Refining results on Lazyfeed

Many people ask us this question: "How do I refine results on Lazyfeed?" While we plan to add more filtering in the future, that's not what I'm going to talk about today. Today I am going to talk about one way you can do this right now, instantly. Call it a tip if you may.

Before we go in, let me clarify what I mean by "refining results". For example, when you add "Apple" to your Lazyfeed, what is it that you want? Maybe you are an Apple fanboy, as I am. Or maybe you love to eat apples(the fruit). How do we handle this?

URL 101

On the Web, how do we tell the difference from Apple(the company) to Apple(the fruit)? We use URLs(Unique Resource Locator). If you want to visit Apple, inc.'s home page, you go to www.apple.com. If you want to find out more about the fruit Apple, you go to wikipedia's apple page. They're both apple but have different addresses.

Same holds for Lazyfeed. If you want to get updates on Apple the company, add www.apple.com. Click "Add topics" button, and type in the URL. Then Lazyfeed will ask you "Is this a web address?". Say yes.

Then you will start getting updates on every web content that mentions the URL www.apple.com. Note that by adding a URL you are NOT subscribing to that site, but you are subscribing to everything on the web that talks about the link.

Adding URLs for fun and profit

Well, now that we know, what does this mean? This means we can refine our updates in all sorts of creative ways. I'm going to mention below some useful cases I've discovered.

1. Brands:

I like to wear jeans from the brand "Diesel". So I added Diesel to my Lazyfeed, but soon realized that Diesel is not just a jean brand, but also a type of fuel, Duh. I start seeing all these news about cars that run on diesel. That's not what I want. So what do I do? I find out what the company's website URL is, and add it. In this case, it's www.diesel.com. The result suddenly becomes refined. I don't see any more posts about diesel based cars. Cool.

2. Movies:

Let's say I want to follow the movie "Up". Now, we all know how fun the movie is, but that over-generic title--Up--really doesn't help in this case. In this case, I've discovered that I get good results when I add the movie's IMDB page URL instead of adding the word "UP". Let's try adding the IMDB url and see what happens:

See? Very refined. Now I only get blog posts that mention the movie.

3. Musicians:

I'm a fan of Justice, a famous DJ duo from France. I am really looking forward to their next album, so I added the topic "Justice" into my Music channel on Lazyfeed. Guess what happened? Yeah it started delivering all kinds of political stuff from all over the world that has something to do with justice ("The quality of being just, impartial, or fair", according to Merriam-Webster dictionary). I know justice is really important and needed all over the world, but all I wanted was just listen to some music from these french-house DJ dudes. So what do I do? I looked up their website, but it turns out that they don't have one. However, they DO have a myspace page, which is often used to refer to them when people talk about them online. So I added their myspace URL into Lazyfeed. And now I have a tidy little topic page about Justice. Are you seeing the pattern here yet?

4. Events:

Next week is Internet week New York. It's a week of "festival celebrating NYC's thriving Internet industry & community". If you are interested in this event, you may want to add their website's URL, which is: http://www.internetweekny.com/ You will now get all the updates on everything that happens next week. Check out my events channel as an example of staying on top of events.

Conclusion

In case you're lazy, just check out the demo channel I've created for each of these topics mentioned. You can see it here: Link Demo Channel I hope this tip was helpful for you guys. Please let me know if there's any other interesting use cases you have discovered.

Get your Lazyfeed widget!

Hi guys, starting today, you can now embed your Lazyfeed posts into any website.

The widget displays your recent posts in rotation, so people visiting your website will get to see what you are currently watching and talking about. Below you can see what a Lazyfeed widget looks like. Check out your widget at http://www.lazyfeed.com/widgets!

Updates, and more on the Social Lazyfeed

Wow, it's been an awesome ride since we launched the update. You guys are really rocking!

I'm already finding all kinds of interesting channels that I'm bookmarking, as well as enjoying conversations with you guys. I've been craving for this since the moment we launched our original Lazyfeed. It was just too lonely using it alone, but now we all get to know each other!

That said, here are some important FAQs I think I must answer.

1. I'm an existing user. Wow. Did you guys seriously just throw away all my topics?

Guys, we would NEVER do that. All your topics are definitely safe and accessible. You can access it at "View all topics" page. There's a menu at the top right corner where you can do this. Check out the screenshot below.

Please understand that this "sort of hiding" the menu was a difficult decision for us too, as we didn't want to confuse the existing users.

Then why? You see, with this release, Lazyfeed has transformed from a place where you read stuff to a place where you write and share stuff. The reading part still stays the same--in fact it's the underlying engine which is still our core competitive edge--but I believe it is the "writing" and "sharing" part that will really make the difference. Think about all the benefit we can get by learning from other people's vocabulary. Think about how you can meet new friends through common topics. By opening up, we are handing Lazyfeed to your hands, and we will be seeing lots of interesting synergy because of this.

Anyway, coming back to the original question, the reason why we had to "hide" the "view all topics" page was because of this: We didn't want to confuse the people who start using Lazyfeed for the first time, knowing Lazyfeed as a writing tool, which indeed is the direction we are moving towards. To use an analogy, it would be like Twitter teaching you about how to privately tweet as soon as you sign up, which is not at all the point of the service.

So we had to do that. We had to encourage people to create channels, but at the same time I want you to know that we did our best to NOT alienate our existing users. We sent a notification about this through your personal Lazyfeed home page. I hoped that everyone got to read this, but some people may have missed it, and that's why I'm talking about it here hoping that you will all read this somehow. I hope this cleared out lots of issues. Please take a look at the notification if you haven't yet.

2. You should tell us about the auto status update before you do so.

We got many complaints about auto status update feature when creating a channel. First of all, I want you to know that we did not intend for this to happen. We actually *did* have twitter/facebook toggle buttons where you could adjust the settings for status updates as shown below. We just wanted to let you promote your newly created channels easily, and that's why we added it there.

However I think this was not visible and clear enough and left many people confused and mad. We didn't mean to do that, and I apologize. We've made a change. From now on, a message box will pop up when you create a channel, and ask you if you would like to send a status update to promote that channel, like this:

3. How do I turn off the Tutorial?

We also got some complaints about the tutorial. Many of you guys appreciated the tutorial (Thank you! We spent a lot of time coming up with this because we wanted even the first time users to understand it easily), but some wanted to know how to turn it off. The tutorial will go away once you finish it. Please don't take this the wrong way. We are not underestimating your ability to understand a service, and I do know that you already know how to use Lazyfeed.

But at the same time, the new Lazyfeed is drastically different from the previous version and I really want you guys to try the change. You will never know what all the fuss is about until you try posting. Believe me, it is not one of those pointless attempt to stay en vogue by "going social like everyone does". The social is the part that makes the new Lazyfeed much more attractive and fun.

Like I mentioned above, we know where we are going, and the benefit is crystal clear. We just need your participation. It's all in your hands now. Please try it, and if it's not fun for you, we will gladly take all the criticism afterwards.

Finally, thank you for the feedback. We are listening, and we wouldn't have known about these important issues that trouble many people if you guys didn't complain and instead just left. Thank you. I hope to get to know you more!

Ethan (www.lazyfeed.com/user/ethan)

Follow me on Lazyfeed

Expression is one of the most exciting human activities, and at the same time one of the most difficult, because expression needs inspiration, and inspiration doesn’t just come to you.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Until today.

Today Lazyfeed is evolving into a place for expressing yourself.

This may sound like a drastic change because Lazyfeed used to be a place where you read stuff, right? However it’s not at all drastic but a natural evolution. You’ve been already getting flood of inspiration using Lazyfeed. It was just that Lazyfeed didn’t provide a way for you to turn that inspiration into expression. In other words Lazyfeed used to be “Read-only”. Today we are introducing the other half of the puzzle: “Write”.

To do that, we are introducing two new features: Channel and Post.

1. Channel

- Share your Lazyfeed: You can now share your Lazyfeed with your friends and the world. Create a "Channel" and collect topics just like you used to, but this time it’s for showing and communicating with others. Channels are where most of your actions will take place from now on.

- Create multiple Lazyfeeds: But this wouldn't be fun if you could only have one Lazyfeed, would it? So Lazyfeed now lets you create multiple channels, each of which you can use for various themes such as your favorite musicians, favorite people, favorite TV shows, etc. (You can check out my profile as an example). Express various aspects of your personality by creating various interesting channels.

2. Post

Collecting and Sharing topics through channels was fun, but that’s just the beginning. Remember me saying you can now “Write”? You can now “Write” to your channel. And when you do, it appears on the left sidebar as a post, and all your followers gets real-time update. It’s like blogging, but super-lazy. You won’t ever have to worry about what to write or how to find interesting things to talk about. Everything you love to talk about comes to you. All you need to do is just pick out interesting stuff from your Channel’s stream and post. Below is a conceptual diagram of what this means:

There’s so much more I can talk about, but I think this is enough to get you started. I'm so excited to see where this goes. It's all in your hands now. Let’s be Lazy and creative!

Feature update to kick off 2010!

Hi guys, did you have great holidays? Today we have some interesting feature updates to share with you. Here they are:

1. Pause Button

Many people have been requesting this. As you know, Lazyfeed's default mode is "Treadmill view", since the definition of the service itself is "Live Update". However, we received complaints from some users saying that it was sometimes too hectic and made them dizzy. So today we have added a "pause" button. Take a look at the top of the screen. Where it says "playing live...", you'll notice that we now have a pause button. Just click on it to pause update, and click again to resume.

2. Grayed-out state for tiles
We've been testing this for a while, and some of you may have seen this in action, but the implementation wasn't perfect before. We're finally announcing it officially today because we're ready. When you click on a tile from the monitor, it will turn gray. Only when there's new content on this topic will this become yellow--and then back to white when you hover your mouse over it--This helps you tell the difference between the topics you have already checked out and the ones that you haven't yet. If a tile is gray, this means you've already seen what's inside and nothing new have come it yet. So you don't need to busy-check it by clicking on the tile over and over.

The important part about this release is that the state for each topic is stored in the Lazyfeed Cloud, therefore the states--whether it's grayed-out or white--are preserved between sessions and across different computers.

3. Better Line Wrap

In our previous version, words at end of lines ended up being broken because of line wrap. This was kind of distracting and it definitely didn't help us scan content faster. We fixed it, so it should be much easier on the eyes.


Well, that's it! Hope you like the change! Check out the change, and please feel free to leave comments below. I would like to discuss further. Happy New Year!