this is what I meant before about the homepage... seeing what the service actually is is most valuable.

http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/7870/betterhomeaf9.jpg

and for comparison...

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/3034/fzerohomebp0.jpg




last edited by Farseeker at 12:53:03 15/Mar/08

last edited by Farseeker at 12:56:05 15/Mar/08

farseeker; cool concept - we had some problems figuring out what should be on the front page, I think both Nats and I like your version way more, so we'll hopefully make it so. Again, thanks for the helpful feedback.

Also what I think would be cool is if you could group the RSS feeds into, well groups :). For example, I normally break up my reading into 2 distinct categories:

1) Non-tech news
2) Tech news

So ideally with link feedzero.com it'd be really handy if I were able to create the grouping like that and then add feeds into them so I don't have to intermixed my non-tech news with my nerd news. Then I can filter those news further using the training obviously.

At the moment I've just removed the non-tech stuff (like ABC feed), I don't know if this is just me but I tuned my mind to a different mind set when reading nerd news & non nerd news. It just easier for me to concentrate and get as much info as I can during my break. This may just be my crazy reading habit though ....

Not sure if this is already on your dev plan?

Oh also a customised sort / grouping order would be really handy as well i.e. again I normally logically read through the articles from slashdot, engadget etc etc. So would be good if I could sort the listing like:

1) Site name (descending/ascending)
2) Date published (descending/ascending)

I reckon you'd really only need no more than 2 levels of sorting.

Damn it I really should group these suggestions into one post... anyway I hope you don't mind me posting multiple posts as I thought of them:

- Ability to limit the maximum number of items per feed.
- Aging rule of feeds so older than x days to disappear.
- Ability to manually/automatically in x number of hours/days to update particular feed or all feeds.
- Ability to save certain feed's item as "favorites" for future reference.
- Auto refresh of feeds
- And of course you've already thought of the read/unread thingy.
- Ok this may be a MAJOR MAJOR MAYBE but, offer cripple email clients like Outlook 2003, a FeedZero.com plugin so I could get all of these kick ass filtering etc straight into email client as well (with logins to your site etc) :) Again this is a dream for me :) I mean you can always embed your ads banner within the RSS feed items when I view each article (as well as each feeds ads if they have it).

UI improvement, as much as I hate to say it, I actually liked Outlook style of displaying the emails, I guess it's not really "microsoft-esque" really but multiple window panes idea. This would make your site more like a desktop client RSS feeder (not sure if ultimately this is your goal but it couldn't hurt).

So I guess if you split up the UI into 4 sections:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

| 1) All menus etc                                                               |

+-------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+

| 2) RSS Feeds listing                | 3) Feed items, with sorting columns by   |

|    with threaded view for each feed |    date/author etc like in outlook,      |

|    i.e.:                            |    showing subject only                  |

|    + slashdot                       +------------------------------------------+

|    + engadget                       | 4) Contents of the feed                  |

+-------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+

Pretty much self explanatory, when you click on 2) it fetches and load contents into 3). Once user click on item on 3) it loads contents into 4). And so you can right click in 2) and force refresh the feeds according to your Bayesian rules, max # article rules & aging rules.

I know this will probably make your app like every other desktop RSS readers but I prefers that UI as it's more intuitive for me.


Oooook I think I've said enough already, please feel free to ignore any/all of my rants :)

Thanks again for the site, it's awesome work guys.

Also what I think would be cool is if you could group the RSS feeds into, well groups :). For example, I normally break up my reading into 2 distinct categories:

OPML-style grouping of feeds is something I've wanted since day one and I believe it is still on the TODO :)

At the moment I've just removed the non-tech stuff (like ABC feed), I don't know if this is just me but I tuned my mind to a different mind set when reading nerd news & non nerd news.

Yep, I'm totally the same.

Oh also a customised sort / grouping order would be really handy as well i.e. again I normally logically read through the articles from slashdot, engadget etc etc. So would be good if I could sort the listing like:

My personal preference is to shamelessly rip off the Google feed browsing interface because it pretty much covers everything people could want to do.

So I guess if you split up the UI into 4 sections:

Yep, that's what I'm hoping we can do.

- Ability to limit the maximum number of items per feed.
- Aging rule of feeds so older than x days to disappear.

Not 100% sure how these would benefit, especially once we add the read/not read thing?

- Ability to manually/automatically in x number of hours/days to update particular feed or all feeds.

Not sure what this means - feed content is updated constantly

- Ability to save certain feed's item as "favorites" for future reference.

'Starring' a la google is def. a good idea.

- Auto refresh of feeds

Yep, I like this too, but (f*** google is awesome) I think its only a benefit if you can actually see the updates easily - the way Google reader does it is really nice, just flashes all updated feeds in yellow for a brief second

- Ok this may be a MAJOR MAJOR MAYBE but, offer cripple email clients like Outlook 2003, a FeedZero.com plugin so I could get all of these kick ass filtering etc straight into email client as well (with logins to your site etc) :) Again this is a dream for me :) I mean you can always embed your ads banner within the RSS feed items when I view each article (as well as each feeds ads if they have it).

This would be pretty interesting but I have no idea how feasible it is

whats an RSS feed? :/

that is beyond the scope of this thread; it is a question that can be answered with some simple googling for now :)

As I mentioned above, the concept of 'read' articles is something I am hoping we can put in.

So at the moment I am destined to be trapped in an RSS "groundhog day".

M$ don't have a feedburner yet do they

- Ability to limit the maximum number of items per feed.
- Aging rule of feeds so older than x days to disappear.

Not 100% sure how these would benefit, especially once we add the read/not read thing?

Yeah I just thought it would benefit esp if you first load the feeds i.e. currently I've got about a bajillion items and I couldn't possible read them all. I personally could only read about 10-11 items per feeds because otherwise It'd take way to long for me. Normally I wanted to see the stuff that:

1) I haven't read
2) Stuff that was updated today (because I read the feeds everyday)

So when I log on to FeedZero, I only wanted to see, say, x number of items from the feeds that I hadn't read that since x number of days etc.

- Ability to manually/automatically in x number of hours/days to update particular feed or all feeds.
Not sure what this means - feed content is updated constantly

Sure, I wasn't sure the frequency that your app is updating them but if you're doing it constantly already then that's cool :)

- Ok this may be a MAJOR MAJOR MAYBE but, offer cripple email clients like Outlook 2003, a FeedZero.com plugin so I could get all of these kick ass filtering etc straight into email client as well (with logins to your site etc) :) Again this is a dream for me :) I mean you can always embed your ads banner within the RSS feed items when I view each article (as well as each feeds ads if they have it).

This would be pretty interesting but I have no idea how feasible it is

Yeah as I say, it'd really only benefit Windoze hags like myself.


last edited by Opec at 10:48:23 17/Mar/08

grouping would be very handy

doesn't provide anything under pocketie. I didn't expect to be able to train it, but I thought I would at least get my feeds.

no effort has gone into making it portable as yet. does PocketIE even support javascript yet?

Yeh this would be f***ing awesome to get on my iPod Touch. Definitely need a mobile version.

It works almost perfectly on ipod touch (as a normal web page), except for one bug which prevents it from loading new items when you scroll to the bottom - this is a known issue and hopefully will be fixed shortly.

Wow - ABC Australia really s***s all over that ABC America crap.

instead of like/don't like, could you have a sliding scape ( 1 to 5 stars or something ). That way you can adjust how much you want to see by changing the number of stars to view.

That way if you're busy and only want to see stuff that's scored 5 stars you can, if you're not busy you can drop it down to 2 or 3 stars and get more to read.

"score filtering" is something we've briefly discussed. I'd sort of envisaged it as working more like email - you have 3 top level filters (in addition to other filters, like category/feed/group/etc):

- Good (ie, items you are almost certainly going to like)
- Unsure (items its not sure you'll like)
- Bad (items that are effectively 'spam' that you almost certainly won't like).

The tricky part is figuring out what thresholds people are prepared to accept for these various things. ATM its hardcoded I think so anything above 70% is automatically good.

But what you're saying is certainly a way I've thought about using it - sometimes I have a little more time and/or less items that are 'good', so I wouldn't mind being able to quickly change my threshold so I can see some lower-rated items.

I think the good news is it is a relatively easy thing to implement (because each item has a score); we just need to find a way that is going to be usable interface-wise, and appealing to all users.

We now have a blog; we have some changes coming based on the feedback so far so stay tuned.

i'm one of those surfers who have numerous tabs open on FF and jump between them reading news and sport articles so i've been checking out RSS and after reading this thread and checking out your site i'm even more interested. (never used any RSS before)
so 2 questions if i may
1. would Feedzero be a good site for me to trial as a newbie or should i go with something else for now?

2. by using FeedZero does this mean that this page is all i need open then i can jump to whatever i want to read?

1. would Feedzero be a good site for me to trial as a newbie or should i go with something else for now?

Well I guess only you can answer that question :) Just give it a go and see how you like it. The interface as it stands is pretty "basic" i.e. it's just a long list of all items from all feeds but you have the option of showing items from one particular feed as well.

2. by using FeedZero does this mean that this page is all i need open then i can jump to whatever i want to read?

Yes.

thx opec.
im in giving it a go

My favourite interface for digging through information so far would have to be http://www.ted.com/

We've just done an update with a bunch of minor fixes.

Hello,

I have just a question regarding feedzero:

On which criterias the like/unlike function is based? Is it based on the main words in the feed title and/or in the feed description or its URL location?
Do you use a specific algorithm in order to do that?


Thanks for your answers.

I believe it is words in the feed title and description