SocialFeed “Closed beta” started
December 19, 2006
What is SocialFeed?
The SocialFeed team launched the RSS-based news recommendation service SocialFeed at http://socialfeed.cc on December 11, 2006 as a closed beta. SocialFeed is an experiment in personalized news recommendation services. Our recommendations are personalized and based upon user activities and social elements among users.
Background
WEB 2.0 has led to a lot of social bookmarking and other “democratic” services. But to me, these services are too general, making it difficult to find what I really like. On the other hand, RSS readers provide access to numerous feeds from across the Blogosphere, and everyday so many new posts are created that users can never consume all of them.
So there is a dilemma: The wisdom of the group is often helpful, but sometimes it is too different from our personal preferences. At the same time, individuals are too busy to check all the sources that they may want to read. SocialFeed solves this dilemma through a service that is midway between “democratic” and personalized.
The SocialFeed Solution
I am sure most people have experienced hearing important news by word of mouth from friends, family, or coworkers. Word of mouth is a very accurate source of news because each of your news sources knows you and your preferences, interests and timings. However, word of mouth is a voluntary behavior dependent on people.
SocialFeed gathers your preferences and interests and continuously watches your activities, then automatically finds people with interests similar to yours and measures how similar they are. Based upon this implicit network, SocialFeed recommends news or blogs selected for you.
SocialFeed is personalized and computer-simulated word-of-mouth information sharing. Our goal is to help you discover news and news sources you like to read.
This blog is a SocialFeed project official team blog. My name is Yuki Ishikawa. I am the developer of SocialFeed. On this blog, we plan to post things like…
- Official announcements and updates
- Explanations and instructions for SocialFeed functionality
- Discussion and feedback from users
- Typical blog content
