Getting the low down with FeedUp

I recently completed a pilot study on how people search, discovering (among other things) that one of the main reasons for search is to acquire updates and news on a particular topic. This is particularly true for those searching a topic about which they already have familiarity. Experts want most to understand quickly what new information they can add to what they already know on a subject. In other words, the first trip down the river takes longer because there are more things to see—the way the water moves, the kinds of trees, the occasional beastie—but later trips are focused on either the destination or what is noticeably different from the last boat ride.

With traditional tools, discovering the new stuff can be challenging. Google doesn’t know or care what your reasons are for typing “Bob Schneider” and will return the same basic results if you search today or a month from now. Sometimes, relevant news floats to the top of those searches, but even under the best of circumstances there are persistent links that cloud the picture. It is up to you to refine the search in ways that let the new information you want come into view.

FeedUp brings the search for new things to your RSS reader.

FeedUp, an “RSS 2.0” tool being developed by Kosmix, scans news and blog articles from thousands of online sources to bring that new information to you. Creating a feed is easy: type in some search terms, give it a name, and maybe stick it in some categories for context. Once created, the feed is just a button click away from integrating with popular RSS readers, such as My Yahoo!, Google, Bloglines, netvibes and NewsGator.

It differs from other notification search tools in that it focuses on recent content, skimming only from the past seven days. The Google Alerts I set up a year ago occasionally send me email, but usually with the same few links it always sends. The value content of those messages is negligible. I have higher hopes for FeedUp, which may prove particularly attractive for users new to the idea of RSS who don’t want to find and manage lots of subscriptions.

With a source list comparable to Google News in size, FeedUp updates feeds every hour. The service is hoping to expand both the depth of the content pool (currently just 7 days are stored) and its scope.

Alpha, Beta, …
Right now, the alpha version of the tool is more of a search feed generator than a community site or resource. The long list of created feeds can have only two categories each to help with the filtering of data, and there is nothing to help navigate to other user contributions in a scalable way. Also, without a member profile, the only way I can quickly recover the feeds I make is to make sure I add them to Google Reader as I create them (at which point, the tools to refine the search feed are a click away). Once in Reader, changes to the name of the feed are not propagated. There is no way to delete an entry in FeedUp, but it is easy to edit an existing feed to be something completely different.

The effect of multiple search terms is a bit confusing for a new feed author—will the results be the cumulation of several separate searches, or is it a way to refine the search? Using vikram’s basketball feeds as an example, it looks to be the former. Each of the comma-separated search terms—NBA, stanford basketball, and USA men’s basketball—constitutes a different search, accumulating into a single additive feed. On the FeedUp site, the results are sortable by relevance or time, although relevance doesn’t seem to take into account the order of the search terms (i.e. NBA dominates, even if it is listed last). One nice feature is the inclusion of the individual keywords near the top of the page linking to their contribution to the feed, creating a simple filter of the results.

A great potential exists for community search through FeedUp. Once a login experience can be added, members should be able to refine their own feeds and easily share them with others. FeedUp search pages could also become home to comments, discussing discuss both the results and meta talk about the quality of the terms used. Feeds could also be restricted for editing only by selected individuals. At the moment, though, there is no FeedUp community. Even your own feeds are not stable since any feed can be edited by any user … possibly a barrier to sustained use if other people can change the search terms I establish.

The results need some refining, too. My mini-blogging feed included the actual tweets from timesonline, a Twitter account for the London Times news stories. For my performance art feed, I initially included “Charlie Todd” (one of the key figures in Improv Everywhere) as one of the searches. The list of results that came back didn’t include anything on Charlie Todd, but did include some unrelated links mentioning people named either Charlie or Todd. Those results will improve in the future, especially after Kosmix adds some advanced search term controls.

Making use of custom RSS
When creating a feed, the search terms probably need to be fairly general since this is a tool for discovery, not one meant to gain a specific answer to a question. If the term is too general, the stream of results may be overwhelming, but if they are too specific the chances of getting some benefit diminish. Since the feeds can string together multiple searches, it is possible to use FeedUp for a group of similar searches. For example, a “Famous Bloomingtonians” feed might string together a list of searches for Jeri Taylor, Jared Fogle, Joshua Bell, Rex Grossman, John Mellencamp, Meg Cabot, Hoagy Carmichael, Dick Enberg, Kevin Kline, Bobby Knight, and David Lee Roth.

Each feed also has a widget that will bring the top results of the feed into a blog or another web page:

This is a big key to the success of a tool like this, to be able to leverage the information gathered through FeedUp in ways that make sense to the user. The integration also has to be intelligent enough to present empty searches as useful. Unless the blogosphere or online media suddenly start talking about the Makice family, for instance, the widget space above is nothing more than an off-site link to an equally empty page. (NOTE: The widget was also causing some interference with this blog template, so I have replaced the actual widgets with an image.)

Another nice mashup for FeedUp might be as a module for aLinks, that great WordPress plug-in that automatically inserts meaningful links into a blog post. Imagine if every time we write performance art WordPress would add a link to the FeedUp feed.

Ultimately, the proof is going to be in the value it brings to my life. If FeedUp turns out to be a simple way to make better use of Reader, then it is a useful tool. Kosmix is targeting August for a Beta release.