LinkedFeed's blog

The climate is hammering hot here in France as we keep on working this summer while the ladies show their bikinis on the beach. There has not been a lof of talk from us lately (well actually there was none), as we paused most of the development to prepare for future advancements - yes, we will reveal what this "revolution" was about... some day ;). Our goal is to provide you with the best social RSS reader, and we figured we had to focus 100% on this and let the NetVibes-looking features aside for a moment.

Please please please, tell us what you would like to see added or improved on LinkedFeed to make your feeds reading the best possible experience!

In the meanwhile, you can see the feeds reader in LinkedFeed now perfectly suits your browser and dynamically adapts to resizing. We love it. Also (but it's not that new) we have added support for podcasting as well as videocasting. Try and add podcasts and you'll see. Don't forget ratings!

Cheers and all the best dives to those of you heading to the sand! GC

Although it is described by Web 2.0 pundits as a personalized Ajax homepage, we consider LinkedFeed as being first a smart social RSS reader. Because we had decided to make it an Ajax-driven application, we spent months developping a front-end which was close to what other fantastic pages looked like (I think of Live.com, NetVibes,...). We are still far from approaching these great products on their ground - we're working on it ;), but now we believe we have added value as an RSS reader:

The new RSS reader we unveil today is very close to what you'd find on a typical Windows/Mac/Linux application, plus an exclusive social network and IA engine. You have your feeds listed on the left side (with tabs as their categories, for now), related feeds ("Linked Feeds"), statistics, and tools (including the long-awaited OPML import !).

You also will find public ratings, with the possibility to know how many people appreciated or not the piece you are reading or listening. This helps LinkedFeed suggest the best feeds and good items related to the topics you like or topics close to the item you are reading or listening. We say "listening" because the LinkedFeed reader now also has embedded podcast support. If you suscribe feeds with enclosures, the reader will display them as download attachments, or will display an MP3 player to let you listen to the podcast.

We'd have much to say about this feature, we are really excited about this release, but we want to let you find out how incredibly great it is to use, compared to what existed so far.

Then we will release a great tool that will make LinkedFeed much more powerfull than ever before!

Please receive our apology for this two days outage. Our servers went down on Saturday, 6pm (GMT+1), and we couldn't access them until our host intervenes this afternoon. That is an occasion to give you some news though.

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Here we are back with a brand new header, designed to help you use LinkedFeed better : new intuitive tabs, LinkedFeed first stats, embedded login... but the true LinkedFeed revolution is coming!

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Today we updated LinkedFeed with huge improvements in reliability, performances and features. Please tell us what you think.

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While working on the most important update since we released LinkedFeed, we updated the application with a lot of core optimization, and a few demanded features. First of all, there is now a contextual menu that gives you access to a "refresh" button to refresh only the content of a specific window. Simply click on the arrow at the top right of the window, and you will see this new menu displayed:

This is also the menu that is now to be used to access the options. As you can see, we improved their graphics as well:

You know you can fold and unfold windows on LinkedFeed. But how do you know when new items showed up once a bloc is folded? To solve this issue, we added a visual help. If the title is in normal type, there is nothing new to read. However there are unread items, the title will turn bold and the number of unread items will be written between brackets:

Is it helpful enough?

Thank you Dion for listing LinkedFeed amongst your personnal list of the 'Most Promising Web 2.0 software of 2006'! That is a true honor. Dion Hinchcliffe runs the must-read Web 2.0 blog and he is certainly one of the (if not the) most literate fellow when it comes to Web 2.0 applications. In his 'non-official and totally subjective' list, Dion named LinkedFeed as the runners-up behind the neat PageFlakes project, in his 'Ajax Start Pages' category.

Occasion is given then to say that, incredibly enough, we had absolutely no intention to make LinkedFeed an Ajax Start Page when we started the project back in mid-2005! We worked hard on the RSS social network part, which is 90% of LinkedFeed, with the idea of creating a smart RSS reader. Then only about a month before the release, when we started working on the user interface side, it became obvious we had to create an AJAX interface. That is why we are still missing so many cool features of other Ajax start pages, but that is also why we are confident in improving it fast Many hidden features of the social network have still to show, and we have lots of ideas for the Ajax part. Many of them thanks to your precious feedback.

Cheers!

You've obviously seen it: LinkedFeed has new graphics! But before we go back to this, please note that you can now transfer feeds from tab to tab. This was asked by many yesterday when we released the tabs feature, and there it is. Simply edit the window and select which tab it should be transfered to. The window will vanish, gone to it's new destination:

One thing we forgot to say yesterday is that the items and feeds suggestions ("Linked Feeds") are based on your tabs content. So if you have a "hockey" tab for instance, the "Linked Feeds" module should suggest you suscribe to hockey news sources you didn't have or read hockey-related news that may not even be on any of your feeds (provided that there are other hockey fans on LinkedFeed, which is not that sure yet :-)). It seems to be quite a cool feature since it highly improves the accuracy of the suggestions, but we need your feedback on this!

Also as you may have seen already, we also solved issues with the windows displacements (which happened mostly on IE but also in some circumstances on Firefox) and we once again optimized the engine to make it all smoother.

But back to the graphics. It is not yet fully implemented. We have new graphics, obviously for the windows, but also for the "add content" menu as well as the weather forecast module. We still need to update the tabs design, improve the windows content and forms, etc., etc. A new French company called ALR du Web is helping us on this, but since we will implement optional skins in the future, feel free to provide us with your own graphic ideas.

Cheers!

After days spent on code optimization to smoothen your LinkedFeed experience, we added today a much desired function: customizable tabs. You will now be able to organize your feeds by topics (or whatever) in various tabs so that you don't have to face dozens and dozens of feeds on a single page.

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After a short blackout last night due to a failed update, we're finally back on track this morning, and decided to release the update "when it's fixed"

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We have been experiencing issues with a recent update (the addition of customizable tabs). Please forgive the interruption, we will come back as soon as possible.

Some of you may have noticed the LinkedFeed button on the right side of this blog . It automatically adds the blog's RSS feed to the LinkedFeed page of the one who clicks on it. Here is how to make up one for your own feed.

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You have been numerous to test the very first version of LinkedFeed. Thank you so much for all your precious feedback! We are working hard to fulfill your wildest dreams on what LinkedFeed can be. Here are a few things we will be releasing shortly.

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LinkedFeed is not your ordinary AJAXed homepage, it is an automated and customizable information social network. The more you use it, the most accurate news it brings to you and people sharing your interests.

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