As a whole I like Toluu. For more on Toluu check out the KnightKnetwork’s interview with Caleb Elston and Louis Gray’s first post about Toluu. Toluu the RSS feed sharing discovery application is a cool concept and does function pretty well. The integration to add a feed to your feed reader is great. But here are few problems I found and features I would like to see.
Speed, Speed, Speed – When you click on the matches tab it takes what seems like forever to change and display the matches. That is a crucial point in the application where it actually shows you intelligent matches of RSS feeds you would like. Displaying this main feature of the application needs to be much faster. I have had it take several minutes. Users can not deal with minutes it must display in seconds. From the Contacts view I click on Matches for one of my contacts and again it sluggish.
Redundancy – When the Matches tab does finally display it shows several users who “match” you and a percentage. You then see a list of “Feeds you might like” from each user. What is interesting is that one of the same feeds is displayed for every user. In my case the feeds “Micro Persuasion” and “GigaOm” are under 4 out of 5 users. This is redundancy that should somehow be eliminated. I have also seen redundancy in the same user where it shows the same feed twice.
Feed Elimination – If a feed exists that I am NOT interested in I would like the ability to exclude from future recommendation. If “Micro Persuasion” is not what I want to read it could be put on an exclusion list.
Toluu is beta and I am sure the application will grow and change. One thing I have been looking for is user enhancements in the form of greasemonkey scripts. This has already added a lot of functionality to FriendFeed.
I will add and subtract from list as the application changes.
By the way I still have invites if anyone is interested. Leave your email in a comment if you want one.