We didn't win at SXSW, but...

I thought you might want to hear my acceptance speech anyway, so I created this little video. . . .

Time is Running Out

Voting closes for the SXSW People's Choice award tomorrow. Don't forget to cast your final votes for Feedhaus and keep your fingers crossed!

If you're going to SXSWi, catch up with me in one of the panels by downloading my calendar ICS feed.

Not resting on our laurels

Team Feedhaus put out a new release tonight. This was primarily a bug-fix release. Here's a run-down:

1) Speed up history detail pages -- we've got more than 1.2 million stories stored up since our private alpha began in early September. Finding those records to show required some heavy lifting, but by adding some indexes to that table and making a few code changes, you can now play with the history slider all you want and pull up old stories almost instantaneously.

2) Speed up regular detail pages -- some browsers were having trouble displaying some of the detail pages, mostly just because they were too big! We've capped the number of stories now at 20 per detail page. Eventually we'll add pagination, but for now, there's still plenty of news and blogs for you to read, with the latest and greatest stuff always bubbling to the top.

3) Detail page clipping -- some tags returned feed content that was too wide for the detail page, which required you to scroll horizontally to see the full extent of the content -- yuck! (We've had lots of complaints about this.) Using some CSS hacks, we fixed that for all the major offenders that we could find. If you find any other "wide loads" (i.e. detail pages that are too big for their britches), please let us know.

Feedhaus Featured on AltSearchEngines.com

Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines.com had this to say about Feedhaus. Thanks, Charles, we think it's cool too!

Feedhaus Eligible for SXSW "People's Choice" Award

As a finalist in the "Technical Achievement" category, we're also eligible to win a "People Choice" award.

But to do that, we need your votes! Vote early, vote often. (You can vote once per day every day up until March 3rd.)

Thanks!

Also, if you're local (DC Area), please join us at our SXSW send off party in Courthouse (Arlington, VA) on February 21st.

Feedhaus Selected as a SXSW Web Award Finalist

We're very pleased to announce that Feedhaus has been selected as a finalist for a prestigious SXSW (South by Southwest) 2008 Web Award!

We've been selected, along with four other great nominees, from among a pool of hundreds of sites for the "Technical Achievement" category, which, according to SXSW, describes "sites that are re-inventing and re-defining the technical parameters of our online experience."

As a finalist, we're also eligible for the "People's Choice" award, so please vote for Feedhaus (daily until March 3rd).

Kudos to the SXWS committee for recognizing Feedhaus! Hope to see you in Austin from March 7th-11th for this great conference.

An International Phenomenon

Feedhaus is making quite a splash internationally. Lately, we've gotten news coverage in German (of course), Spanish, French (again), Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese!

Feedhaus Featured on The Web 2.0 Show

Josh Owens and Chris Saylor of The Web 2.0 Show interviewed me for their podcast. Give it a listen.

The Crazy $100 Feedhaus Sticker Challenge

I had a crazy idea this afternoon while stuck in Manhattan gridlock. I asked myself, "self, why don't you start a crazy $100 feedhaus sticker challenge?"

Here's how it works: over the next few months, I'm going to be sticking feedhaus stickers in secret -- but conspicuous -- locations in major cities throughout the world.

If you find the sticker, simply be the first to post its location on this blog, and you'll win 100 bucks, courtesy of feedhaus.

I put the first sticker up today, somewhere in Manhattan.

It's that simple. Find the sticker, make $100.

Next city up: Washington, DC

Introducing the Feedhaus Newsroom

Team Feedhaus is very pleased to announce the launch of the Feedhaus Newsroom. Powered by feedhaus but integrated seamlessly with meebo, the newsroom gives you a forum to chat with your friends while constantly being updated with the latest news from the hottest tags on feedhaus.

You can recommend stories and tags to your chat buddies and they can do the same to you, which I'm sure will result in some lively discussions!

To access the newsroom, sign into meebo.com using your credentials from AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk or ICQ and then invite one of your buddies to chat. Witin the chat window, click on the rocket ship: Scroll down to "news & entertainment" and then click on "Feedhaus News:"



This will invite your chat buddy to the newsroom -- which works even if your friend isn't using meebo -- enjoy!

My Love Affair with Instant Messaging

Do you love instant messaging?

I do.

In fact, I remember the first time I used a chatroom when my parents signed us up for AppleLink, a BBS (remember those?) that we could access using the modem on my first computer, the ill-fated special "Woz" edition Apple IIGS (remember THOSE?). The year was 1986 and I was in the 5th grade. In 1989, AppleLink was bought by a little-known company called Quantum (by a little-known person named Steve Case), who later rebranded the service as America Online. I remember when the service changed and how excited I was because it meant one thing -- even more chatrooms!

In my high school and college days, I would telnet into academic Unix servers and talk to my friends on ytalk and later on PCs using AOL Instant messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and GTalk. The only chat service I never got into was ICQ, although I did log in once in a blue moon for a special purpose chat on one topic or another.

So, long story short, I love chatrooms and the whole concept of chatting online. But, circa 2000 or so, all my friends were on different chat networks! At one point, I was running three chat clients on my machine -- what a waste of resources. Enter Trillian (and Adium for the Mac, Gaim for Linux, etc.): now I could manage all my buddies in one place.

Then came that fateful day in 2004 when the client site I've been visiting since August of 2003 shut down all chat ports and banned Trillian from our desktops. For the first time in my life, I was a man without a chatroom.

Then, in 2005, a new Sequoia-baked web site went into alpha. I immediately jumped in and registered for this new chatroom, called meebo, which offered the ability to combine all my buddies and chat across all the networks (like Trillian) but do so under the guise of a normal web site running on port 80. This of course allowed me to bypass the chat port and client software restrictions.

Fast forward to the end of 2007, and meebo now features rooms (how nostalgic) along with an open API, for which various companies have built a plethora of applications ranging from chess to speed dating to video chat.

So why did I just chronicle my love affair with chat in all of its gory detail? And no less, why did I do so on the Feedhaus blog?

Stay tuned, because tomorrow we're going to announce a very cool new part of feedhaus that will truly change the way people consume news on the internet . . . and how they partake in discussions about current events.

Watch this space -- and I promise -- you won't be disappointed!

feedhaus sponsors MashMeet Chicago

We're pleased to announce that we're sponsoring Chicago's first MashMeet, an event designed to bring Chicago's best Web 2.0 startups together for a night of social networking (the in-person variety, not the online kind).

Here are the details:

MashMeet Chicago

7:00 - 10:00 PM, November 29th, 2007
Fulton Lounge, 955 West Fulton Market, Chicago, IL

The event is open to all and no RSVP is required. Hope to see you there!

Introducing the feedhaus Facebook widget

We're very happy to announce that Facebook has approved the feedhaus widget for inclusion in their application directory. Right now the widget is pretty limited -- it just lets you add one of your tag clouds to your profile. In the future, we plan to support adding multiple tag clouds and sharing stories and tags with your Facebook friends. But for now, the widget is fun way to show your online compadres what your interests are in current events, celebrity gossip, tech/gadget news, etc.

Enjoy, but enjoy responsibly. Facebook can be addictive -- so remember to do some live, in-person networking with your real friends and family members and try not to sink all your free time into online social networking. As a fellow Facebook addict, I implore you to do as I say, not as I do! :-)

Instructional Video

Interested in feedhaus but not sure where to start? Check out this ten-minute long instructional video that walks through all the major features of the site and the widgets for Facebook and meebo (coming soon).

feedhaus sponsors MashMeet DC

We're pleased to announce that we're sponsoring DC's first MashMeet, an event designed to bring DC's best Web 2.0 startups together for a night of social networking (the in-person variety, not the online kind).

Here are the details:

MashMeet DC

7:00 - 10:00 PM, December 7th 2007

MEZÈ, 2437 18th St. NW, Washington, DC

The event is open to all and no RSVP is required. Hope to see you there!

Charles Knight's Christmas List

I've very pleased to announce that feedhaus was listed among the Top Five Web Applications that Charles Knight wants for Christmas. Actually, there are eight, but we're still pleased that we made the list.

Charles runs a site called Alt Search Engines, which is part of the Read/WriteWeb blog network. In my own words, it's a site that proves that there's life after Google.

In their words:

"The unique approach of AltSearchEngines is to expand coverage of search engines to include the hundreds of alternative / niche search engines. While the editorial attitude will not be “anti-Google”, it will certainly be “pro-alternative search engines” -- a showcase of cutting edge innovation. Our goal for AltSearchEngines is to make it the definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines -- over 1,000 of them!

Our motto: “The most wonderful search engines you’ve never seen.”

AltSearchEngines is edited by Charles Knight, a respected industry analyst and former SEO from Charlottesville, Virginia."

feedhaus Featured on Robert Scoble's Video Blog

Robert Scoble and I had a great talk the other day. Robert, an avid feed consumer, was an excellent critic of the site -- this video will give you an idea of what features we'll be adding in the near future, many of which were based on his suggestions. Enjoy!

Feedhaus reviewed by KillerStartups.com

We posted our first press release this week, announcing the availability of our public alpha. In response, we picked up lots of new registered users along with hundreds of new tags and feeds, including our first non-American feed content (26 Noticias from Argentina).

In response to the press release, we were reviewed by KillerStartups.com and they had nothing but great things to say about the service, including one person's comment that:

"the only thing impeding Feedhaus from becoming a very successful service is its publicity."

So, fans of feedhaus, please continue spreading the word!

Make feedhaus Your Own

The feedhaus team here at bdg is very pleased to announce that we've added personalization to feedhaus!

The new section of the site -- called "my feedhaus" -- gives you the ability to organize the news as you see fit. Choose from the hundreds of tags available to create as many of your own "mini" tag clouds as you like and then drag and drop them to organize the page the way you like it.

Like the main tag cloud, your personal tag clouds are also "live" so that as the news changes, you'll always be the first to know.

feedhaus Now Supported by Ads

You may notice that the detail pages are now ad-supported. I would have implemented this weeks ago, but Google was very slow to approve our AdSense account.

We're not trying to make a killing here -- in fact our first goal is just to cover the cost of hosting. . . .

We also implemented Google Analytics so we can track site usage.

Right now the ads aren't targeting themselves correctly -- apparently that takes 48 hours to kick in, so stay tuned.

feedhaus Now on New Hardware

In response to some complaints from my hosting company and registrar that we were using too much CPU and bandwidth, I've moved feedhaus from a virtual dedicated server to a dedicated server.

I think Lucene was the culprit -- as FUD was indexing feeds' articles, Lucene was consuming WAY too much CPU. Anyway, after a 24 FUDless hours, FUD is happily chugging away to bring you new stories from the 70+ feeds we now have in feedhaus.

I'm very happy to say that I was able to move feedhaus and FUD over to the new hardware with only 30 minutes of web site downtime. W00t!

This incident led me to thinking a bit about scaling feedhaus. My fears about the scalability of cometd/long-polling are probably unwarranted. What I should really worry about is FUD. I think ultimately FUD needs to be separated out from the web server machines so that it doesn't interfere with web site performance. Furthermore, I think the feed table should probably be broken into segments and there should be a new FUD process instantiated for every 100 (or so) feeds.

I guess FUD and I will cross that bridge when we get to it . . . but for now, performance is snappy as ever AND you're getting your news in near-realtime. Enjoy!

More on the New feedhaus Features

Nearly every new user who gets on feedhaus has the same question: can I narrow the tag cloud down to only the topics/tags that I care about? My answer is no, not yet, but soon! How soon this happens is anyone's guess, but let me update you on the progress of our newest features:

1. Search

This feature made the top of our list because you really can't have personalization or profiling without first opening up access to all the tags in feedhaus. (In case you haven't already noticed, only the top 100 are showing on the home page.) We're designing search so that you can easily find feeds, articles (current or past), tags and users. The search is powered by a great, turnkey opensource search engine called Lucene.

2. Personalization

This has been the most requested feature to date. And it'll be here . . . soon! You'll be able to create as many personal tag clouds as you want and drag the tags you want to watch into each tag cloud. You'll be able to name these personalized tag clouds and share them with your friends, essentially allowing you to design your own constantly up-to-date news site.

3. User Profiling and Social Networking

The user profile feature will allow you to see what other people are tagging and what feeds they're adding (if they choose to share). You can also browse other people's tag clouds and copy them, adding your own tags or removing those you don't care about. If you like another person's "taste" in the news, you can add them as a friend. Lastly, we all love a competition, so we're adding a "top contributor" page and showing each person's rank, which will be calculated based on how many feeds he or she has added.

Be on the lookout for these new features and, as always, leave your comments here or drop us a line at admin@feedhaus.com.

feedhaus Alpha 2 is Live

We made a few notable changes, including revamping the "add a feed" page by adding clearer feedback and better instructions. We also made the feed adding, indexing and aggregating a lot more robust by fixing some bugs deep within the feed processing engine.

We're trying our best to emphasize that this is a social news site, so we added the orange button (on the right) to encourage people to add their own content.

Coming in the next alpha build . . . the much anticipated search feature, along with perhaps some personalization and/or user profiling bits. More about these new features later . . . .

feedhaus Public Alpha Begins . . . Now!

We've put the "Alpha 1" build up and removed the password protection, which marks the beginning of the feedhaus public alpha!

In this build, we've repaired a lot of the IE problems (although there are still a few sneaky issues) and revamped the forms along with other parts of the UI. The "add a feed" page is much more robust now -- if you enter a web site URL instead of a feed URL, it will actually search the page for one or more feed URL(s) and pre-populate the form for you. (Thanks Andrew for implementing this great feature.)

We've also changed our slogan from "What's Hot Now" to "Be the First to Know."

One known issues is that the history slider is still a little wonky and it will be for several days (until enough snapshots exist for it to scroll smoothly). This problem will be with us for about a week or so and then it will work itself out. Think of it as feedhaus' "growing pains."

So, have at it, folks!

And please report problems and suggestions by commenting on this blog or sending an e-mail to admin@feedhaus.com.

Web 2.0 and Cascading SLAs

Herein lies a great example of one of the downsides of Web 2.0. It's something I call "cascading SLAs."

I was checking feedhaus today and I noticed that the flickr badge (the cool lil' widget that displays a little collage of photos) was down for the count. I thought perhaps I had broken something on the dev server, but a quick health check revealed that everything was okay with feedhaus.

So, I decided to check out flickr to see if there were any messages about known downtime, current server issues, etc. Lo and behold, flickr was also down! Hello? Anyone? Bueller?

This demonstrates one of the classic problems with mashups, a crucial component of Web 2.0: cascading SLAs (Service-Level Agreements), or, more precisely, a lack thereof. Here at feedhaus, I have a responsibility to provide up-to-date news to that my users will be the "first to know." I can (although I probably won't) guarantee a level of service for feedhaus's ability to deliver content. But, as a multi-band content aggregator, I'm solely dependent on the sources of content -- namely flickr, YouTube and you-name-it syndicated feed from whatever.com. Now if my sources are CNN, Google, Fox, etc. I would expect pretty dependable service. But Digg? Twitter? Seeing what happened to Skype recently, I'm beginning to wonder if everyone, even the biggest -- and most distributed -- systems are subject to serious unplanned downtime.

So, what I'm getting at here is that my SLA, no matter how much I pay my attorneys to draft it, is only as good as the SLAs of the services that I use. Now, I'm not paying the sources for those services -- and, I might add, you're not paying me to use feedhaus -- so I have no SLAs for my underlying services, which makes my SLA worth less than the paper it's printed on. Do you see the problem? (I'm reminded of a certain scene from the 1989 classic comedy Major League. "See, it says right there; no calisthentics. What do you think of that?")

So, before you start drafting that SLA for the cool new mashup you just built between Google Maps and Facebook, think about the stability and sustainability of your sources. Or else your SLA might have the same fate as Roger Dorn's contract. . . .

We're alpha!

I'm very pleased to announce that this evening I installed Build 0 on our development server, so now we're officially alpha.

Here's the note I sent to the people who registered for the private alpha:

Greetings,

Based on the interest you've expressed in doing an early evaluation of the web's newest community news aggregator, I'm sending you instructions on how to sign into the feedhaus private alpha.

1) Visit http://www.feedhaus.com.

2) Enter the username "********" and the password "********". That's it, you're in!

Here's a small primer on how to use the site:

First, check out the newest stories that appear at the top (you can't miss 'em). Then, click on any tag to see all articles across all feeds that match that tag, along with relevant photos and videos. Finally, slide the history slider at the bottom backward to see what the tags and articles looked like in the past.

You can always return to the present by clicking on the feedhaus logo in the upper left.

That's the entire end-user experience. However, if you want to become a power-user, I recommend that you click on the "register" link to create an account. You'll need to fill out a form and validate your e-mail address. After that, you'll be able to tag feeds, which makes you a contributor to feedhaus's concept of "what's hot now." Click "add a feed," enter the feed URL (RSS or Atom), enter some tags, and off you go. Remember, unlike del.icio.us, you're tagging feeds, not web sites. So instead of entering http://www.cnn.com, you'll want to find CNN's RSS or Atom feed and then add that URL (for example, see http://www.cnn.com/services/rss/).

The outer basic authentication will be removed when we go to beta, but for now, we need your help in ferreting out as many bugs as possible. We're also interested in usability suggestions and any other feedback. Please channel all feedback through the blog (by commenting here).

That's it! Go get 'em and thanks a million for your help!

Best regards,
Chris Bucchere

P.S.: Thanks to Andrew Bays for all his hard work on the feedhaus backend and to Allison Bucchere for her fabulous visual and graphic design.

It's not too late to register for the alpha! E-mail us at admin@feedhaus.com to join the party.

Visual Design

We started applying the visual design tonight, which means one thing: we're getting close! The image to the left is the first cut at the logo. The background gradient is a friendly green, but all the windows where you will actually interact with the site are white with blue hyperlinks and black text, which provides a nice sense of familiarity. Since much of what we're tying to do here -- applying tags to feeds -- is so new to the masses, we want the site to be as friendly and as unintimidating as humanly possible.

Progress Report

The wheels of the Feedhaus machine are spinning along . . . .

Today we installed an early prototype on the development server and validated that about 90% of the functionality is implemented and basically working. You can sign up, sign in, sign out, edit your account, tell a friend, tag feeds and view the main tag cloud and detail pages. Well, you can't just yet, but we can. The Feed Update Daemon (which we affectionately call "FUD") isn't quite ready yet, so it's not activated on the development server.

We've chosen GoDaddy.com as our hosting provider as they've been doing all the hosting for bdg since I started the company in 2002. They provide great customer service, reasonable prices, flexible plans, and most importantly, their hold music features a great 90s retro/neo-swing band, The Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Hordes of people have already signed up for the private alpha. What are you waiting for? E-mail us to sign up today!

Welcome to Feedhaus

Welcome to the Feedhaus blog!

Several of us at bdg are working hard to bring you a next-generation, Web 2.0 news site that will change the way the world views news by always keeping you in the know about what's hot now. As we're preparing for launch, which is scheduled for the end of Q3 2007, we thought we'd give you a little taste of what's to come.

First, some background:

Feedhaus is a concept that I dreamed up in the middle of 2006. It spawned from my desire to have a place where I could go and find out what's going on right now so that I could "scoop" my friends and coworkers with breaking news before they found out about it. My options right now are limited. There's Google News, which is pretty good for mainstream headlines. There's Digg, which is good for niche news and speciality/weird items. There's a few creative takes on news aggregation, like Marumushi's News Map and Original Signal. There's also a slew of feed aggregators; however, all news aggregators focus on the individual (like Google Reader) and not the community (like del.icio.us).

So, what if you could combine the convenience and power of news aggregation with a user-driven folksonomy to classify the news? Then, unlike Digg and del.icio.us -- which are solely based on user input to classify and popularize information -- the relevance of user-classified news would change based on real-world events, not on Diggs or other end-user actions. And what if you could see the lifecycle of news stories waxing and waning in popularity and relevance in real-time, without ever hitting the refresh button? Enter Feedhaus. . . .

Recent changes in the way content gets delivered on the web, along with some slick technologies (Rome, Comet and Lucene to name three of them) and some creative coding by bdg-ers Chris Bucchere and Andrew Bays, make all of this possible -- even, dare I say, easy. Nearly every news site, blog and most Web 2.0 sites (including all the sites referenced in this post), expose their content through structured data feeds using RSS/RDF or Atom. Feedhaus allows users to classify feeds from any source and of any format with tags, much like del.icio.us or Flickr. But, unlike those sites, which allow users to tag static content, when you tag a feed on Feedhaus, it's as though you're tagging a living news source that's constantly growing and changing.

Imagine a tag cloud where the tags actually grow and shrink based on real-world events, all powered by background agents that are constantly checking feeds for newly added content. Then, when you click on a tag, a tag-specific page appears, showing a realtime-updated list of articles aggregated from all the feeds associated with that tag along with a Flickr photo badge and a YouTube video stream with images and video, respectively, matching that tag. Now, you're beginning to understand Feedhaus.

Here at bdg we have a lot of other ideas about features for Feedhaus and we're struggling to cut out all the fat and launch just "the right" number of features to give me -- and all our users -- exactly what they need: a single place to find out what's hot now.

If you're interested in participating in our private alpha, please e-mail us. (We won't use your e-mail address for anything other than to notify you about the beta and make other Feedhaus-related announcements.)