We are today announcing the remaining features that make up fav.or.it. We have already announced the revolution that is our ability to post back replies back to the blog that we aggregated the content from. The first new feature is that fav.or.it is also a blogging platform. The second is how we want to revolutionize tracking what is most popular.
Blogging Platform
fav.or.it is all about trying to open up the Blogosphere to a wider audience. The second part of our plan for this is to make starting a blog a lot easier. Many people already contribute to many online forums and write very high quality content but they either never feel inclined to make the effort to start a blog or they have no understanding how to go about it. With fav.or.it the process becomes a two step approach.
Step 1 – Start writing posts, these posts get included in our database for everyone within fav.or.it to read but they are not published externally.
Step 2 – The user then decides to take those posts and start publishing them out as a blog.
Why is this so different? We think that many more users will be prepared to contribute in a ad-hoc manner writing content on a wide range of subjects as thought they were contributing to a massive forum but without the pressure that they need to stick to the point or a theme or any of the other unwritten rules of blogging. If at a later stage they decide they want to republish their content as a blog with a couple of clicks they can do so. Not only can they republish all their content but they can also be selective about what goes on their blog, this is where SubSlices come into play.
SubSlices
A ‘SubSlice’ is a combination of a ‘Slice’ and a ‘Subdomain’. If you have read about fav.or.it before you will know that a ‘Slice’ is a cross section of all the content with fav.or.it and a Subdomain is an extension to our domain e.g. ‘nickhalstead.fav.or.it’ or ’scoble.fav.or.it’.
At their simplest a SubSlice can be the content of just one person. To describe a slightly more advanced use lets go back to our imaginary user who has spent a couple of months writing posts. He decides he wants to create a blog from some of his posts but only wants to publish those that he has written under the category ‘gadgets’. Because we can create a blog from any slice this is not a problem.
What does a SubSlice look like? It looks just like a blog on any of the other popular blogging platforms. We have a range of themes and have a widget system to let you drop in various content into an overall layout.
Republishing Content
It is not only your own content that you can republish. If you can create a slice in the reader that you like or that you think others will like then you can republish that content as a SubSlice.
Examples of slices that could be republished.
| Slice | SubSlice | Description |
| /what/iphone | iphone.fav.or.it | All the content within fav.or.it that has any mention of the word ‘iphone’. |
| /category/technology-gadgets | gadgets.fav.or.it | Only content that has been put under the gadget category |
| /category/socialnetworking/what/facebook | facebook.fav.or.it | Content under the social networking category plus filtered down to only be content that mentions facebook. |
| /feed/30-53-107-77 | groupblog.fav.or.it | An example of how simple it is to create a group blog of 4 separate feeds. |
These are just a few examples and it is possible to do many more combinations and we hope users will be very creative in building new and exciting blogs.
It is important to note that content owners have various options on how to opt-out of having their content republished by anyone else. Although we hope that all content owners will see the benefits of getting extra coverage from having their content republished in new and interesting ways.
Popular Content
fav.or.it is also about finding great content and we think we have a natural solution that gives a reliable way to track what people think is the best content. While using fav.or.it we track how long you look at each individual post. We store which posts you read and ignore any that you skip over. All this information gets sent back to our database so that we can then build up a picture of what you like or dislike.
The other effect of this is that we can track the total time everyone spends reading every post. Over a 24 hour period this gives us a great ‘what is popular’. We present this back to each user on their homepage so that they can quick read what is popular.
One other great ability is for users to use this information within their own SubSlices. It is possible to use our ‘Most Popular’ Widget which gives a Top 10 of the most popular content within that SubSlice. If the SubSlice is limited to ‘iphone’ then it would be the Top 10 most read articles in the last 24 hours that contains the word ‘iphone’.
Events
If you want a full demo of everything above we are at Mashup Demo on Tuesday 2nd October and at Future of Web Apps on Wednesday and Thursday (3rd & 4th October).
Movies
| Full Length video covering many aspects of fav.or.it (15 minutes long) |
Other Videos (shorter sections)
- Replying to comments inline
- fav.or.it as a blogging platform
- The homepage
- How we deal with importing feeds
Further coverage at TechCrunch & TechCrunch UK
wow~how can i get a favorit invition please?
i am looking for it a long time
It kind of sounds a little like having a RSS to Blog capability, only this will do all the feed aggregation and filtering for you. The end result will be highly focused content, if I am reading this correctly. I like the concept, as it will simplify things a great deal, and get people who aren’t capable of coding their own system of RSS scrape/filtering.
Am I reading this correctly, of did I miss something? Also, a couple questions come to mind. Are templates to be used? Can you put advertising on this blog?
All in all, sounds like a solid concept. I will be watching this closely.
Inline conversations is a feature that I’ve wanted from my favorite newsreader for so long that I’m willing to shift (at least partially) to one that offers it.
I am not sure how the Categorical cloud of the blogosphere approach will work out though. On one hand, it gives me this quick access to news that I want; but on the other I know people who like to keep their reading list highly organized and selective.
Best wishes for your site though, I feel the single interface approach is going to be a big facilitator for online conversations.
And, I had to put this in, puhlease give me a beta!
Jim, the SubSlices are template/layout/widget based, so you can customize them as much as you like. Yes you can put advertising on those slices, the slight different is that the advertising is done as a widget, you choose one of our affiliate advertisers, and then you, fav.or.it and the original owner of the content (if that is you, then you get that as well) all get a % of the revenue.
Sameer, it is possible to treat slices as single feeds, and therefore we may at a later date allow some form of hierarchy of slices, so that you can organise them just how some more ‘technical’ users do already using bloglines/google reader.
Looks very promising, looking forward to getting a chance to try everything hands on.
Hey I write a Linux blog that has become decently popular and would like to write a review of fav.or.it. I am a member of streamy and would love to compare your two serveices.
SO if you would like a write up please send me an invite
Perhaps you’ve addressed this elsewhere – I didn’t watch the entire video and haven’t read through the entire site:
How do you handle various comment formats? Some blogs support HTML comments, some want Markdown etc. So for one thing, as a fav.or.it user I’d love it if the comment form could say what format is expected. And also, when my comment is shown inline after being posted, that formatting should perhaps be applied (or stripped).
It seems to me that assuming a subset of HTML unless another mark-up method is mentioned by the comment form might be Good Enough. Then again, accuracy might be too low.
I’d be interested to hear how you handle formats, if at all.
[...] (even adding a description would be great)…it seems there is more in the works…aha re-publishing content. I wonder if you could bookmark items you find outside fav.or.it into a clip stream…I guess [...]