Feedhaus — Be the First to Know!
Feedhaus, a new social news site that went into alpha in the fall of 2007, aims to deliver real-time news, images and videos that are personally relevant based on user-selected and refined real-time tags and tag clouds.
Feedhaus CEO Chris Bucchere and I got together the other day because for a long time I have wanted to explore other methods of finding new alternative search engines. Over coffee at Panera, he walked me through Feedhaus and how I could use it for my research.
Feedhaus is built for people who are avid feed-readers but it’s also designed for laypeople who’ve never heard of RSS, ATOM or OPML. The site’s main view is a large, 100-term tag cloud. Powered by a revolutionary new technology Feedhaus invented called “ActiveCloud,” the tags actually wiggle, pulse, grow and shrink in real-time. These tags are constantly fed by updates coming from background Feed Update Daemons (FUDs) that work around the clock to poll thousands of user-submitted feeds looking for semantic matches to the tags. In other words, if a news story breaks about a wildfire in California, tags for “fire,” “wildfire,” “California” and “disaster” will pulse and grow to indicate the breaking news. Likewise, tags without any breaking news associated with them will wiggle, shrink and eventually fall off the home page. (How cool is that?)
Clicking on a tag opens a mashed-up detail page showing relevant content drawn from all the associated feeds paired with a Flickr photo badge and YouTube videos relevant to the selected tag. The detail pages are also fed by “ActiveCloud” so if a story breaks while you’re viewing a detail page, it will automatically appear at the top, shuffling the other stories downward. Check out this Russian search engine posted just 4 hours ago!
The home page provides a great way to follow breaking news; however that’s not all the Feedhaus offers. It also provides a whole set of personalization features to allow you to track news and blogs that matter to you. You can set up a personalized page consisting of tags drawn from the “Top 100″ or from searches across thousands of other tags and organize them into an unlimited number of personal tag clouds. Each of these tag clouds, which comprise your My Feedhaus page, also benefit from “ActiveCloud” through which they can show real-time updates by growing and shrinking in real-time.
For users who are familiar with RSS, Feedhaus offers the ability to add your own RSS or ATOM feeds and associate any number of tags with them. These tags get aggregated into the system along with all the other tags and feeds. Just like all the pre-existing tags, if news breaks, the tags will bubble up to the home page. Any submitted tag can also be easily added to your My Feedhaus page, giving you a personalized real-time view of anything you want to track in the news or in the blogosphere.
“Until now, I couldn’t find a good way to keep up with the wealth of news, blogs and other content sources on the internet,” said Chris Bucchere, founder, President and CEO at Feedhaus. “Feedhaus gives you the power to tag feed-based content and design your own ‘My Feedhaus’ pages that deliver specific, personalized news, images and videos to you exactly the way you want them, in real-time.”
Invented and developed by a team of enterprise software veterans with deep internet and intranet portal experience, Feedhaus is led by CEO, President and founder Chris Bucchere, formerly Lead Engineer at Plumtree Software, the market-leading enterprise portal software company that was acquired by BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) in 2005.
Privately held and personally funded, Feedhaus was built by a small team of developers in a matter of months using open source Java technologies such as Rome, Lucene and Apache Tomcat along with advanced Javascript libraries to enable real-time publishing of news, images and video via an Ajax-like technology called Comet.
“Ajax has its place in the industry and we use it throughout the site,” says Feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. “However, Comet allows developers to provide real-time updates to tags and detail pages without any user intervention, providing a whole new twist to our Rich Internet Application (RIA).”
While current, contextualized, real-time news updates are great, Feedhaus also keeps track of everything that has been gleaned by FUDs since Feedhaus’s launch date. It does this by capturing a daily news snapshot, allowing readers to drag a slider bar backwards in time and find out what made the news yesterday, last week, last month or beyond.
Feedhaus already offers integration with the popular social networking site Facebook, allowing Feedhaus readers who are also Facebook users to share tag clouds on their Facebook profiles. It also integrates with industry-leading web-based instant messaging provider Meebo to provide a widget for discussing and sharing news stories with your IM contacts. More social networking features, including the ability to track view and track other people’s public ActiveCloud tag clouds, are being planned for an upcoming release.
Recently, Feedhaus was selected by a committee of judges for a prestigious South by Southwest Web Award in the Technical Achievement category. It’s also eligible for a “People’s Choice” award — if you like the site, please vote for it here.
Meeting with Chris and learning about Feedhaus has made my job more productive. Try it out!
