What is the Goal of Toluu?
I began writing this with a different perspective about Toluu. Where is Toluu heading? I previously wrote a post titled “My Problems With Toluu.” This was several months ago as Toluu was in it’s infancy.
I considered titling this post “More Problems With Toluu” but thought better of it. I do not want to be critical but long for the value of this application to increase.
Toluu recently had a big day rolling out enhancements. At least 8 different blogs featured a post about the little RSS matching service from founder Caleb Elston. So I have been using the service again in earnest since that time.
Toluu is still making continual enhancements and the performance increases are sizable. If you have not logged in a while try it again. Speed has increased dramatically.
What does Toluu really have to offer an early adopter? What does Toluu have to offer an everyday user? Are the answers to these questions different? Finally, what is the Goal of Toluu?
I am not sure I know the exact answer but would love to hear from Caleb on the subject. Application development is an interesting process as I know first hand. An application does not always end up in the exact place you conceive it might at the onset.
In any case Toluu adds feeds to your feed reader and Toluu via bookmarklet. As long as you use the bookmarklet the feeds stay in Sync. Toluu also provides matching to other users in an attempt to recommend additional feeds. Toluu is designed with clean UI and is what this user expects from Web 2.0. It is in private Beta so I do not aim to condemn but am contemplating its usefulness, relevance, and future.
The following is a list of ideas produced from the Toluu friendfeed room and simple brainstorming. If the goal of Toluu is to provide simple solid functionality then Toluu is well on the way. But here is a list of features I would personally like to see.
Toluu Enhancement Thoughts
- Tag/Organize/Categorize Feeds – This is my #1 the rest of the enhancements are in no particular order. Feed tagging increases Toluu ability to present recommendation, organization, search, categorization. Feed tagging would change the Toluu forever.
- Feed Similarities – What feeds are similar to other feeds. Tagging or feed meta data could greatly assist with this. I want feed relationships. Tell me that if I read Lifehacker then Download Squad and Lifehack are similar.
- Personalized Feed Recommendations – Beyond matching. Matching is certainly a good way to offer users insight into feeds they might like. I would like better feed recommendations in the way Amazon does. Tell me I would like feed “B” because 75% of users that read feed “A” also read feed “B”.
- Matching Speed – The matching speed was recently greatly increased TWICE. The speed is NO longer an issue. The matching would now qualify as instant. One comment though: I wish it would not display current contacts as matches. If they are a current contact then I already know about them.
- Syncing Between Your Feed Reader & Toluu & Feedly – See this link to the FriendFeed discussion about this one.
- Better Integration With Other services
- Integration with Feedly
- Integration with Friendfeed – I find Feeds more and more with FriendFeed. I have to launch the article and use the bookmarklet. It would be great to have an addon or greasemonkey script thought integrated a Toluu feed link into FriendFeed.
- I hate bookmarklets – Everything has a bookmarklet these days. They clutter my bookmarks bar and I am uncertain what each one does. Perhaps a Firefox Addon.
- User Profiles – I would love to see additional information about a user.
- Clearly Display the User’s blog(s) feed(s) – This goes right along with the previous but I am listing seperate to emphasize its importance. It is not easy to see the blog feed for each user.
- Import my FriendFeed contacts – I would say 90/95 % of my FriendFeed contacts are on Toluu. But I am not sure they are all contacts on Toluu. I would like them to be. Bummer.
- Browse Feeds by Name
- Browse Feeds by Tag Directory
- Feed Search
- Contact/Person Search
- URI search – I put in a web address and the feed page is displayed
- Most Popular Feeds (feed stats)
- Hot New Feeds – popular
- Enhance the Bookmarklet and future Firefox addon to support Tagging
- Number of Toluu Subscribers per feed on feed view
- Site Help – Sometimes I am uncertain what Toluu can currently do and what it can not
- Edit My Toluu Feed List – A clean easy interface for editing my feed list
- Clear My Feeds / RSS Reset – Is this already possible?
Toluu is a young private beta application. From my view the future is very bright.
Most of my enhancements center around Toluu being about feeds. I understand the data commitment and strain that storing meta data and information about individual feed data could consume. But I believe it would be very worth it to the end user.
Toluu is great and I say once again I believe its future is bright. I can not wait for its features to extend and its value to increase. I have Toluu invites if you would like to try it.
Thanks for this fantastic post. We get so much fantastic feedback everyday from users, but this is certainly the most comprehensive set of requests which will certainly spark a discussion about what everyone wants to see in Toluu and how you all want to use it.
Toluu is really about helping you discover feeds you will love but have not found yet. It got started because I wanted to know what my buddies were reading and there was no way to easily do that. I knew they read interesting things that I didn't know about, but would enjoy.
As you mention, we have been rolling out updates that enhance the ability to discover the feeds in Toluu. We started with the personal Activity page, then expanded to a global activity page, and most recently updates to the feed pages so you can see who subscribes to a particular feed.
When we think about new features we give priority to those that will either make it faster to discover new feeds, hence the dramatic matching algorithm speed improvements, or make it easier to discover new feeds, the activity page or subscribers view.
I can tell you that we are working on your top request as well as many others. We also strive to keep the UI as simple and clean as possible which is often a contradiction when adding new features.
We are working hard to improve Toluu everyday, whether through infrastructure improvements, new features, tweaks and polish, fixing bugs, looking at analytics, or simply chatting with users. We are just a few months into what we plan to be a very long journey. We couldn't do it without our amazing community of users and fans, so thank you.
I really like this article, because it really shows that you like Toluu and want to see it get better.
I do like Toluu. I am glad it shows. Thanks for the comment.
I really like this article, because it really shows that you like Toluu and want to see it get better.
I do like Toluu. I am glad it shows. Thanks for the comment.