Feeds and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has finally come out of the door into public beta, reports TechCrunch UK. It has a large number of new features aimed at simplifying interaction with news sites and blogs. Founder Nick Halstead has now focused on the core goal of making feed reading and commenting as mass market friendly as humanly possible. Despite praise from the likes of Robert Scoble, the site was early on misinterpreted as a traditional feed-reader, notably by Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray . So RSS reader aficionados will be disappointed by Fav.or.it. There are 2,000 feeds inside Fav.or.it, with 3,000 more to come, but Fav.or.it will add the feeds, not you (at least for now). If content is marked as non-commercial Fav.or.it only shows excerpts Update[Update: If the feed owner has specified that the feed may not be used for commercial use then Fav.or.it only shows excerpts]. Feed owners can embed advertising into their feeds and Fav.or.it will display these without any alteration.
The original idea, of Fav.or.it – the ability to comment on stories and have the comment appear both on the site and the originating blog – remains, thus making commenting pretty simple. This will step up to the plate against other commenting systems like CoComment, SezWho, Tangler, Disqus (which now makes use of Fav.or.it’s full API for commenting) and Intense Debate. And an Adobe Air app, which will notify you when you have comments to go read, is in the works. Fav.or.it has also made it possible to aggregate your IDs from a large range of services. You can add your IDs from Twitter, FriendFeed, or OpenID, amongst others (below).
(Halstead explains more in a video I shot last week, below, apologies for the quality)
As promised when I first wrote about Fav.or.it in October last year (some months before the launch of the private beta) the site uses Javascript to gauge how long you read a post, which is very useful data. It will even stop the timer when it thinks you have walked away from the screen, if, say the post is only 100 words long and you’ve sat on it for 2 minutes (see right). Fav.or.it uses this data to start suggesting items it thinks you’ll like. Fav.or.it was developed using the Zend Framework on PHP with just three developers, rather more than most competitors.
Ultimately the question is, will a mainstream audience actually want this kind of site? I think the commenting functions on Fav.or.it are very powerful. But now it’s fully open, it remains to be seen if that is enough to power its growth.
No comment
How does this service host full text articles from sources that provides only partial text plus link to the full article in their RSS feeds?
Is Fav.or.it scraping the original site? Isn’t that copyright infringment (theme of the week!)?
Nice..
Pete Foster
Is Fav.or.it scraping the original site? Isn’t that copyright infringment (theme of the week!)?
Me: Is that really true???
I will say that I like this site a lot. I find it inherently more useful and interesting than Digg. I like the way i can share right into twitter(and other services). I also like the commenting that can occur. I think that this is easier to consume than friendfeed in many ways. I like the attention algorithm.
This site has mainstream appeal outside of tech circles.
To call favorite a google reader clone is an insult; if anything it is a cool way to discover news (i am gonna leave digg for favorite), share, comment and push out to other sites like twitter. It is squishy, which is very nice.
Think of fav.or.it as a great way to share, discover, comment and connect with other people around stories that interest you. I am a techie but love all the non techie stuff that is brought to the surface easily with this service.
Cheers!
Rodney Rumford
Editor: Facereviews.com
The conversation tracking is the most powerful feature for us hardcore blog readers – I want to know when people have replied to my comments, at the moment comments are seen too much as write them and forget. When I send this, I am told whenever someone replies.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID177895]
Umm, yes. I’m fairly sure just taking the full text of an article that is copyrighted and pasting into your site does not constitute fair use.
Taking the intro, first paragraph, title etc is fine and definately within the bounds of the fair use doctrine (despite what the AP says). But you can’t just take a full article and publish it on your own site without transforming or adding additional value if that source material is copyrighted.
@jatt, no we are not scraping – we are taking the content from the feed. We are (probably) the only service that looks at the license that is attached (e.g. createive commons) and if the feed is set as non-commerical then we do not show the full feed. We have emersed ourselves in the blogosphere for over a year, and I hope are very senstive to this kind of issue.
Bottom line we want to engage a whole new target audience and give sites like techcrunch even more coverage!
sent from: fav.or.it [FID177928]
@pete,
What is a RSS reader doing then? other than taking full content? on our site you can flick between reader/portal – exactly the same same content, we are adding value by making it easy for non-techie users to interact with content from a broad spectrum of site.
And again as in my previous comment, we cater for licensing for those who wish to restrict content use.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID177966]
So with a tip of the hat to The Player, is it digg meets friendfeed meets netvibes? I don’t really get it. This message will be posted from fav.or.it to test how it deals with commenting.
Don’t really like how it deals with my feeds. (I’m a netvibes man, cut me and I bleed netvibes)
sent from: fav.or.it [FID177982]
OK that post has yet to appear on Techcrunch. Oh and what happens if my profile name if different on fav.or.it and Techcrunch?
sent from: fav.or.it [FID178006]
i think the concept is an interesting one and am keen to see how the site will grow. My only gripe is the UI – which i find quite overwhelming in that there is too much information being presented back. would prefer to see less and the ability to tweak it. not keen on the boxy approach.
also been thinking about the power of the individual blogg versus the aggregator – personally i prefer the source rather than a middleman – in that it has everything i want, and i know i wont be missing anything.
dt
Maybe next step should be customisation.
Rajeev Vashisht
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
I reallly really really want these guys to succeed and have been tracking them since i first heard of them.
Unless i’m missing something though – importing opml feeds is still impossible? Until that gets working, i’m not using it.
@Rajeev There was a TC post a few weeks ago about NewsCred, another site that does something similar in terms of easy aggreagation, but that had personalization. The UI was much simpler and more intuitive, but its frustrating because its often quite slow.
i think that`s cool!!!
sent from: fav.or.it [FID180407]
@Andy You’re right – we do have some similarities – both NewsCred and Fav.or.it share the vision of bringing the power of RSS aggregation to mainstream readers. However, there are a lot of differences as well, especially with regards to the UI and user experience, and of course our focus on credibility as a key criterion for news filtering.
Apologies for the sluggishness of the site. We’re working hard at fixing some of the scaling problems thoroughly rather than band-aid fixes (so that we can avoid Twitter-syndrom in the future)! Its already much faster today, and should be back to full speed in the next day or two.
Shafqat (cofounder of NewsCred)
@Andy You’re right – we do have some similarities – both NewsCred and Fav.or.it share the vision of bringing the power of RSS aggregation to mainstream readers. However, there are a lot of differences as well, especially with regards to the UI and user experience, and of course our focus on credibility as a key criterion for news filtering.
Apologies for the sluggishness of the site. We’re working hard at fixing some of the scaling problems thoroughly rather than band-aid fixes (so that we can avoid Twitter-syndrom in the future)! Its already much faster today, and should be back to full speed in the next day or two.
Shafqat (cofounder of NewsCred)
This is very cool, I love blogging about everything this is such a great resource and I know i will be using this all the time.
I like the site. The video explaination helped a lot. They totally need a site re-design. That blue color is just wrong – it hinders usability and ease of navigation. The primary navigation must stand out more.
Please get a decent copywriter, at least for the home page.
EXAMPLE:
“The Street Steve Jobs Health Fears Key to Our Stock Manipulation Game”
What is that? And it’s written in baby blue, with body text in light grey.
The engineers over there have to realize that no matter how great their technology is, if the comm design is difficult, the user will leave.
Nick, just to echo what Michelle says above, and others keep saying, and as I suggested to you once before, you have to get the messaging right on fav.or.it. That’s everything from writing punchy, subbed copy that conveys the site’s usp through to the design, layout, colours and every element in between.
Truly, I want you to succeed big time. But forget everything you know about fav.or.it and look at the home page with objective eyes.
What IS fav.or.it? Could your dad, my mum, or any of the ‘masses’ you want to reach answer that? Until the answer is ‘yes, it’s really obvious what fav.or.it is is and I’m going to jump straight in’, I think you have a mountain to climb.
Michelle,
They don’t provide the content, they just aggregate it. The example you gave was from another site (in this case RoughlyDrafted). they do have a choice on text colors and it sounds like you a more informed opinion there.
@Kyle, we have been developing this for a long time without any external input, you can bet your bottom dollar that we will listen carefully to what people are saying and try and get that message right, what is important to me is that the concept of what we are trying to do is right, the design, the message can all be worked on.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID182933]
Fav.or.it could be very powerful. I haven’t been here long but the ability to use existing social network IDs and the timer feature for popularity are pretty innovative.
sent from: fav.or.it [FID183486]
Glad to see all live and scaling….and some good outreach as well, UK press picking up on this as well, check out the FT.
I don’t think it’s a good business model when you republish copyrighted blog posts in full without even so much as notifying the blogger. It messes with the original blogger’s SEO and has the potential to draw traffic away from the bloggers site.
Sure, it works if you have the right creative comment license that works with fav.or.it, but most bloggers have a regular copyright. Apparently that means nothing to fav.or.it.
I didn’t sign up for fav.or.it. I did not give them permission to run my content. And yet my content is on their site in full. Beyond that, they make me look like a willing contributor, when in fact, I am not happy about this at all.
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