Yesterday, June 11th was a great day for the Internetz! One of the best and most influential tech blogs – TechCrunch turned 5!

Happy, happy birthday TechCrunch!

To commemorate the event,  TechCrunch fans from around the globe gathered, drank beer and talked technology.

At the favit office, in Sofia, Bulgaria we organized a TechCrunch MeetUp as well, and spent more than 4 hours (we left after midnight!) talking geeky stuff and drinking beer (from green bottles mainly)

Check out the 3 videos, we have recorded with some passionate TechCrunch readers as present for the TechCrunch birthday:

The videos are all HD thanks for the flip device that we won at the first TechCrunch Disrupt event in NYC – what better occasion to put in action!

Once again, happy birthday TechCrunch and continue to disrupt the status quo, we like you that way!

We have now completed the upgrade procedure to the new favit, well almost…

There are some small things missing and during the next few days we will be fixing a lot of stuff, starting with:

Counters in the sections:

• Direct Messages
• My Discussions
• Read Later

Saved links importation into the Read Later functionality of the new favit.

Comments: publishing and replies, editing and deletion.

Twitter Integration and sharing.

Unique URL for each entity, plus restoring the favit url shortener fav.ly

Not all of the imported groups and feeds are showing up as we expected, so we will be fixing this as well, shortly all feeds will start coming.

There are also many other things, big and small that we will be polishing and adding in order to ensure a much better favit experience for all of you.

Check this post for updates on the progress, or report bugs and feedback of any kind in the comments or by messaging Martin – our community manager, the @favit is also an option.

Thanks for the understanding and enjoy the new favit!

Although our demo table at the first TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York City was quite small, that was not an obstacle at all in presenting and discussing the favit beta with the Disrupt guests, journalists, fellow exhibitors and of course, potential investors.

We were extremely pleasantly surprised to learn that the people at the Disrupt conference and those following the event from around the world voted up favit in the Evelyn Rusli‘s call for Start Up Alley participants interviews.

So here it is. The Charming Evelyn asking our CEO – Konstantin Hristov to describe the service and our plans about disrupting the status quo, enjoy the video and watch the entire Start Up Alley Day 2 Interviews with better quality at lifestream.com (the favit part starts at 21:45)

Today is a big day for favit.

Our CEO – Konstantin Hristov and the chief platform architect Atanas Yurukov are having a demo table in the Start Up Alley at the first TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York City.

The live coverage of the StartUps from the Start UP alley begins at 12:30pm EDT with Evelyn Rusli from TC doing the interviews.

We’ve prepared accordingly with two vinyl banners that simply say what is favit all about – the user – helping him restore the control of his digital activities.

If you happen to be at the venue feel free to disrupt Konstantin and Atanas at any time, they will gladly show you the new favit and you can leave your impression at the white vinyl.

For the rest, do not worry, the new favit will be soon rolled out.

@innovate100 on flickr

Me pitching favit in front of the jury of experts from PayPal, Microsoft, Norwest Venture Partners, Quickstart Global and the amazing audience of journalists and young entrepreneurs that made the Innovate100 Event in Tel Aviv an amazing and unforgettable event.

And when I say amazing I totally mean it.
As a CEO of favit I have ventured far and wide and attended many conferences, delivered many speeches and received tons of feedback and questions, but nowhere so far I have been more impressed by the quality of the feedback that the Innovate100 judges and guests gave me. The discussions I had with them about the future of the web made me wish the event lasted two or more days!

See the favit pitch and the jury feedback:

And the presentation:

Yesterday Niall Jones from ideas-bg paid us a visit and together we worked on a different approach to our frequent brainstorming sessions.

One can not teach or restrict creativity and it is pretty common for any event where ideas and opinions are freely expressed to get out of control and schedule. Niall’s job is to prevent this from happening by making the brainstormings more focused and productive.

It is amazing to see what difference a few simple tools like markers, paper and sticky notes can bring to the table of creative thinking. Add some basic rules and a strict time frame and your brainstorming sessions are now tamed!

We came up with some pretty good ideas on the preset topic “How to execute a successful global viral campaign?” and shortly you will be seeing them in action! Thank you Niall!

When we launched our two-way integration with twitter, expanding and showing shared pictures or videos from the tweets was a fairly easy task.

The harder part was to beautifully integrate them into a single, unified content stream, in which the favit users receive information not only from their twitter or facebook timelines but also from their favorite sources (subscriptions).

There was one thing though that we have not been doing in the previous version and I am sure you will love it in the upcoming Avalon release.
Having our own RSS reader allows us to know a lot about the links that are shared around, even when they are shortened or in other way altered.

In the new favit when your friends tweet about an article they are reading, you will be receiving not only the tweet and the link to the resource -  the entire article will be expanded and displayed in full together with the comments from the original source. How more awesome can favit get? Stay tuned and you will see!

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: