Mar

26

Toluu Review

March 26, 2008 |

toluunormalI got an invitation to try out toluu a few days ago (thanks Louis!) and after I first went to the site, I have to admit that I had absolutely no idea what was going on until I read the FAQ.

Basically, it’s the new defunct ‘Share Your OPML’ with a little social-network and a recommendation engine attached. You can upload your OPML file from, for example, Google Reader, and toluu will recommend you similar feeds and also match you up with other users that have similar interests (you can also add feeds one by one, but that is a bit cumbersome).

At the end of the day, its a very sophisticated recommendation engine based on what you and your friends read - and it does a pretty good job at making good recommendations. I for one have found a number of feeds and blogs that I didn’t know about (like I need more reading material - but that’s a different story).

As always, here are a few observations:

  1. Apparently I’m a 101% match with MG Siegler of Parislemon. That’s strange, especially because I’m only a 46% match with myself… (see screenshots at the bottom of this post)
  2. It would be nice to have the ability to subscribe to new feeds right in my favorite RSS reader. However, as it is right now, I can add them to my toluu feeds, which doesn’t really help me much. You can export your feeds as an OPML file, but that seems cumbersome. The only feed coming out of toluu I have found so far is for friend activity, which really isn’t that interesting.
  3. I like the ‘recommend’ functionality - nice and simple - just like the rest of the site design.
  4. The default setup makes toluu send you an email every time someone in your network subscribes to a new feed. You can turn it off, but until then, it can get very annoying very fast.
  5. The whole site design is very elegant and simple.

But overall, I can’t help but think that toluu is mostly a feature and not so much a whole application right now. It fills a niche that Google Reader has left open and does so very well. Overall, though, I’m not sure I will be heading back to the site regularly to find new feeds. It’s simply easier to scan what others are sharing on FriendFeed or other aggregators.

sieglertoluu toluumyself

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Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. David on March 27, 2008 10:04 am

    That’s funny, I had a similar experience when I first got on. After playing around with it I found I really liked how it was implemented and I’m looking forward to the service growing so I can get more recommendations. I threw together a Toluu Badge Widget for self hosted Wordpress bloggers if they want to promote their Toluu account. http://knightknetwork.com/2008/03/27/toluu-badge-widget/

    FYI. I couldn’t comment using Firefox. I’m no expert but it looks like the friendfeed “liked” link is missing it’s /a

  2. Frederic on March 28, 2008 12:03 am

    Thanks for the feedback David - I will be looking into the comment issue.

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