Fav.or.it is tiny start-up based in a small office an hour’s drive from London. But this “feature rich community-based feed reading system” is about to unleash a wholly original take on reading blogs and news feeds which could see it face-down even the social bookmarking giants like Digg and the newer kids like CoComment.
[Note: this is an edited version of a much longer post which appears on TechCrunch UK]
Favorit brings together blog reading and replying into one simple web application. Its innovative web interface is designed to allow users to let users read any kind of RSS feed, cut-up, mashed-up with other feeds or “sliced” in any kind of way.
It’s also is a classic Web 2.0 startup which will attempt to solve one of the web’s most frustrating issues, i.e. the separation of reading RSS feeds from being able to comment on the post. Admittedly any blog post is only a click away from a user being able to comment on it. But imagine being to comment, Twitter-like, under a feed and not even have to care about filling in your name, email, etc. Just comment, save and carry on reading. Having witnessed it myself at an exclusive demo, I can confirm that this is what Favorit is capable of.
Favorit will this week launch a private beta based on a submitted database of 10,000 blog feeds. (The site is exhibiting at two events in London, FOWA and mashup demo).
Turning feeds into slices
Favorit approaches the issue of reading RSS feeds with the concept of ’slices’. Each post in a feed is categorised and tagged. By choosing a category, tag or rank (or a combination of each) the user can filter what they are reading in a more efficient manner than the normal ‘hose’ effect of having to laboriously wade through hundreds of blog posts in hundreds of feeds.
Comment posting with an API
Based on PHP and the Zend Framework, Favorit will launch an API during the public beta enabling it to hook into many more blogging platforms to allow it to send comments back to the sites. Founder Nick Halstead hopes the API will create an ecosystem outside of Favorit.
Now of course there is a glaring issue here. Sites thrive on traffic. But by removing barriers to commenting, Favorit potentially creates a faster turnaround of comments to blogs, and especially blogs at the end of the ‘long tail’.
Tracking attention beats voting
Because Favorit uses Javascript it will gauge how long you read a post and what you did before during and after. This data is invaluable both for advertising targeting and for data mining, and its far more sutble than Digg’s voing system. Eventually the site hopes to rank as many as a million blogs in order of attention.
Because it will track what people actually read, Favorit will be a far more accurate reflection of what is popular online than Digg, which everyone knows is increasingly subject to gaming.
Although Halstead went to great lengths with me to emphasise that Favorit is a different animal than Digg, there is no getting away from the comparison. And it’s quite clear that capturing attention meta-data beats ‘voting’ hands down.
A blogging platform as well?!
Favorit is not just going to be a feed reader. It is also a blogging platform. By creating a subdomain, such as ‘gadgets.fav.or.it’ users will be able to write their own posts into the system. Using this, they can pull in their feed from their blog as well as post directly into Favorit. Any comments on the Favorit subdomain blog then appear back at the original blog.
Since it’s all widget based, users will be able to ‘pimp’ their Favorit blogs with a set of widgets – many form outside suppliers – which Favorit will build into the system. But you won’t be able to access the underlying HTML or CSS.
Here’s where the revenue comes in. Favorit plans to share advertising revenues with users who create these subdomain blogs.
However, controversially, a user could create a subdomain site with someone else’s feed.
If the Nike subdomain pulls in everything there is to know about Nike, Google could be among those knocking on the door given the usefulness of this data. But so could the lawyers.
Because of its simplicity for reading and commenting Favorit has the potential to open up feed-reading to a wider audience than perhaps other aggregators have done so far. And could well disrupt older ‘voting’ style social bookmarking sites.
Ok cool tech… but where is the “fav.or.it” version of Kevin Rose?
“Because it will track what people actually read, Favorit will be a far more accurate reflection of what is popular online than Digg”
Mike, I think you’re missing what Digg is about IMHO. If Digg was a passive site, meaning, you don’t get to *say* (digg) what you like or what you don’t, and things were mainly determined by what you read, it wouldn’t be Digg.
Is Favorit a Digg killer?
One word: No. The site looks too tacky so the analysis wasn’t needed.
As I point out here, no… it won’t be…
Site does look cool though.
Too bad – there needs to be a Digg killer.
Well, the problem is to create a wide community as digg. I don’t see it as a ‘dig killer’
I don’t see it as a digg killer….rather I can think of creating applications using their API
Digg was obsolete one week after it initially launched. Made obsolete by MSN Ultra Weblinker Service link server!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
I like the idea that it tracks how long I’m on a post. If I glance at a post and can tell right away that it’s not something I’m interested in and move on, then that should count as less eyeball time than when I not only read a post from beginning to end but then end up linking to it from other relevant locations.
I look forward to checking that aspect out. Unfortunately, I think the last thing we need online is yet another blogging location. *sigh*
Looks like another “Me too, nothing (new) to see here”.
See you on the DeadPool in 6 months…
what an ultra stuipid brand name… the could have at least tried to spel it rite!
favourite has a U in it… and an E at the end… the UK folks could have at least got the U part rite – stupid umerican speling!
I think its going to be a great idea, I even signed up to see what happens. I can say that it is going to take some time to climb but when it does… Well only time will tell. But it will be good to write about over at tsotd.com
So is fav.or.it biting the in-development FeedSlice’s terminology for slices? I think so.
#11: Why use british spelling over american? English has become a world language and people may use it as they see fit.
English has always been a language in transformation and still so. Just deal with it.
Is blah blah a digg killer?
is this and that.. an iPod killer?
sensationalise just about anything!!
Nothing about this site makes any sense on any level.
Who is the target market?
Who will leave digg for it?
Digg is about people promoting their own sites under the guise of news and 12 yr olds commenting.
This will kill digg, No, this will not gain any traction, will not make any adsense money and will be toast in a few months.
The only people who will make money are the people who arrange the VC money train to fund this loser.
100 million websites and only 100 are really useful.
Initially, I think it sounds like a great concept.
However, I don’t think simply ranking items by the time spent on a page is very effective. Consider the difference between a page with a cool photo, and a 3 page article on Wired. The photo only takes 10 seconds to look at and the Wired article would take about 10 minutes. On digg they’d share the same level of popularity, but on here you would see the blog post absolutely crushing the photo.
So it wouldn’t necessarily rank popularity, but just how long it takes for you to view the content.
Why are you comparing it to Digg? It’s a more advanced rss reader. Google RSS and bloglines are the direct rivals.
If you want a Digg killer you need a Digg-style community. Thats Diggs main asset.In addition, I dont see much relationship between Digg and this startup.
Why is the name in Swedish?
I wonder what Arrington would have written about this site. I think it would have been at least one paragraph.
More than a Digg killer, the site looks a nice feed reader with LIVE commenting. I don’t think Digg is ever considered as a feed reader (I would say, it is a headlines reader plus crap comments). TIme will tell, in what way favorit will compete with Digg. I hope it does. Digg needs a killer. Please.
I’m actually not a fan of the “track what’s popular by how long I view it”. I agree with Nate (#17).
Using his example. Say you get to the end of a 3 page Wired article only to find out the title was misleading, the conclusion was just dumb, and the article sucked as a whole. Because you’ve spent 10 minutes reading it, it goes up in popularity though the majority of the population could very well think it’s dumb.
I mean it’s an interesting take but maybe the combinaition of how long someone spends on the page, along with votes, and comments would be a better way to rank stories.
“Because it will track what people actually read, Favorit will be a far more accurate reflection of what is popular online than Digg, which everyone knows is increasingly subject to gaming.”
IF the gaming users write some greasemonkey script to disable the timer reporting, they will not have a chance. You can’t ever rely on client-side code for things like controlling users.
Actually, I met the CEO of the company and he explained his product in a totally different way. The way he explained the product bears little to no relation to Digg…Here is what he said:
He used the concept of his father who is a fan and officianado of air guns. His dad contributes to a number of message boards and bloggs on the subject but has to manually visit each of those to do that. He also finds it time consuming to visit all those sources because he doesnt know what RSS feeds are or how they work.
Using fav.or.it he can find all the best feeds and subscribe to them simply by doing a category search. Then from that interface he can simple read and comment to all those sources from one location.
For the mainstream user this is an incredible product. I have no idea what this has to do with Digg or why you would even compare the two. For all the tech geniuses out there…..Joe public still doesn’t even know what an RSS feed is or how to use it. Fav.or.it does a very elegant job of solving that challenge and giving them easy access to the treaure trove of data on the net.
Oh, yes and it “learns” based upon your viewing habits which bloggs and feeds are more important to you and ranks them accordingly.
Unlike all the cynics on here who have never built anything of any commercial value and seem to know so much, I wish the lads luck. It takes guts to be an entrepreneur and they have taken the plunge and built what seems like a very useful interface.