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!

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

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

This movie will take you to a journey. Its the way the favit’s UI has traveled since it was just a thought.

Fasten seat belts and enjoy

Last week, Robert Scoble said something special. It was in the middle of a heated comment exchange to this post on mashable.com

Quote:
“… I want a curation engine, not another lame aggregator. We’ve had enough of those. SocialThing. Jaiku. FriendFeed, etc.”

Definition of “curation”
1. The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts;
2. describes a range of activities and processes done to create, manage, maintain, and validate a component

Well, its coming any time soon…
code name #fluffy

A comprehensive explanation of what exactly the favit effect means,  is in this short video.

Enjoy!

The Internet has undertaken, more or less, the same role throughout all these years: building bridges between people and data.

In the beginning, there was the RIFT: the people stood on this shore, and the data was on the far side. Few , God blessed , had the tools to reach and work with the digital data. So, bridges were needed…

The “salvation” came in the 1990s, when several significant changes took place on a global scale; first the PC penetration jumped exponentially and the second major thing was the availability of a permanent connection between these PCs through the World Wide Web. At the same time, the popularity of interconnections became stronger, laying the ground for intermediaries to jump in. A new era started, shortly followed by a war among the most important web services (Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft), basically a war of the middlemen – the battle was and still is about “Who is going to control the Bridge”.

SEARCH

In the late 1990s – early 00s, the search engines successfully served the purpose of giving the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the data. The data itself was static and, for that period of time, things were working well on both sides – the user could have a proper way of looking towards the opposite shore and spot what’s needed.

As everything had gotten more and more dynamic though, the old algorithms of the search engines started to look obsolete when compared to the increasing energy of the Internet – the blogging platform steps in and pulls up the speed of data alteration. As a response to the increasing dynamics of the web, Technorati and other niche blog search platforms emerged.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Around 2004, we witnessed another radical step – the first attempt of placing humans as bridges between data and end users – the beginning of the social web. It all worked according to one very powerful principle called the “collective wisdom”. It says that if many people judge something as good, it must be good in deed. And so users submitted content to one place in the web and other people rated it, determining what’s worth and whats not. So, the average mass user got to read the popular stuff.

The catch was that very shortly after, the social bookmarking platforms like digg, reddit etc have got under the control of several content lobbies. As a result, the content creators benefited, opposite to the conent consumers, who were overwhelmed by the amount of “highly rated information” which was actually irrelevant to their interests. Cause they had no control about what they get.

RSS

The Really Simple Syndication emerged as a light in the tunnel of the already overloaded information society. For first time you could actually appoint the sources to obtain content from. Unfortunately, the light quickly proved to be coming from the approaching locomotion. A gigantic portion of content is relentlessly dumping on us through our RSS-ed feeds. Probably, no more thаn 10% of the users can handle this situation effectively. Just take a look at the “unread” items in your Google Reader to get our drift.

All these patterns of obtaining information had one thing in common: a substantial human effort, time, energy and quite often specific knowledge, which were required for obtaining the interesting content on a daily basis.

Despite all the technologies, interconnecting people with data in a variety of ways, the rift has never been larger. It is because the user needs just what its interesting for him/her. On a daily basis. Presented comprehensively. Obviously a new bridge is needed…

What is favit ? from favit on Vimeo.