Despite feeds becoming a regular part of web sites, people continue to struggle with how to use them, and don’t want to have to schlep from site to site to find feeds that might interest them. Enter topic-based readers. With these services, you don’t need to seek out sites that cover the topics of interest to you. Instead, search for those topics and the service delivers what it thinks best fits your needs.

I’ve yet to find two sites offering topic-based aggregation doing things the same way. So your best bet is to try out the different services and see which suits you. The features you will most likely want to look at are topic selection, usability and “scannability.” You’ll discover that some sites are easier to use than others, while some do a better job of selecting and saving topics. The following four sites deliver content by topic to simplify your task of receiving content that interests you (Twine is another topic-specific aggregator that we’ve covered previously.)

ensembli

Your ensembli dashboard is divided into three zones: “Follow,” “Discover” and “Explore.” “Follow” lists the topics you’re following. “Discover” lists the latest articles about specific topics. You can rearrange and delete topics at will. Every headline in the “Discover” zone comes with a summary; email, Twitter and Facebook sharing options; a link to read the full story; the ability to “favorite” the article and the option to delete it. If you’re not looking for anything specific, then you might want to head to the “Explore” area for a list of hot topics and editor’s picks.

The well-organized dashboard makes it easy to navigate and use. The “Discover” section needs more rich content, as the current selections only return okay results, but the service is still new and undergoing improvement.

Evri

Evri, currently in beta, splits its contents into two main sections: one showing your current topic or collections and the other splitting the content into different types such as articles, images, videos, quotes and tweets. However, the service only offers a limited topics. For example, if you want to search for freelance-related topics, instead of retrieving articles about freelancing, Evri delivers content related to companies, brands, people and web sites.

While the service does have some conceptual topics like “small business,” “cash flow” and “email marketing,” its major focus is on people and companies.

The topic page has a cool visual that shows your current topic and its connections to other topics:

This demonstrates the limited topic selection. The “Small Business” map shows connections to companies, countries and products; nothing about finance, management or strategy. Evri is probably best suited to research on companies or individuals, not conceptual topics. It also has a few usability quirks, such as taking too many clicks to get where you want to go.

Guzzle.it

Guzzle.it is similar in approach to popurls. The aggregator posts all your topics and a handful of headlines in columns for easy scanning. Enter the keywords for your topics, and arrange the topics however you like. For trend followers, the service includes popular headlines, as well as the latest images.

The quality and accuracy of available headlines is mixed. Some articles are on target, while others don’t come close. You can’t delete any of the articles to improve your results or view more results — even though some high-quality sites might have more recent articles than those showing in the results. Guzzle.it does a good job with its organization, topics, customization and usability, but could stand improvement on the provided content. For example, the topic “writing” has results including articles on a business reporting financial losses, vintage coats, programming and Canadian town halls.

Lazyfeed

Lazyfeed provides live updates for your selected topics. The topic of “Writing” produces related subtopics of poetry, marketing, copywriting, business, books and so on, in order to narrow the topic’s results — a great feature. After browsing and discovering a topic you like, you can save the topic to receive real-time updates. When a topic receives an update, it moves to the top of your topics list. Getting around the service takes no time with its minimal design and status bar navigation.

You can block a site if you don’t like its content, but you can’t delete articles to move them out of your way. If you find a poor quality site, you can block and report the site.  Lazyfeed doesn’t like more than one word in topic titles, so instead of “social networking,” you’ll need to use “socialnetworking,” for example. Annoying, but it produces good results. You can read most articles of interest right inside Lazyfeed and share them on Twitter, Facebook or by email.

Lazyfeed has an original feature that allows you to “connect to a site.” You can connect to Twitter, Flickr, Delicious and blogs; once connected, results from those sites will start to feature in your feed. The very impressive Twitter results show hashtag topics, along with extra notes.

What content aggregator do you use? What do you like about it?

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Strands.com

I am once again overwhelmed by too much information.

And lately, I’m even overwhelmed by too many tools to access, filter and read that information or to save it for later or add it to various Web 2.0 tools.

On my browser bar alone I have my Google Reader Subscribe button and the ability to save information to Kirtsy, del.icio.us, Second Brain, Instapaper, Evernote, Tumblr, and more recently Strands and Twine.

Before I talk a little more about Strands and Twine, I have to voice a few complaints:

1. I’m getting tired of having to learn new iconography every time a new site launches and decides to create a unique set of icons to represent the same functionality found on their competitors’ sites. I would love for everyone to adopt a basic set of icons to illustrate features such as Profile, Settings, Publish, etc. so I’m not trying to figure out that that stapler icon means files. Kudos for the adoption of the RSS feed symbol. Let’s get more of those universal icons, please.
2. I’m growing weary of all this new terminology that is proprietary to a particular site. Do new companies really believe that their terminology will become the definitive words that we’ll be using 5, 10 years from now? I mean every one of them? What struck me during the demos of both Strands and Twine (which I like, by the way, so don’t let this rant confuse you), is that “strands” and “twine” both basically stand for “interests.” Why not call them “Interests”???

Phew! Okay. Got that off my chest. Now on to Strands and Twine.

Strands all categories

Passively Consuming Your Strands

Strands was developed for the general consumer of information, not the turbo-powered, obsessive info-junkie like many of us. More like your mom or dad type of consumer. But let me tell you right off the bat: while I think Strands is providing some nice functionality, even I was getting a little confused and overwhelmed by how it works.

Strands.com is fitting in between Lifestreaming where information constantly publishes without a lot of rhyme or reason and Friendfeed style aggregation where content tends to drop into a black vortex of overload. Strands is trying to let you find cool people who publish cool stuff based on your tastes – stuff you really want to learn about – quality versus quantity. The crux of Strands’ offerings is their “social recommendation technology.”

The premise of Strands is that not everyone wants to publish content but instead wants to consume good and relevant content, says Drew Olanoff, Community Manager and Evangelist for Strands.

As an avid publisher, I had a hard time wrapping my head around that, but then I had to think about my own Mom and Dad and realized that yes, there are people in this world who are not compelled to publish content online.

Strand allows you to filter the content being served up by the people you are following. You like their blog posts but not their tweets? You can flip the virtual switches to distill their content to the most consumable format based on your preferences. You can also refine the stream of content you receive by people and by categories such as bookmarks, books, events, images, movies & TV, and music.

You can also mark the content you like and dislike or save content which in turn feeds into the site’s recommendation technology to further refine the content you see.

And for those who are new to social media tools, Strands is about to offer a setup wizard to help prompt the uninitiated who want to discover the most relevant Strands for their needs. And this week, Strands announced a partnership with SkyMall – the inflight products catalog. SkyMall’s web site will integrate the “Strands Social Recommender” engine to enhance the online shopping experience and provide more relevant product suggestions to shoppers.

Twine

Recommendations to the Nth Degree

Taking recommendation technology to a whole new level, Twine calls itself the “first consumer application for the Semantic Web.” They almost lost me on that one as I still try to wrap my head around the concepts around the Semantic Web, but it sure did sound exciting.

As always, I turned to Wikipedia for a definition:

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

The bottom line here is that Twine’s technology is constantly chewing on everything you do on the site to churn out more and more refined and relevant results and recommendations.

Twine page

Twine helps you track your interests. You can join a Twine (topic-specific “group” where everyone publishes content related to that topic) and can comment on that content or you can start a Twine. As you add Twines that you want to follow, the backend recommendation system makes detailed notes about what you are selecting and begins pushing content to you on the right side of your screen. That right margin of the page is chock full of information options such as

• Recommended Twines
• Recommended Members

and as you drill deeper into a Twine, you also get recommended

• Places
• People
• Organizations
• Other tags
• and Recommended Items

All of the recommended content in the above categories shows up as tag clouds so the most relevant or extensive appear in a larger font.

Despite all of these intensely rich recommendation options, I have to admit that I didn’t even NOTICE the right margin options for more information until it was literally pointed out to me. Note to user: Don’t ignore those boxes and options on the right side of your screen when you are digging through Twine – lots of hidden treasures there for you to discover!

Because I’m an avid publisher, Twine founder Nova Spivack recommended that I publish a Public Twine. Spivack says that he has stopped publishing on other sites and now uses his Public Twine as the hub of all of his new content.

Twine as a company is looking to monetize their semantic profiling by signing up advertisers who want to develop relevant content that can be fed to consumers with what is described as laser-like precision. Consumers, says Spivack, will consume advertising if it is their content feed and related to a topic they are really interested in. Twine can be an intermediary between users and marketers with the operative word of that relationship being “relevance.” All marketing messages, of course, will be noted as such so it won’t be as if an ad were slipped into your content stream surreptitiously.

When you create a Twine, you can configure it to have blog-like features or wiki-like features, that is, either it is for you to publish exclusively such as your Public Twine or it is for the community to publish along with you. You can make a Twine, add items, invite others to participate, and manage the Twine. You can also share Twines and subscribe to Twine RSS feeds. Grab the Twine bookmarklet as well to easily add content to any of your Twines including several at once.

Strands, Twine, and Other Filters

I’m all for filtering the unmanageable onslaught of information that plagues all of us.

I believe that each of us will find the tool that is right for us and master that tool to become our ultimate filter. Strands and Twine are only two of the many options out there for this kind of filtering. I like the way recommendation technology is becoming more robust and also more mainstream as the defacto underlying functionality of these sites.

But I have to say, at some point, we’ll need filters to filter the filterers. There are many out there and many more to come. For now, I think I’m going to focus in on Twine. Now that I know a little more of what it does (and my brain and this post only scratches the surface), I’m getting excited about the possibilities.

What are you using these days to filter out the noise? And is it working?

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