Toluu Helps You Like What Your Friends Like

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.