I recently came across FaveBot. The site aims at aggregating and filtering RSS feeds from the most renowned news sites and blogs all over the internet and has recently received a major update functionality-wise.
The site doesn’t exactly look beautiful but its minimalistic simple interface makes it incredibly easy to use.
Once the really brief signup process is completed you are all set to go. Through the “My Trackings” tab you’ll be able to specify search keywords and the categories of feeds you want the site to search in. Results are immediately accessible from the “MyDiscoveries” section.
The categories currently available on the site are blogs, books, DVDs, events, music, news, photos, podcasts and videos.
Another spiffy functionality is the possibility to upload your iTunes library file and let the site aggregate for you all relevant news about your favorite bands.
The only thing I find quite confusing is the fact that while you’re allowed to create multiple tracking filters the results are then all mashed together. the only way to access the outcome of a single search is to click on the number of results in the Trackings summary page.
The site would, perhaps, grow at a considerably faster pace by letting its users add new fees to its database. At the moment the list of feeds to be spidered seems to be “hard-coded”.
The idea looks solid and fairly useful. With just a few fixes and usability improvements it could probably turn into a profitable business in its niche between Feedburner and Digg.
Tags: Aggregation, Blog, FaveBot, fedd, iTunes, News, RSS, Startup, Web, Web2
November 18, 2007 at 4:02 pm |
Thanks for the feedback and the mention. I’m not sure what you mean by the list of feeds being hard-coded. Are you referring to blogs specifically? If so, I’m using Google Blog Search to find blog posts. So whatever they spider should show up, with the noticeable exception that I had to ban/block some domains because they were full of spam. That list of domains includes blogspot(!!!) and any .info sites . I’ve been meaning to blog about that, so I guess I’ll do it now…
Re: getting results(discoveries) for a specific search term (tracking). I guess this is a result of my poor interface design skills (a professional redesign is planned). The method you mentioned is probably the best way to access the results of a single search (tracking). Note that you can also get an RSS feed for each tracking’s results. When you’re on the entire (mashed together) list you’ll see links like this “only XYZ discoveries” at the top of each discovery. That will do the same thing as clicking the number next to search term XYZ on your trackings tab.
You can think clicking on the “my discoveries” tab as a river of news view of all your discoveries. I know some people don’t like the river of news style of doing things. Those folks may be more comfortable using the “my trackings” list as folders which allow them to drill down into one search term.