LazyFeed Wants You To Be Serendipitous In Your Reading
July 10, 2009 :: Kenneth YeungAs part of my time here in San Francisco, I’ve always enjoyed hearing about the latest and greatest coming out of “the Valley” and often times find myself writing about them – this is one of those occasions. Just today I was able to sit down with the CEO of LazyFeed, Ethan Gahng and their head of marketing, Claire Chang for a one-on-one conversation on what exactly is their product, LazyFeed and why should individuals and businesses care about it.
What is LazyFeed? This new startup out of the Bay Area is designed to offer people a more convenient way to get information from “relevant” feeds. According to Gahng and the website, it’s a means of offering individuals the opportunity to “accidentally” stumble upon something new.
How does it work? Basically from what I saw – and they’re still in the final push (as of this writing) for making changes that they haven’t revealed yet – the interface is pretty simplistic. Once you’ve logged into the site, you’re greeted with your “homepage” that gives you what are trending topics that LazyFeed has parsed from the blogosphere, but not from Twitter and offers you the option of learning more about the top 10 trends. If that’s not your cup of tea and you don’t see your topic there, you can enter in tags in a search bar. That’s actually the cusp of what I’ve gathered LazyFeed to be – they look through the web to find content that is tagged similarly. So for example, if you’re on the application, you’re able to see a lot of blog posts, photos, videos, etc tagged with the same keyword(s). I did notice though that some of the more “credible” websites were not accounted for though, such as the New York Times, TechCrunch, Mashable, Washington Post, Huffington Post, etc., although they are still apparently crawling through the rest of the web to index the content to make it more relevant. Once you have looked up a topic, you’re able to save it similar to a bookmark along with individual content you like to reference later.
Real-time? This whole phenomenon of real-time updating is something that I think LazyFeed is trying to incorporate into their platform. Part of their website is programmed to display when new additions are made to the tags that you find interesting and have bookmarked.
Why is LazyFeed even interesting? To the individual it’s a really remarkable tool for you to use. If you’re always wondering what’s going on in the world, compared to Twitter’s trending topics, you’re not subjected to just conversations. LazyFeed will offer you the chance to look at the actual content surrounding those respective trends. Take Sarah Palin’s recent surprise resignation. Rather than scouring through Google, Bing or even Yahoo for information about what blogs are saying – often some rather irrelevant, you can log into your LazyFeed account and look up a specific tag – in this instance perhaps “SarahPalin” which will produce a list of content that has been tagged accordingly. You’re able to get a whole array of content with a simple click and even get continuous updates. However, it does seem that they don’t want to address archiving information at this stage as the content is displayed in chronological order with the most recent automatically placed at the top of the page. As a result, it’s my impression that LazyFeed is just about current events and pushing out information related to those topics. Anything longer than a couple of days would require exorbitant amount of scrolling (time consuming) or as I’ve been told by Ethan Gahng: “Go to Google.” Amazing…
The quirks. Initially the whole startup looks sound and for individuals to use it makes total sense. From a business perspective, you might need know that it’s little more than buzz monitoring at its most basic level. The folks at LazyFeed understand that and they don’t seem to mind it at this stage. So why should you, as a business care still about this product? It’s because it’s cheap buzz monitoring. If you happen to be in the automotive industry, you can use LazyFeed as a method of understanding the sentiment people are having about industry issues like, hybrid vehicles, General Motors, Japanese cars, etc. and then frame your conversation elsewhere accordingly and possibly get ahead of the curve.
Some advice that I would have given to someone about how to monitor your brand online would be through searching on Google or Yahoo about what people are saying about your brand on blogs, websites, social networks, etc., but it seems that LazyFeed has consolidated the whole idea to one site and even incorporates the tag concept to help shape how you find information. Saves you multiple steps, I’d imagine.
LazyFeed offers you the option of looking at either their trending topics that they’ve accumulated through their journey across the interweb or allowing you to connect to sites. You can “connect to sites” using one of four ways: RSS feeds from your blog or any other enabled site you may come across, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Twitter. Once imported, you’re able to look at content that fits those keywords you have for whatever feed/site you’ve connected with. Sort of like a personalized feed reader, I suppose.
What can be improved? When I saw a demonstration of the application, I found it pretty simple – literally. It’s not that complicated to find things to do, for the most part. One thing that I did come across was the ability to link out to external sites. When I came across a post I wanted to read more on and possibly link to and/or bookmark, I clicked on a icon that read “page” only to discover it only refreshed the site! The real external link is at the end of the blog post title! Other issues that I found was related to usability and adherence to best practice to follow the “two-click rule”: users must be able to get from where they are to where they need to be within two clicks. And as of right now, it’s a free model since I’ve been told that since they’re just launching, there’s no immediate plans for monetization.
From what I gathered the content provided would also be real-time. Unfortunately based on what I saw at the demo, only a portion of LazyFeed is indeed “real-time”. The rest requires some action on your part to refresh the site. Maybe I’m defining the term incorrectly, but I imagine the constant auto refreshing of information similar to FriendFeed is real-time – LazyFeed does not seem to offer that in the truest sense, although I don’t think that’s a major reason to avoid the site. After talking with them about that, I was assured by the CEO that it would be something they would consider modifying in later phases.
Lastly, did you know that you’re not able to share your information with others? It’s not a social media website. It allows you to import content from social media sites, but when you want to share it with others on Twitter, Facebook or others, you’re out of luck. Right now they’re methodology is to have the system be truly focused on the individual – the only way I’m able to share my feeds I’m monitoring with others is by giving them my access login or showing them what’s on my computer right now.
Would I use it? I imagine that if I, as a business, am interested in learning more about what people are saying about topics I’m interested in, such as social media, website, marketing, photography, etc., then I would consider using it – after all, it’s easier than constantly scouring the web looking for information. Overall, LazyFeed lives up to its name and provides content as simply as it intends.
And no, it’s not a competitor to Google Reader. It’s not the same thing. With Google Reader, you’re already looking at feeds you’re interested in. With LazyFeed, you’re given totally new feeds you may or may not have been aware of and might find something new to read. The goal of LazyFeed, according to Ethan Gahng, is to make finding content “serendipitious”. It’s the accidental discovery of information when using the site that will be the biggest reward. Being the constant surveyor of information online, that’s lazy enough for me.
LazyFeed will be open to a private beta group beginning on Friday, July 10. To put your name on the waiting list to test out the site, visit their website. They will also be presenting at this year’s TechCrunch CrunchUp event in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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