We are covered by TechCrunch today. Marshall had pointed out to us that the UI was ugly. Except the topic discovery part which is solid beta, the UI (ugly, we admit), opml uploading etc are still at alpha stage. We will get a graphic designer to re-do the UI soon. What we think is the most important feature is the automatic Topic Discovery Engine, which filters through a large number of posts and discovers what are considered the current important topics based on
1. what are talked about in the posts
2. where the posts come from
3. how they are related to other posts (both by contents and by hyperlinks) and the importance of these related posts
4. the community of users’ attention data (what topics they track and how they interact with the posts)
5. your attention data (what topics you track and how you interact with the posts, weighted very heavily once you log in)
All attention data are time-decayed to reflect the current attention.
Our main motivation is to help users find out quickly what is happening and quickly get to what they are interested in. If you subscribe to a lot of feeds, there will be hundreds of posts per day and it will be very difficult for you to read them all. If you subscribe to tens or hundreds of feeds, you know what I am talking about. The Topic Discovery Engine discovers the topics that match your attention data and sort the posts into the topics.
For example, the topics that are discovered today include “fidel castro”, “minimum wage”, “google talk”, “british prime minister tony blair”, etc. These topics are more informative and objective than tags.
P.S. if anyone has trouble uploading your opml file, would you please email it to us at info@wizag.com so that we can find out what is wrong? Thanks.
