Comments on: Adobe launches myFeedz, the social newspaper

By: Steven

Steven — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:35:00 +0000

Hey,
Honestly I found myFeedz a little confusing..
The UI is a little cloggy..and isn’t partitioned well. and I havent had a moment of “wow” till now..

By: Ashish

Ashish — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:55:00 +0000

Hi Marius
Thanks for dropping by.
Well, you are right to a certain extent that my views are biased about any AI product. [esp. after my experience with other products that aims to understand the end user, but has failed in their attempt to do so]…

Let me get involved with myFeedz a little more!!..

By: Marius Zaharia

Marius Zaharia — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:52:00 +0000

Hi Ashish,

I think your initial perspective on myFeedz is somehow biased.

The product doesn't really "guesstimate" what you should read. It doesn't matter that your favorite feeds are not very popular within the community. You can still get interesting articles from them. In fact, you can get articles ONLY from them, by toggling between "My feeds only/All feeds" in the right corner of your article lists.

What myFeedz does is not guess what you would like to read, but learn from what you actually read.

All the best,
Marius

By: Ashish

Ashish — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:09:00 +0000

Hey Ritesh!
Thanks for dropping by.
I agree with your statement
"I think this paradigm of the web, if done right, can make our lives enormously simpler, yet more enriching." - the keyword is "if done right'.
Many attempts have been made to understand the user behavior [e.g. Y! music is a classic failure [IMHO], while I love Pandora [and it's serendipity factor]..

Let me play with myFeedz - and then share my experience.

-Ashish

By: Ritesh Banglani

Ritesh Banglani — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 18:49:00 +0000

To me this sounds like "Web 3.0". While 2.0 is all about community, 3.0 is likely to be about intelligent machines "figuring out" what you want.

Let us take the search engine world. Today's search engines take your query and present a platter of choices. Wouldn't it be nice if they took your query, guessed a lot of background information, and presented you the most relevant page (or at least a shortlist of 5 relevant pages).

For example, if I have been looking at travel websites just prior to entering "New Orleans" in the search engine, the engine should be able to figure out that I am not interested in the political fallout of Katrina, but rather in flights to Louisiana on the forthcoming long weekend.

Let me take another example from the RSS world. I subscribe to your blog, so obviously I am interested in what you write. However, since our interests match, chances are that I am also interested in what you *read*. So I will find value in a feed reader that looks at feeds *you* subscribe to, filters them for stuff I am likely to have an interest in, and presents it to me as a collated feed.

I think this paradigm of the web, if done right, can make our lives enormously simpler, yet more enriching. So don't diss it just yet on grounds that "any service that tries to guess my taste is of no use to me". Maybe such services don't do a good job of it today, but they will only improve in the future.

Full disclosure: I work for Adobe Systems, but this is not an endorsement of the service. I have no connection with the MyFeedz project, and these views are entirely personal.