In late December we teamed up with the design and usability experts from Zurb in order to find the best reading interface for the new favit – update codename: “Avalon“.

The first thing the guys from Zurb noticed about favit is that it has so many powerful features and it is difficult to explain them. Even geeks got lost in finding, grasping, and spreading all those features in their communities. In fact, the most important feedback and ideas we’ve received from the Zurb team was:

“Why don’t you merge all those features into one powerful and easy to understand?”

The next simple, yet brilliant question was:

“Why the lifestream (people and groups) and subscriptions are in different services. Can we put them together?”

This one struck us as a lightning – there was no logical explanation as to why we had them that way… We believed (like geeks do) that the Subscriptions (blogs and site feeds) should be separated from the user’s activities across the various social networks. But why?

Working closely with Zurb we created a new feature in favit – the Social Streams – a tab like structure where every user can decide which friends and subscriptions to include. The streams can behave both as lists and as powerful interest based filters that every user can configure and edit easily, at anytime. All streams are shareable – and everyone can subscribe to streams shared by others – sharing is caring!

One of the new great features in the upcoming streams is that they can be browsed by the type of media they contain – Photos, Videos, etc. Every user can decide how the information in the stream will be displayed – weather it should be ordered chronologically (based on the time of sharing) or by the network activity (based on comments, likes and reshares). This feature is also one of the most controversial – in the current favit your lifestream gets rearranged based on your networks activity. In this way stories that your friends consider important keep popping on top of your stream. But, as Robert Scoble has said several times – the ability to decide how the stream should behave is crucial. BTW – most of the requests that Robert addresses in this post have already been integrated in favit Avalon.

Once we agreed on those new elements and features, our team took over from Zurb and went developing the application that will blow everybody’s mind. We analyzed how people read and interact with information and created an interface that will enable every user to fully enjoy his social media stream.

Be among the first to peek into the new favit – it will be divided in two parts – a Notification stream and a Reading window. In this way you can read undisturbed an interesting article and in the same time keep track of your friends’ content stream, status updates, etc. Our real-time engine will make sure that all blog posts, shared items, likes and comments arrive in your stream the second the user publishes them.

Working with Zurb helped us a lot and we’re very pleased with the way they Jeremy, Roeland and Tanya embraced the project, opened our eyes, and helped us focus on the user experience and optimize the logic that lays in the basis of our core product.

More features and upcoming changes will be revealed shortly. Keep an eye on our blog as we prepare the launch of the Avalon version of favit!

Innovate!100 is a worldwide initiative run by the global market intelligence and advisory firm GuideWire Group with the goal to identify and accelerate the world’s 100 top technology, media and telecommunications startups.

favit.com has proudly won its place among the top 100 and we will be delivering a rapid fire pitch at the Pitch Slam in Tel Aviv, Israel at the 12th of April. (get tickets and come and see us!).

We would like to express our gratitude to the entire GuideWire Group team for their time and efforts and mostly for coming up with this great initiative – Thank you, and see you in Tel Aviv!

“Social Today Feels Like Search A Decade Ago: Lots Of Noise And Lots Of Spam” – Michael Arrington

We all find it difficult to keep track of what is happening on our various profiles over the Internet, still we do not complain much, it seems as if we do not have a better solution. Do we?

Here is how  favit approaches the problem and the solution we offer:

First, when favit integrates a profile from a certain network it does not separate the different services (or media) into different tabs in the interface – all your content streams are melted into a single one.

Second, every integration in favit works both ways – everything you like on favit will be marked as liked on facebook or added as your favorite tweets on twitter. More than that, the comments on your shared links will not only be synchronized with the respective services but also brought together from the different platforms they were originally posted on.

Third, you will not have to build new socialgraph or remember the network of each of your friends. Once you integrate one of your profiles, favit brings to you all the information that would reach you on the original network, regardless if your friends have favit accounts too or not.

To cut the noise and limit the FRAM, favit offers great personal filters and lists, which tremendously help you filter, scan, and organize your content.

The major difference between favit and the rest of the social stream aggregators is that favit is built to accommodate future demand and growth, and not just barely cover the today’s needs. The result is a scalable and reliable solution to the Information Overload problem:

Having read Steve Mollman’s great article for CNN: “How can we cope with information overload?” I consider that I should add some more ingredients to it by describing the favit approach to end the information overload.

The major concept of favit is that the product has to cope with information overload on all levels. Filtering and reordering feeds was quite an easy task to do, but this was just the beginning of the game. A much more difficult task is to put a full lifestream in order, thus minimizing the “noise” from different networks.

People have limited processing powers and time, but we are good at finding new things based on connections, conclusions, and reactions to information we have already encountered. Machines, on the other hand, are great at filtering and organizing information. While these are familiar facts for everyone, unfortunately just a few of us know how to take the best of the two worlds and integrate them into a real-time web service that will make it possible for everybody – not just geeks – to win the battle against information overload. Happily, a few of those people are on board of favit which allowed us to integrate and apply the latest modern web technologies to the major sources on which people rely to receive information from:

• Sources -we generally subscribe for stuff we can’t afford to miss (I put the save search here too). The wide and free availability of feeds however, made our readers explode. Subscribing became like bookmarking – with the purpose not to read the content but just to ensure that you can easily reach it if needed. Plus, the RSS readers are simply erroneously constructed as private services with limited interaction capabilities.
  In favit we applied a totally new approach to sources, starting by constructing our own reader and equipping it with tools (like filters & bundles) that made the content consumption, interaction, filtering, and sharing much easier and effective. Furthermore, our discovery section returns interest based suggestions not only for single feeds but for carefully curated user collections (bundles) and filters.

• People & Groups – this part was harder. People are of much greater value but they generate more noise in their content streams. On top of that, the lifestream is more vivid and the interaction with it is more intense. After providing a true two-way integration with the major social networks, we applied the same logic from the reader – both people and groups can be part of a list and filters can be applied to the content that arrives from them. In that way, favit users benefit from everything that their friends discover without being overwhelmed with information and without the need to switch between different services or tabs.

We put these two major channels in a simple stream and laid the foundations of the tool that we believe will bring an end to the information overload. Of course, more things have to be done and optimized but we are definitely on the right track!

Related: Content is all around us. But why it is so difficult to get to it?

Today, Richard MacManus placed favit, together with the light blogging platforms tumblr and posterous, in the People Curated section of his Top Tools For Tracking Topics on the Web mash up.

favit covers the entire lightblogging spectrum by providing the necessary environment and tools for both content creation and content promotion, utilizing its two-way twitter & facebook integration.

Better yet, thanks to the favit statistics module, you can also learn about your readers and their behavior.

The lightblogging part of favit described above is just a small piece of the favit potential and abilities.

In this post I would like to digg deeper in Richard’s article and show you how you can use favit as a tool to track topics and trends on the web:

The numbers from the screenshot correspond to three ways favit allows its users to monitor things they can’t afford missing, even when browsing the latest stuff from their lifestream and subscriptions.

1. This one is my personal favorite and it’s called the global favit filter – it  tracks many topics simultaneously and allows selection of the monitored sources.
2. The favit saved searches – anytime a search is made on favit it can be saved and then efficiently monitored.
3. The search section in the activity monitor panel – keeps track of recent searches and provides updates on  them.

The above position favit as a destination service for your tracking needs – this means that you will have to visit favit in order to find the results you need. Emphasis is also put on making favit a feed service – the rss feed from the search results is a good example of this.

Related:

Another post inspired by the RWW team: Sharing is caring in the feeds world too

RWW for favit in its “The Real-Time Web and its Future” report – “It blew our minds“

favit.com moves everything in your online world in real time now: articles, videos, images and status updates.

The real time favit allows you to see articles the second they are posted and to participate in discussions as they happen. Your friend’s comments are now popping one after the other – interesting discussions evolve in front of you.

If you want you can stop the stream from the   button on the top menu. To get the new stuff you will have to refresh your browser window though. You can return to the show anytime by pressing the button. Enjoy!

The favit real-time engine is the next step after adopting the PubSubHubBub to making favit entirely real-time and keeping its leading role in the Real Time Web.

music by DoKashiteru

In the beginning of last week I found a really nice read on the RWW blog: 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock, two points of the Richard MacManus’s article aroused my interest and I would like to extend them further with a few examples.

1. Filter RSS Streams

Probably we are all constantly facing one of the biggest handicaps about the RSS stream readers – the unread numbers (1000+).
We do subscribe to a lot of websites and find ourselves overloaded with content. The digits in bold keep bugging our mind and we feel like we are always missing something important. While in fact, when subscribing to a RSS emission, by default we do not intend to read everything.

Happily, things evolved and now by applying certain topic(s) to a bunch of sources we can filter their content and get only the stuff we really care about – take for example the Facebook and Twitter news filter that scans 17 carefully preselected top tech blogs for articles about Twitter and Facebook. In the last 24 hours all the 17 blogs published a total of 207 posts with just 29 posts about Facebook and Twitter. I have been spared 178 irrelevant post that would have otherwise turned into 178 unreads.

Filters can be of great help especially when facing one and only massive RSS emission from a certain source and we need a fast and reliable tool to filter it for the content that we are actually into. Things with filters and RSS are getting even better with the vast implementation of the PubSubHubBub protocol, which delivers you the articles in real-time.

2. Categorize News

Categorizing and putting our news feeds in bundles is great, but what use they have if you can not share them with friends? Now you can!
Take a look at the favit.com’s Infographs bundle including 24 awesome feeds related to infographics and data visualization, I have spent half a day researching and curating it, and I will be more than happy to share it my friends so they do not spend the same time in research, but in actually reading it and getting inspiration.

To summarize, I can now say that the “sharing is caring” principle so vastly implemented when sharing single articles have now, thanks to the favit.com developers stretched further to a field that we have erroneously considered private and personal as our Inbox, neglecting the fact that feeds are public and by default shared with everyone from the site that emits them – so go ahead and whenever you find a new interesting source share it with your friends – they will appreciate it!

Have you ever wondered how many people visited your personal profile on some service? Or how many people landed on your group today? Which website sent them? How popular is actually the link you just shared? These questions still remain unanswered on most networks across the web.

favit is pioneering a stat module providing detailed traffic statistics available on each shared item and public profile. This way you can monitor popularity trends and dynamics for your personal profile, groups, bundles and filters – every single item on favit.

The stat module is free and the data is being updated each 15 minutes – thus turning the favit stats into a great tool for real-time data reporting. Details are available for the last 24 hours and the past month.
Get to know your visitors, friends, your entire social graph a lot better with the favit stats.

For quite a long time we have been receiving feedback from favit users around the globe that they would like to manage their integrated web identities and interact on various networks simultaneously from a simpler and cleaner interface.

We have created for them the favit lite:

The lite version of favit allows you to stay current with your subscriptions and monitor your lifestream, comment and like content the same way as in the Standard favit.

The difference is that the left and the right menus are not visible and the user attention is entirely dedicated to the information flow.
The really simple interface makes browsing and consuming content highly addictive and you will click the “show more” button more and more…

You can always switch between the Standard/Lite favit either from the favit logo on top left
or from the link above the search box

The “Real-Time Web and Its Future” is a comprehensive report with more than 50 inspiring interviews of companies, developers and executives venturing into the field of building real-time web applications.
The ReadWriteWeb’s lead writer and editor of the report –
Marshall Kirkpatrick combined also more than 300 insights from the  Real-Time Web Summit in October this year. The result is a must-read piece of inspiration and shared knowledge.

Favit.com is proudly listed in the “Real-Time Web and Its Future” report. We are extremely grateful and happy that our effort of building something unique and useful have been recognized and spread from such a high level:

Favit.com does a whole lot in one stream-reading client – so much that the user might take a little  while to get comfortable with the tool. It recommends Twitter and Favit users to follow. It does major and minor filter creation:

• minor filters are for keywords over feeds that you’re subscribed to, and a
• major filter is just a big button at the top of your screen that you press to turn a global filter on or off.

It recommends filtered collections of blogs assembled by other users with similar interests. It’s amazing.

Get the full report at: ReadWriteWeb.com/Reports