myFeedz Development Blog

myFeedz public beta is here and we are ready to accept more registrations. So, if you have been happily using myFeedz for the duration of the private beta, send your friends over to the myfeedz homepage and we’ll hook them up with an account.

Over the last couple of months we have been improving our secret sauce and we also added a ton of features like:

• complex tag queries
• feeds for everything that looks like a list
• a homepage that actually gives out useful articles
• usability and layout fixes

Searches

One of the most important things we added is complex tag searches. These are queries for multiple tags that you can save in your tagcloud for fast access. So, let’s say you want to get news about apple, but don’t really care about ipods (crazy, huh?). You just search for apple -ipod and then click “add to my saved searches”. Of course, saved searches (like all the lists in myFeedz) also export RSS so you can use to keep an eye on things. Searches currently possible with our current implementation:

apple AND microsoft -zune

david AND "ruby on rails"

Currently, tags containing spaces must be placed between quotes in the search box.

We’ll detail more about the rest of the features over the next few days. Until then, play around, spread the word and let us know how you’re using myFeedz.

Relevance

We also improved the relevance algorithms a great deal, so we hopefully clean up most of the junk for you and let you see only the important stuff. Also, we viciously refactored the database content, so now we have way less duplicated data (mis-spelled tags, etc).

Currently, we get back pretty relevant results, and also do a good job at cleaning up duplicate posts. We also created a lot of tools to help us tweak the algorythms as the system is running, so as to increase elevance when the parameters change (number of active users, number of aggregated feeds).

Coming up

In the next weeks, we will keep a close eye on your feedback, during the public beta phase. We will also be concentrating on how we can integrate stuff that is already build in our system to existing weblogs, in the form of API integrations. Stay tuned!

Andrei, Beje, Cristi and Tase