We've just released Feedzero.com - a new website we've been working on for a few months - for testing and we're looking for interested peeps to help us out.

Feedzero.com is basically a web-based application designed to help you filter your RSS feeds, presenting you with a nice simple list of stuff that you're interested in and filtering out the things you don't care about.

It works using Bayesian filtering, a technique which is used by many email applications (such as Mozilla Thunderbird) to help filter spam.

How it works:

1) You visit the website at http://www.feedzero.com

2) You create an account (we don't want a lot of information - username and password. Even email is optional!)

3) You add RSS feeds to your account.

4) You visit your articles index page and start rating articles simply by clicking "like" or "don't like" (for example: if a news item comes up in a feed about World of Warcraft and you want more WoW news, you'd just click "like". If something comes up about Lord of the Rings Online and you don't care about it, you'd just click "don't like".)

5) After you've rated a few items, Feedzero.com will have learned a few things about the sort of things you like and don't like, and it will give you the option to either hide (or just collapse) items it thinks you don't want to see.

6) Eventually after it is well-trained, you'll simply get a filtered list of things that are of interest to you - a personalised webpage that just shows content that you like.

That's it!

If you don't know what an RSS feed is, then please hold on - we'll have more information about what the hell an RSS feed is and how to use them soon. In the meantime we're just looking for testing assistance and feedback from tech-savvy Internet-types that are looking for ways to keep their data flows under control.

Thanks to anyone who can jump online and have a play with it.

Here are some example screenshots of some of my feeds:

My digg.com filtered feed - if you're a regular digg user it's really handy because you can filter out the reams of rubbish that defies the odds and makes the front page.

http://trog.qgl.org/up/TN_fzero1.jpg

My AusGamers Files filtered feed - you'll note at the top a bunch of games that I just don't care about at all. The X3: Terran Conflict one is interesting as well; it's marked that as unsure because I have a lot of other sci-fi type stuff that I've marked as 'liked', even though I've never marked that specific title as 'like'. The CoH and Quake-related titles are obvious - note Quake Wars in particular has a 99% probability that I'll like it, but Quake 4 is a lot lower (...for obvious reasons).

http://trog.qgl.org/up/TN_fzero2.jpg

Update: We now have blog, which we'll update as we make changes to the site.

Can I view the output as rss?

If you're looking for add revenue then there's no reason you couldn't still integrate adds into the feeds.

I ask because this seems like a great idea as filters go but realistically I still want to use a rss reader like Google Reader (unless you have similar level of functionality)

Can I view the output as rss?

Heh, no(t yet). It's funny you ask that, because we sort of jokingly guessed that this would be the first question anyone asked.

I ask because this seems like a great idea as filters go but realistically I still want to use a rss reader like Google Reader (unless you have similar level of functionality)

We do not yet, but I am hoping we will be able to - I really really miss Google Reader functionality when I'm using Feedzero, particularly as it relates to marking items as read, so I'm hoping we'll be able to do this.

Cool well it's a good idea and if you either add rss aggregation or a fully fledged reader I can see myself adopting it.

As much as I can see you saying "hahaha"... Its broken in IE8B1. The like/dislike code isn't working and when I click "like" it hides the article but doesn't update the score.

I also noticed no simple way to get back after searching for content - ie. I typed in QGL and went to "other feeds" and then couldn't really get back to the main page.

If i like to read every single post on a site should i still include it in this or am i better off just visiting it?

If i like to read every single post on a site should i still include it in this or am i better off just visiting it?

I find that typically if I do read every single post on a site, it is caught by my learned preferences anyway.

So for example - I typically read everything on Slashdot. When I started training, I trained it on a bunch of slashdot items that I liked (+ a bunch of other items), and now almost every slashdot post shows by default - maybe 1 or 2 a week aren't. The ones that don't are (almost eerily) not things that I really care about anyway.

This is what I found using SpamBayes (my bayesian mail filter) as well - its almost spooky about how well it learns what is good and what is bad.

There are definitely some things where it doesn't work - for example I want to see every post in the xkcd.com comic feed, but it has almost no text - so its hard for it to learn that you want to read that. It has prompted me to think a good option might be (on a per-feed basis) "always include content from this feed regardless of training".

Great idea, and seems to be well implemented, congrats.

Here are some example screenshots of some of my feeds:

these need to be on the front page of feedzero.com -- much more useful than the recent articles/icons/pile of text. imo the front page is too heavy (lots of text and lots of solid black on white.. it could be easier on the eyes)

I'm assuming the .rails means this is a rails app :) awesome.

I can't help but notice how messy the urls are though.. rails routing makes it easy to fix this up. It's a good idea to get a little more towards RESTful practices too, which as well as making everything less techy, you get an API for free.

http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/3897/picture12yl9.png


last edited by Farseeker at 21:48:37 14/Mar/08

pretty nifty. i like the import feed list.

question, in google reader, once you have the read the article it disappears. what happens in feedzero?

here's some usability annoyances.. quite opinionated, but these are the kinds of things you need to get right.

• when first starting to give feeds likes/dislikes, the page updates live.. violently. cool technically, but arse to use. (Update button? Training mode?)



• the bars and the buttons being on the right, with the title on the left makes it difficult to scan through articles.. then when deciding to vote, you gotta find the little buttons.. it may seem silly, but it's too much work. I think it would be worth trying having it all together.



• "We think you won't like this article" - saying this everywhere is silly.. it simply doesn't matter. just decide if you're going to show the article or not, rather than cluttering the page.

Nice work, will check it out.

Also, I don't see "beta" in the logo, hence not true Web 2.0 compliance!1

before you get any funny ideas

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch15_Better_Not_Beta.php

read the rest of the book while you're at it :)

I don't necessarily agree with some of that article's points, but on the whole we agreed enough in principle to quickly vote 'no' to using beta on the site the other day when it was raised

will this site allow me to give all of chubs threads a bad rating thus filtering them from my view.. if so sign me up.

I have no idea what is going on.

Nice site though.

As much as I can see you saying "hahaha"... Its broken in IE8B1.

OK ta; I don't believe we have anyone running the beta yet but I suspect this is a trivial fix.

these need to be on the front page of feedzero.com -- much more useful than the recent articles/icons/pile of text. imo the front page is too heavy (lots of text and lots of solid black on white.. it could be easier on the eyes)

Yep, I actually am planning a little demo movie (as much as I hate movies on web pages showing functionality) that shows it - I had a great moment yesterday when I clicked 'dont like' on a story and I got to see all the probabilities recalculate on the fly (all the graphs resizing), which is a relatively new feature I just hadn't seen - I think it really showed a) how it works b) what the point of it is and C) the effectiveness of it.

I can't help but notice how messy the urls are though.. rails routing makes it easy to fix this up. It's a good idea to get a little more towards RESTful practices too, which as well as making everything less techy, you get an API for free.

I'll pass that on; we had brief conversations about this at a high level (when trying to choose the domain). For me the main reason to have friendly URLs is for SEO purposes. I can see the benefits of having URLs though.

question, in google reader, once you have the read the article it disappears. what happens in feedzero?

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

when first starting to give feeds likes/dislikes, the page updates live.. violently. cool technically, but arse to use. (Update button? Training mode?)

This is a bug and is already on the list for a fix :)

the bars and the buttons being on the right, with the title on the left makes it difficult to scan through articles.. then when deciding to vote, you gotta find the little buttons.. it may seem silly, but it's too much work. I think it would be worth trying having it all together.

I was thinking very similar thoughts - basically I was thinking we should move, or copy, the expand/collapse button so its on the far right of the bar (just to the right of the like/dont like).

"We think you won't like this article" - saying this everywhere is silly.. it simply doesn't matter. just decide if you're going to show the article or not, rather than cluttering the page.

Yep, my uncle pointed out this exact thing. There's an option in your preferences where you can make it just hide stories you don't like.

Good feedback! Thanks. User testing so far has been limited to a few friends and family members so I'm particularly interested in usability notes (mostly so they bolster my own arguments about how I think it should work :)

will this site allow me to give all of chubs threads a bad rating thus filtering them from my view.. if so sign me up.

No, but if he consistently writes about things you don't like, it will automatically filter out his stories.

Cool idea I like the use of Bayesian to train and filter the articles. In terms of UI, I personally like it, it's simple and easy to read. Well done

Cool, I'll let you know if I have any more feedback. It's a great idea and the implementation is just about there.

Regarding scanning through articles being too much work, I think it would be worthwhile at least mocking up a way of having the article title, the likeness bar and the like/dislike buttons on the left. It would be trickier aesthetically (it will look unbalanced at first) but it would help. another option i guess is have gmail-style keyboard navigation. W-S for moving selection up and down, Y-N for like and dislike.


I've already cut back my feeds so I don't really need feedzero (Inbox Zero influence?) - it just means I could add more noisier feeds again, with a better way of dealing with them.
http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/5726/picture14xg1.th.pngat the moment I have a 'Noise' group - these are the feeds I want Feed Zero to track. I read everything else.


A feed that I follow is the del.icio.us hotlist - http://del.icio.us. it would be really handy for me if the tags came up next to the article title.. (please take this advice for requests made by everyone else, ta. :P)

It just means I could add more noisier feeds again, with a better way of dealing with them.

That really is the point, I think. I used to use http://www.planetplanet.org/ to read aggregator my blogs but there reaches a point where you cant hope to keep up with it so you have to pick and choose your authors.

With FeedZero you dont have to do this, you can really just subscribe to as many feeds as you want since the bayesian filtering results in you only seeing stuff you're interested in.

will this site allow me to give all of chubs threads a bad rating thus filtering them from my view.. if so sign me up.

No, but if he consistently writes about things you don't like, it will automatically filter out his stories.

Actually, the author is one of the tokens analyzed so if you have an RSS feed containing multiple authors, but you only like some of the authors, the system will take that into account.

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