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!

“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?

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!