NewsGator Launches Recommended Feeds Based on Attention Data

Ever since news aggregators emerged on the web, they’ve been aiming to provide recommendations for the ideal news to read. The trend has recently resurfaced with new tools, user feedback and communities, all of which provide an ample amount of data that can be used to infer certain things about the popularity of a given news item.

NewsGator’s on the web RSS Reader, which includes FeedDemon and NetNewsWire under its umbrella, has teamed up with SenseArray to provide suggestions to its users. SenseArray filters through NewsGator’s feeds, and sorts them according to relevance based on the number of times users click on links, tag items, or forward articles. Direct user feedback, which can now be provided on NewsGator items with thumbs up/down voting, is being incorporated into the new SenseArray filters for suggestion purposes as well.

At first glance, it didn’t appear as though the new recommendations would be tied to the new increased support for APML (attention data), which NewsGator just released yesterday. But in corresponding with the NewsGator team, I found out that suggestions and your APML will be linked together from the very beginning. According to NewsGator, “whenever a user clips, tags, emails, or does any other action, we store a weighted score. We use that to create an attention score for the feed in APML, and we also use those scores like ratings in the collaborative filter.” via [mashable]

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Facebook Sandbox Now Open to Developers

Changing the design of a user profile isn’t usually a terrible big deal, but when it comes to Facebook, there’s a lot more at stake than just the rearrangement of a user photo and their basic information. Developers have begun to make a living on the ability for Facebook users to share more content on their profile pages, and the third-party developer economy has a lot riding on the way in which users interact within their Facebook profiles.

So Facebook has been keeping the developers, and the rest of the world, updated on their ongoing changes in regards to the user profile redesign. The latest–Facebook has opened up the beta sandbox for the new profile design. This gives developers an chance to test out their apps on the new profile layout before it’s implemented across the site next month.   via[mashable]

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A User Generated Guinness Book of World Records!

Some random things, people have an affinity for. Like world records. Were you the 5th grader sitting in the corner during free hour, flipping through the pics in the Guinness Book of World Records? I was. And if you’re anything like me, you also play Solitaire Vegas style so you can beat your own top score (I actually had a screen shot of my top Super Solitaire score from a few weeks ago, but lucky for you, I can’t find it).

So when a new website called WhatsYourRecord popped up in the Mashable inbox, I couldn’t help but check it out. It’s a user-generated almanac of random, and not-so-random records. There are contests, too, but WhatsYourRecord is out to become the ultimate leaderboard. Whether you can hold your breath for 3 minutes or can belch the alphabet 4 times in a row, WhatsYourRecord has a place for you.

Once you’ve posted your record, others can add their records for the same task as well. Users can also add attempts, results, and comments, which are nice ways of gaining a community feel for the site. Continue exploring the site by checking out the related records, see where on the globe the records are coming from, and add votes and ratings for records and comments.

You can event create group records for various categories and record sub-topics, which is a good section of the site to layer in some in-person contests or meetups. I don’t see a related Facebook app, but I think there should be one of those, too.

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Facebook Beacon Haters Get Finally Their Own Plugin!

Facebook Beacon has caught a lot of flack since its release, to the dismay of many advertisers out there. While the backlash hasn’t been as noticeable as some of Facebook’s other releases, there are still a good number of folks out there that would prefer not see their faces on other people’s feeds as part of an advertisement.

My Data is My Data has beta-launched a browser plugin that’ll alert you when Facebook Beacon’s system tries to make a connection with a partner site, so you can determine when and where you’d like to share your third-party purchasing activity with your Facebook friends. While there are already a number of privacy options inserted into Facebook, and even more services out there that will rid you of cookie problems all together, Facebook Beacon’s mainstream press presence in itself may help My Data is My Data gain a good amount of users based on principle alone.

The plugin is still a bit buggy, but the team is working on it. Given Facebook’s restrictions to curb newsfeed abuse, and the limited growth of Beacon, there will surely be more tweaking on Facebook’s end in order to ensure that end users are more or less happy, whether this is through voluntary manipulation or oblivious bliss, with the Beacon’s implementation.

Via[mashable]

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