Social Media Marketing Strategies

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Today, Toluu launched the long awaited feature that its members have been patiently waiting for. The new feature is the ability to label and discover new feeds using tags. Just as you would use Diigo for labeling, sorting and discovery of new bookmarks, you can now do the same with your rss feeds on Toluu.

Clicking the tags tab on any feed will reveal the top tags in the Toluu system for that particular feed. If there is no tag in the system for a specific feed, you can easily assign one.

Occasionally you will find a particular feed on the system with no tag. Toluu makes it easy to add the corresponding tag for that feed into the system. Toluu’s tag matching technology will match the keyword you assign to any other feeds across the Toluu system with similar tags. Toluu also added an auto-suggest feature which pulls from the tags you have used in the past. This makes it easier to tag feeds even faster using tags you previously have used.

I added the tag startup for the feed Startup Mentality. The system accurately found five matching feeds based on that keyword. The tagging results will strengthen in time as members start to tag feeds in the system. This will help strengthen the results to ensure even better accuracy of matching.

You can quickly drill down on tags to find related feeds in the Toluu system. The tag ‘technology’ yielded an impressive 692 related feeds.

Member profiles now display your five most used Top Tags. This is another quick way to discover what’s peeking your friends interests.

Feed pages now have new sort options. Now recent, subscribers, a-z, have been added as sort options. This now gives you a new way to look at the tags other members use and the feeds associated with them. This also makes it easier when exploring a member’s feeds because you can quickly get a feel for their interests based on the tags they may use. You will also now notice total feed counts is displayed on feed pages.

Toluu has done an excellent job with the well needed features and functionality improvements. What all this means to you is, better functionality makes for more better exploration and easier discovery.

Toluu is still in private beta. If you would like an invite to test the service out, please post your email address in the comments. You can also follow me on Toluu and discover the feeds I read.

Toluu just got a lot better & now a lot more social!

Mike Fruchter rss, Social Media, tagging, Toluu

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Sweetcron is the latest new shiny toy in self-hosted lifestreaming. Sweetcrons main selling point is the ability to store your lifestreaming data on your own server,and on your own domain. There was much awaited anticipation of this application. It has garnered lots of publicity for the past few months. I finally installed Sweetcron and took it for a test drive..

I was extremely unimpressed. The hype sold me, but that’s about the only thing that I can say will sell me about this application, or at least in its current stages.

Most of us who attempt to set up self-hosted lifestreams must be comfortable with php, and for the most part, rely on plugins in conjuncture with some type of blogging platform, usually wordpress. While I expected Sweetcron to be so much more, it’s pretty much a stripped down wordpress blog with tags and the capability of importing rss. In it’s current state it does not look very secure. The php scripts running it, look off the shelf and possibly highly exploitable.

It’s in pretty rough shape: nowhere near a 1.0 release. The architecture and design decisions come off as amateurish as well. I wouldn’t trust it with my data. – Mark Trapp

I agree with Mark Trapp’s comment quoted above, from this FriendFeed thread. I also would be very cautious of the data you input into Sweetcron at its present stages. This application needs some serious development. It could be your own personal FriendFeed, without the friends, but it’s simply not.

What Sweetcron does have going for them is the fact it’s open source and easily customizable. At least now, others can improve on this application where Sweetcron seems to have failed.

Under the hood, it runs on php and mysql. Setting it up was relatively easy. Create your database, modify your php files and it’s installed.  The control panel is so bare-bones it could not be any more basic.

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The dashboard is minimal. It’s pretty self explanatory from the screen shot. You can do 3 things here.

1. Write: Post directly to your lifestream
2. View Items: Delete, edit, unpublish/publish.
3. Feeds: Add or delete rss feeds.

You can also post directly to your lifestream. I guess this could be useful if you were extremely bored. This is what Twitter is for. This sort of defeats the purpose since you more then likely would have tweets imported in via rss.

This is your options page, or should I say lack of options page.

Last but not least, Smartcron has a link for comments, but failed to implement a commenting system. It’s great they suggest using Disqus for comments, but after all this application is built on mysql and php! Commenting could have been easily implemented.

At this stage in the game, there is nothing to see here folks. My advice is if your looking for a service like this, set up a self-hosted wordpress blog, and customize it.

Mike Fruchter lifestreaming, rss, sweetcron

Toluu is a one stop social supermarket for discovery of new rss feeds. How Toluu works is quite simple. Once registered, you will import your current OPML file into the system. The service will then search for other users with interests similar to yours. This is almost like a dating service, and will display the best matches accordingly. Toluu is not a replacement rss reader, but rather a type of condiment. This post  highlights some of the recent feature enhancements that Toluu has implemented.

Filtering made easy:

Toluu recently introduced 3 new filtering options. Now you can see your matches based on when they joined Toluu. Filtering by ‘This Month’ or ‘This Week’ shows only users who have joined in that period who match with you. This helps to consistently surface new fresh feeds and new members.

Feed views & statistics:

On feed pages, you now have the ability to see popular posts pertaining to that feed. You also can view how many Toluu members are subscribing to that particular feed.  The subscriber view will also show that particular members 3 most recently added feeds. This makes it that much easier for finding new members to subscribe to that share the same interests.

User interface:

When you hover over a feed anywhere on the site, a small tooltip will popup with the feed title and 5 recent posts from the feed. These post titles are clickable and link directly to the post on the source blog. These new quick tool tips are available anywhere a feed appears on the site, the activity page, match page, feed lists, profiles, and the feed subscribers view.

Activity view:

The improved activity view reveals a treasure trove of data. You can now see and sort feed activity based on contacts and favorite feeds. You can also see recent activity on Toluu from your friends, or everyone on the system.  Clicking the “Feeds” link, will show you feeds gaining traction on Toluu.

Scalability:

Toluu has undergone a major re-architecting of their matching system, this in turn has made the system dramatically faster and more stable.  The days of slow page responses are a thing of the past. The speed improvements Toluu made to the matching system, has also laid the groundwork to a more universal caching system.

Toluu is currently in private beta. If you would like an invite to test drive the service, please post a comment with your email address.

Mike Fruchter rss

I’m running a little ongoing experiment using the rooms feature on Friendfeed. Friendfeed recently added the ability to add RSS feeds into rooms. Being a big RSS and Google Reader junkie, I decided to start a room dedicated only to an individual’s Google Reader feed. I posted on Friendfeed asking for people’s Google Shared URL, there was close to 40 replies with feeds for the room. I created this room on Friendfeed and unloaded the 38 various Google Reader shared feeds.

The room has 38 members, or better yet editors. Thirty eight editors handpicking the best content that they deem worthy of sharing. Most of the editors share the same interests as myself, which in turn enhances the value of the feed for the individuals in this test group.

Here is some feedback on this experiment:

This is a pretty cool idea, a whole set of hand picked stories – and you can’t even directly tell who they are coming from, so no biased clicking. – Tim Hoeck

I’m adding this rooms feed to my Google Reader. Nice to meet you.- Erhan Erdogan

With that being said, here are some of my thoughts on this early ongoing experiment:

Positives

• Excellent pool of feeds from some of the brightest minds & bloggers in the social media blogosphere.
• Approx 35 of the feeds are technology/social networking/media oriented.
• Has potential to be a replacement for Google Reader.
• Can be highly customized with feeds from select editors.
• The room has an RSS feed that can be added into any RSS reader.
• No need to subscribe to multiple websites feeds. Let the room editors do it for you.

Negatives

• Duplication of content
• Stories with a note, get imported into the room as a comment. On Friendfeed it shows me as the person who left the comment, not the actual person who noted it in their Google Reader.

This will only work with a large pool of Google Shared feeds. The pool has 38 feeds currently. Want to participate? Post your Google Shared URL on the comments on this blog, or on the Freindfeed thread.

Mike Fruchter Friendfeed, Google Reader, rss