When we started fav.or.it (Company and Website) we had a range of ideas that we thought would improve the way consumers read the latest news. This focused initially on aggregation of blogs and the unique (at the time) feature of blog comment aggregation. The business behind this was to bring together filtered content (from blogs) and deliver an engaging platform to brands. But with some sadness I am announcing that we have taken down fav.or.it and it will not be returning, the site will hence forth be used as our company website.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The site went through a number of iterations, from RSS Reader to the final news portal iteration in which we attempted to centralize news and commenting for the mainstream market. This failed for a number of reasons,

1) The commenting market shifted to what I call ’surface comments’ – these are comments that appear inside other networks, i.e. Facebook, Google Connect, Twitter, FriendFeed (to name just a few) and although some of these have open platforms from which to aggregate from, the problems of context and also a rapidly shifting market soon made it extremely difficult for a small team to continue to compete (for which whole companies have dedicated their resources to notably backtype + ubervue).

2) RSS is DEAD – back in early 2008 I presented at thenextweb conference in Amsterdam, and said that RSS was dead for the mainstream market. It was clear to me that as a technology it worked, but that adoption was never going to go mainstream. We attempted with fav.or.it to remove the need to know what feeds you needed to read (you created ’slices’ of content), but it became clear this intention was ahead of it’s time but also poorly implemented, and I doff my hat to the people at lazyfeed for getting it right.

3) The site has also not been without controversy for re-use of content (through public RSS feeds), and although we put massive effort into support of licensing models (such as auto-detection of creative commons) our approach to aggregation of content for which we could not detect a license, and that required the publisher to opt-out (rather than opt-in) was in hindsight misguided.

TweetMeme

Although we continued to develop fav.or.it behind the scenes up until the end of February 2009 – the changes have never been deployed. The reason for this was that a very large chunk of technologies in aggregation, filtering and API’s all got moved over to a another project ‘TweetMeme‘ and in fact a lot of the ‘unseen’ developments in fav.or.it will only start to see the light of day in the coming months through TweetMeme.

TweetMeme became our focus for several reasons, firstly the trend towards status messages (micro-blogging) meant that access to real-time news was becoming a reality and that our aggregation + filtering technologies could be very quickly leveraged to take advantage of it. Secondly, our simple approach to delivering what websites desired in the form of a retweet button very quickly got traction (our thanks to Mashable for getting the ball rolling).

The team is now working 110% on keeping TweetMeme at the very forefront of real-time news, we have already made a mark in real-time search and you will see a whole new set of important innovations to bring real engagement for the mainstream consumer market, and most importantly to the deliver enterprise solutions to businesses and brands.

Lastly let me thank the Team for their continued hard work, and my investors for continuing to believe in our vision.

So today is my first day as the community manager at Fav.or.it and as such I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce myself and what I’ll be doing here over the next few months.  So here goes…

First things first I’ll be looking over the comments from our current users and identifying any key areas where the site could be drastically improved so get your suggestions into us by leaving me a comment and suggestion for what features we are missing that should really be there.  I’m also into making things as simple and usable as possible so if I see usability issues I’ll be picking up on them to make your job easier!

Secondly I’ll be attending The Next Web conference and will have my laptop with me so that you can see Fav.or.it in action and at it’s best.   As such do come and find me and I’ll show you what we can do with the site!  Honestly there’s more to it than just the front page…

And finally some random facts about me…

Background: Formerly I worked at Cardinal Health as a software engineer doing a  lot of .net programming and software development in and around this area.  I’m also the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners and that is where my community experience comes from.  I’m known for being a little unconventional in my approach to things and have a passion for mobile devices… so thanks to Nick (aka the Boss) I am now fully connected with an IPhone!  So that means you can find me on Twitter a little more often than you used to!  If you want to find me on twitter my account is @girlygeekdom and I have a couple of blogs… my group blog is GirlyGeekdom and my personal one which I’ve not put much on recently is Flirting with the Future… I thought it was a fun name for a blog!  You’ll also find me blogging here and over on the TweetMeme blog too! And yes I will be cross posting every now and again, but hopefully not too often!

After hearing a friendly tweet from a friend about graze.com, I figured a website with a name like that deserved a look. What I found really surprised me. A company that provided “healthy eating by post”. They convinced me that I could replace my normal not-so-healthy lunches with a simple solution that would arrive from the postman each day.

They would keep track of my preference of different fruits, vegetables and nuts and pick out a perfect selection for me each day. I can continually update my choices and delivery options, so I never get anything I don’t want.

So in true sysadmin style, here goes the graze.com unboxing!

The box is sturdy and easily small enough to fit through a letter box

They provide a totally personalised card about what you’ve got in your box and its nutritional information.

They split the box into ‘freshly prepared fruit’, ‘special graze mix’, and ‘handy snack pack’

It’s all very neatly done, and you even get a bamboo fork to eat it with.

For the really keen, we even took a video of the unboxing:

Alex’s Graze unboxing (crazy fruit) from Daniel Saxil-Nielsen on Vimeo.

I did make a comment about it being over packaged, which I take back. It must be remembered that it has to survive going through the post, so I think its totally reasonable. I also noticed a page on the graze site about their green concerns and what they are doing to minimize their impact.

I would thoroughly recommend these boxes to anyone. I’m getting another one tomorrow, so I should get an email through soon saying exactly what it’ll contain. If you’re considering it, head over to graze.com and use my code 8JXTLRHB, and I’ll donate £1 to the Rainforest Alliance).

For updates on my graze.com action, follow me on twitter.

Having secured our second round of funding we have a number of new roles that we need to fill, first up is the Community Manager. This is a crucial role because we will be pushing out a range of more social features and many more community based aspects to the whole service which will need to managed/nurtured/kicked in equal amounts.

We are looking for an extremely bright, enthusiastic and customer-focused individual to work closely with our community on building and supporting them. You will have excellent interpersonal skills and be able to build rapport quickly. Some key responsibilities will be:

• Actively engaging with the community, advising them on adding knowledge to the system.
• Building the community with original frequent blog posts.
• Representing the community and communicating its feedback to programmers, product managers and the management team.
• Reach out to influential web sites, blogs, and spread the word.
• Develop relationships with key community members to encourage their involvement and reward them for their involvement.
• Stay up to date on new social media tools, best practices and how other organizations and companies are using them, so that the company can continue to be an early adopter of these technologies.
• Attend networking and related conferences / seminars

Experience & Qualifications Required:

• Good quality graduate education.
• Track record of actively participating in realtime social media sites (e.g. twitter, facebook)
• Experience with variety of networking, community-based web sites.
• Fluent English essential.
• HTML skills desirable but not essential
  

Skills & Attributes Required:

• You like working hard and thrive on the excitement of a goal oriented team
• You are an independent, creative self-starter who loves running with things while keeping everyone inside and outside the company in the loop.
• You love to write & enjoy sharing your ideas with others.
• You spend a lot of time online and stay up-do-date on new, fun things out there for web savvy users as well as regular people.

The role is based in Reading (UK) – salary range 20-35k based upon previous relevant experience / knowledge of this sector. You also get a shiny MacBook Air + Flip Video Camera.

How to apply? contact me on twitter – if you don’t know what twitter is? then don’t apply…

As announced by Techcrunch UK today, I am pleased to announce today that favorit Ltd has closed a second round of funding that totals nearly £500,000. I won’t go into the details of what the money is for, as you can read our Statement for 2009 which details out our plans, instead I wanted to talk a little about the personal side of the investment.

I started the investment process almost six months ago and in between starting and closing, the UK and the rest of the world have suffered the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

The Good & The Bad

I feel a mixed set of emotions: one of pure elation that in such a downturn that we have managed to raise money (and purely from the UK!). But I also feel for the many other startups that have not secured funding, and or will go under because raising money is now so hard. In the managed offices we are located in, two startups have failed in the last three months when they had not previously had any fail in the previous five years.

I wrote a guest post on Techcrunch UK a few weeks back about UK government funding in which I discussed the recent GOV announcements on funding for SME’s – this was partly related to the fact that £125,000 of the investment has came from Finance South East. Because I had succeeded in doing so, I wanted to share my knowledge of the GOV investment eco-system. I will endeavour over the next few months to write some more detailed, in-depth posts covering the various options available. 

The London Scene

I have been very fortunate in meeting some of the best entrepreneurs in the world while networking my way around London. Each and every one of them has always been 1000% supportive and I feel very lucky to have built such a good set of close friends within the community. I thank everyone who has come to know me over the past year for your time and energies in engaging with what we are trying to achieve.

The Team

The technology we have built with such a small team (we have only been 3 people for most of the last year) is incredible. A massive thank you to all the team for your hard work and efforts so far. 

The Wife

Lastly I also wanted to say a massive thank you to my amazing wife. She has been my rock whenever times have been tough – always having that level head to counter balance my sometimes overly flamboyant ideas. Last January she also gave birth to our daughter Amelia who is a constant entertainment to me and whatever the trials at work she is always smiling when I get home.

If you want to follow our exploits on Twitter you can follow myself (@nickhalstead) or fav.or.it. (@favorit). If you have an interest in Twitter you may also want to take a look at tweetmeme which we re-launched yesterday with a variety of new features.

Over a year ago I had a vision for a product that would achieve two results:

1. Help bring blogging to the mainstream
2. Let businesses engage with the conversation

Below I have laid out how we are going to achieving that vision very soon.

Channels

Just before Christmas we started testing a new part of our new platform. The ‘channel‘ system allows us (and soon, everyone else) to create a new website that is a mash-up of other content republished using our own next-gen page designer.

Filtering

This is not just simply ’select some feeds’, but a fully fledged filtering engine. For those interested, it’s a fully bespoke engine written in C++ that can filter millions of articles based upon our own micro-programming language. We have created a simple interface (pictured right) – that allows anyone to create complex rules to filter out content.

The rules that can be applied,

• filter by keyword (also by relevance factor, and also by type e.g. person, place, product)
• filter by category (e.g. technology, business, food)
• filter by feed
• filter by media (video, image, audio)
• filter by license (free or paid for – see below)
• filter by rank (either by our internal rank based upon attention data, Technorati rank or by Feedburner follow count)

The engine allows AND’s OR’s and NOT’s (again for your programmers) but again you can see from the screenshot that we have represented these hopefully in a simple way.

Design

I also wanted from the outset for every user to be able to generate web sites that did not just look like a blog. If you look at our first few test channels you’ll hopefully agree to the diversity of what can be built.

Back in October I gave a quick screencast of the editor in action, and as you can see from the screenshot we have further refined the interface.

What is it for?

We do have some clear goals on what can be achieved using our platform but we also believe when the system is opened up to everyone to create thousands of diverse channels the way it is used and for what purpose will be as diverse as the channels themselves.

The three clear areas in which we believe our platform can be of great value.

• Centralizing – The filtering engine has the great ability to bring in content on a particular subject, so we envisage a lot of channels taking niche topics and aggregating them together to build a larger and more vibrant communities. E.g. bring all the Arsenal football club discussions into one place.
• Collaboration – When I personally started blogging I felt that without the ability to work with a few other bloggers I would not be able to make a big blog. With fav.or.it, you can work with a number of other bloggers to build something greater than the sum of its parts. But more importantly, you can pick and choose from each of your own feeds and all the comments made on fav.or.it still get pushed back to each members personal blog.
• Engagement – For companies the ability to engage with their customers is becoming more and more important. Many companies already pay for the ability to track what people are saying about them online. We now take that one step further and give companies the ability to engage directly with their customers and users. Using our technologies we can deliver bespoke websites out to external websites, giving them the ability to engage themselves or also have their own customers have a mainstream interface to read + comment on topics relevant to that company across millions of blogs.

Licensing

The last part of the puzzle relates to the ownership of the content that we aggregate. We were, as far as we can tell, the first aggregator that took note of the creative commons license that is attached to some feeds (10% or so +growing) – in case of the feed declaring non-commercial use we abided by those terms (by only displaying an excerpt). The long term plan which has taken us longer than we hoped was to build a licensing model around feeds.

FeedBroker

In building this feed licensing platform we also saw an opportunity to separate some of the functionality into a new site which would allow for licensing feeds external to fav.or.it – thus feedbroker was born. Feedbroker lets content owners specify terms under which their content may be used, but most importantly, if they desire they can take payments on a pay-per-post basis.

This works using our filtering system to allow consumers of content to specify what kind of content they want and at what price. Most importantly, they are buying the feed content *after* it has been written, so there is no perception of content being produced to order.

The content consumer can either take the content and re-use it within fav.or.it – or produce a secure feed which can then be used within their own site.

Look out very soon for some more screencasts demonstrating all of these features.

We will also in the following days be posting more detailed writeups on each of these features as this summary does not really cover any particular feature in any detail.

Over on the tweetmeme blog we have just announced a revamp of tweetmeme. This includes a new leaderboard and a better way of visualising what people say about each story.

I have been a massive fan of twitter for a long time, it has saved someone from jail, is frequently used as a tool during any disaster and now it is being used to bring together thousands of twitterers for a charity event called twestival – The very first twestival was held on the 25th September 2008 and I was lucky enough to attend, this time round event organiser Amanda Rose has taken this from being a local event to being a global phenomenon. On the 12th February nearly 200 cities will be taking part.

The charity in question is charity: water which is bringing clean water to developing nations, funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need.

Twestival Raffle

Last year at Future of Web Apps we built a 3,500 piece Lego Death Star on our stand. We finished it just before the show ended and with enough time for me to have the hair brained idea that I would get Kevin and Alex to give it away on Diggnation. To cut a long story they forgot to give it away!

We had planned on keeping the Death Star and having it sit in the office, but when Twestival asked for good prizes to raise money via a raffle I suggested we give it away.

So if you are attending London Twestival please give generously, especially if you want the chance to win our fantastic Death Star. I will be around on the night so please come say hello.

If you are not attending one of the twestival events you can still donate to charity water.

Today we launched TwitOrFit. We developed this in partnership with the lovely people over at huddle.net, the full story of how it got started you can read over on the twitorfit blog.

What does it do?

You vote for people, are they a Twit or are they Fit? you have to be a registered twitter user and have a profile picture, you register and start voting on other twitter users, but by registering to vote you also must submit yourself to be voted upon, bit of a double edged sword.

Badge

You can also put a badge on your own website/blog showing your current rating (I really hope mine stays above 4!) – and at last count a DOG was the top of the leaderboard (how random is that).

A big thanks to everyone involved in development especially @stut and @dtsn who have worked non-stop to get this ready for today. Also a big thanks to everyone who signed up for the BETA.

Coverage so far.

• TechCrunch UK – TwitOrFit is Twitter-meets-HotOrNot
• Louis Gray – Twit Or Fit? Hot or Not for Twitter Users Launches
• Mashable – Twit Or Fit? Yes, it’s Hot Or Not for Twitter
• The Next Web – TwitorFit: Hot or Not for Twitter
• Rizzn – TwitOrFit: It’s Hot or Not for Twitter

As always if you want updates on twitorfit or favorit you can follow me here

Ahead of the impending launch next week of our new channel system I thought I would share the work of our designer Daniel who has been busy at work creating base templates and themes. In my previous post about our Layout Editor I showed how easy it was to build new layouts. The screenshot below shows the results and how amazingly customizable the system really is (this channel was built in 4 hours).

(click image to enlarge)

All will be revealed next week so keep an eye on the blog and on my twittering.