your friend’s like in terms of feeds, could they offer up the right content in a mix? And what about aggregating "like content" together?

Check out our full review of the Toluu service.

Toluu is a way to discover new blogs based on the blogs you already read. We initially wrote about Toluu earlier this year and basically said that it’s no longer about what you are interested in, it’s about what others think you should be interested in based on the interests to which you are interested!

Today founder Caleb Elston has announced a variety of upgrades and updates to the service. They have cleaned up the design of many of the pages across the site. They have also upgraded the architecture of the site to make the site load even faster than before.

There are also new filtering options which helps you find the newest feeds to discover. Rather than receiving the same recommendations over and over, you can select a time period and only receive recommended feeds newer than the selected period. If you have been with the service since the beginning you will like these new filters.

Welcome to 2008, the year of the friend. This year it’s not about what you like or are interested in, it’s what you will show interest in because your friends thought you should. Toluu has launched to help us with this task. It’s simple to use: pop in your feed list (also known as OPML), add your friends and Toluu does its magic. It then provides you with a list of suggested feeds that you should be reading or might be interested in based on your friends. And there’s an activity/news feed.

Louis Gray, who has become a leader in the area of feed discovery has an in-depth review of Toluu. Gray chatted with the founder of Toluu Caleb Elston who mentioned, "I set out to create a site that was focused on sharing the feeds you read with friends and discovering new interesting feeds. I did not want to create another feed reader, there are many fantastic feed readers out there and new ones being launched and updated everyday." Another service working with feed discovery is FeedHub (our coverage).

Toluu offers an export which allows you to take the new OPML and pop it back into your selected feed reader. There’s no talk of a business model yet but my guess is that sponsored feeds could be suggested with your friend’s suggestions.

Each friend I checked out basically had the same recommendations for me. Frankly what I’d prefer to see is a profile tool that asks me questions about who I am and what I am interested in. After completing the survey it displays potential new friends and their feeds that I might be interested in. If it’s about discovery, the odds are my current friends will have 75-85% of the same feeds I alread read.

I am all for content discovery, but to keep it limited to friends is a bit boring, and will produce limited results. I am guessing some sort of leaderboard is only a few weeks away.