Experimenting with myFeedz from Adobe Labs

Adobe Labs announced their latest experimental web service last week, an online social newspaper called myFeedz. So far my experiments with the service have been mostly positive, but it's fair to say that this is very much a beta, or technology preview if you will, of things that may be possible. While I'm not rushing into production with myFeedz there are enough interesting things that my non-programmer brain can wrap itself around to keep playing.

So what's a social newspaper? Here's how Adobe describes it:

With myFeedz, you can:

Import RSS feeds of your favorite websites or from your favorite RSS reader.
Browse articles by tags, sort them by relevance or by date.
Read, rate and tag articles.
Find out the popular stories of the moment.
Save articles for later reading.
Search new articles.
Export RSS feeds for your topics of interest.

The idea here is that the more you follow tags of interest--or your readers follow the tags you display--the higher the relevance ranking and greater importance is applied to the tags. Conceptually this means you have a live service working for you to sort through all the information floating about and display in a graphical way what you and like-minded people find important.

Cool. Data visualization is one of my new passions, and I think we're only in the Model T era of what's to come as new technologies--and more importantly--new ways to show and discover information come online. There's a real convergence just around the corner in the area of web services and visual experiences for viewers that will absolutely rock the world.

Really.

So the chance to build up something like this by providing RSS feeds that can be connected to tags visually, then displayed visually, is something that appeals to me and will to lots of others I suspect.

There are some loose bits around the edges of Adobe's offering but it will be interesting to see how things develop. Yesterday, for instance, I was receiving dating advertisements on my myFeeds home page from a site in London. Odd, since all the feeds and tags I added were strictly education related.

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing what myFeedz can do. In my first run-through I've created a tag cloud on educational technology related topics. You can see that experiment and watch as it unfolds at the myFeedz Educational Technology Demo that I created.