Toluu Blog

We have just launched a re-aligned ‘Match’ page with a cleaner UI and greater functionality. We have also made updates to ‘Contacts’ and feed ‘Subscribers’.

We recently made major changes to the architecture of matching to make it load dramatically faster. Today we have made design and functionality improvements. The new design is simpler and cleaner which should make it easier to hone in on the people and feeds that matter to you. 

We have also introduced 3 filtering options. Now you can see your matches based on when they joined Toluu. Filtering by ‘This Month’ or ‘This Week’ shows only users who have joined in that period who match with you, surfacing fresh feeds and people. This makes matches more useful for users with many feeds or those who have been with us since the beginning.

Also new with ‘Matches’ is the ability to add a user as a contact in-line. Many of you asked for it and we listened. No more clicking through to a user’s profile to add them as a contact!

We also revamped the ‘Contacts’ view with the new UI conventions and in-line contact adding functionality. We also now show how many contacts you have.

Not to be left out, the feed ‘Subscribers’ view got some love too, it now has in-line contact functionality too.

We hope you find these improvements useful and they help you find more interesting people and feeds!

The past week we have been re-architecting our matching system to make it dramatically faster. 

When we started Toluu the matching system ran on a small set of data and, like most code running against small sets of data, it ran very fast.  However, as Toluu has grown we have had to make changes. A few weeks back we optimized the way we accessed the data in the database, this sped up the process by 10x or so. But we knew this was only a patch.  

We then began on the work we just launched. We have moved to a much more scalable system that will last for many doublings in size of the userbase. 

We are so excited about these optimizations that we will be spending the rest of this week making optimizations across the rest of the site. These optimizations will lay the groundwork for a new set of features and our growing userbase. 

All I can say is wow. Yesterday was an amazing day for Toluu, you helped us shatter every metric we track.

We launched the new subscribers and popular tabs along with some other improvements early in the day and because of the fantastic posts written about the release, the Twitter and FriendFeed discussions, and the slew of new users, yesterday was remarkable. 

We had a record number of pageviews, visitors, signups, new feeds, connections made, invites requested, and time spent on the site. All I can say is thank you.

Thank you to everyone who wrote about us, everyone who requested an invite, everyone who took the time to join and explore, everyone who added new feeds, everyone who sent in feedback, and every one of our existing users who have made the site great.

Here is the coverage that sparked the fire yesterday:

F. Pettit- Toluu Feed Page & Speed Enhancements

Billy Fairchild- Toluu Rolls Out A Slew Of New Features

J. Phil- Toluu Just Got Better: New Feed Page Views and More!

Hutch Carpenter- Subscribe or Not? Toluu Just Got Better at Helping You Decide

Sarah in Tampa- Toluu Adds More Features, Helps You Decide How to Subscribe

Nathaniel Payne- Toluu has gotten even better

Corvida- Social Media Roundup: Toluu, FriendFeed, and Twhirl Updates

Tris Hussey- Toluu cranks up the speed and let’s you check if that feed is fresh

Today we get back to working on the next great new feature and fixing the new bugs you all have found. Every new user and every new feed helps make Toluu a more useful site. It is humbling to be apart of this.

We have just rolled out 2 new views to the feed pages; a way to see popular posts & a way to see who else subscribes to that feed. The goal of these new views is to give you another way to discover interesting feeds and people.

Now, when discovering a feed for the first time you can quickly know what the feed is really about, what makes it special. The popular view provides another layer of information that you can use in deciding if a feed is right for you.

Which takes us to the subscribers view. This view is super cool, because now you can actually see, on a feed level, who is reading it. Not only do we show you the avatars and names of the other Toluu users who subscribe, but we also show their 3 most recently added feeds. This provides a fantastic way to discover new people that you may want to add as a contact or find more feeds that these people find interesting too. 

In testing, we have already added discovered many new people and feeds that were a bit hidden. These 2 new views really provide a new view into the data and pivot points to explore.

Also in this release we have added the greatly requested date stamps, improved YouTube embed compatibility, improved the loading time of the contacts page by roughly 5x, and fixed some bugs surrounding the invitation page.

Please let us know what you think and keep the ideas and suggestions coming! 

Many of us subscribe to more feeds than we can handle each day, some people love the idea of just being inundated with new information all the time, while others would prefer a more streamlined approach. Whichever you prefer it, is likely that your RSS subscriptions have ballooned beyond what you can personally manage in a given day. RSS Reset proposes you wipe your slate clean and build your subscriptions up with only the feeds you really want to read- day in and day out.

The idea for RSS Reset was born by J. Phil and Corvida, who realized that many of the feeds they subscribed to were not really contributing to the conversation, so they decided to start fresh and follow a few simple rules, mainly

1) Use aggregations as a first line of filtering; think Friendfeed feeds or Techmeme.

2) Subscribe to as many small interesting blogs as possible.

3) Read rather than skim.

Both J. Phil and Corvida have reset their RSS feeds in Toluu so you can follow which feeds they subscribe to by adding them as contacts here and here.

If you would like to participate and need your feeds reset on Toluu just send me an email to caleb {at] toluu.com

We just  rolled-out  filtering options across both the ‘Recent’ and ‘Everyone’ activity streams. You can now filter your activity stream by feeds, contacts, favorites, or see a combined view of everything. In addition to the new filters, we implemented RSS feeds for all of these views so you can repurpose the data in interesting ways.

Since the launch of the new activity page 8 days ago we have seen more and more activity on the site and as a result the stream passes by faster than ever. We wanted to make it easier to view a particular kind of activity. Want to find new and interesting people? Looking for the cream of the crop of new feeds? Want to see which feeds are gaining in popularity? We wanted the answers to these questions, that’s why we added the new filtering options.

Along with these new filtering options are 9 brand new RSS feeds for activity on Toluu. Each filtering view has its own RSS feed for your activity, you and your contacts, and even for everyone on the site. These feeds make it possible to, for example, be alerted when your friends favorite a feed or for creative developers to build plugins or widgets with the data. 

The feeds can be accessed via the RSS button in the top right of the activity page (it updates based on the activity you are viewing) or via the RSS button found in most modern browsers in the URL bar.

In testing, we have found these new filtering options to be amazingly useful in diving into the activity on the site and finding new feeds or new people, and we hope you all find them useful too! Try it out at http://www.toluu.com/activity/everyone

We are excited to let you know that embedded YouTube videos can now be played right from Toluu feed pages. Now when viewing a feed that has a YouTube video embedded you can simply click play!

We have been finding more and more blogs that are embedding YouTube into their posts and so we decided it was a great time to get those videos playing on the Toluu feed pages.

We have just launched Twitter integration and a redesigned activity stream. You can now connect with your Twitter account so every time you add a new feed to Toluu, via the site or the bookmarklet, your friends on Twitter can know what great taste in blogs you have. We have also redesigned the activity stream to make it more scannable and give the important information more breathing room. There is also a new tab system that allows you to switch between the recent activity of you and your contacts, but also see the activity happening across the entire Toluu universe. Let’s dig a little deeper.

The Twitter integration makes it super easy to share with your friends who are not on Toluu yet what new feeds you are finding interesting. One of the great bits about the Twitter integration is the ability to customize the message that gets sent to Twitter. Many services simply send a canned message, however we felt this wasn’t want people really wanted, what people really want is to have control over what is said on their Twitter stream. We are excited to see how you express yourselves with this feature. We have also added little details to the implementation such as checking that your Twitter username and password are correct before saving your settings, so there won’t be any head scratching as to why your activity isn’t showing up in your stream. 

After using the activity page on Toluu for the past month with real data we wanted to see if we could make it more readable. We wanted to put more focus on the important information and remove the visual clutter. We now use the full size avatar photos which makes it easier to at a glance see who has been recently active. We also made the activity entries themselves more balanced and legible. Adding the ability to see the activity across all of Toluu makes it possible for new users to get a better sense of what feeds are gaining traction as well as find individuals who they may want to add as a contact. 

With all of these new links being posted to Twitter we realized many of the people who would click on the links would not be Toluu users, and may have never heard of Toluu. Today we are also rolling out a feature that will help orient new visitors to Toluu. When unlogged in visitors land on a Toluu feed page they will see a simple module that will give them a 1 sentence explanation of Toluu as well as a way to get an invite. 

Needless to say, we are super excited about these new features and how they will help you share your activity better. Making it easier to discover new and interesting feeds as well as connect with your friends in new ways. Please try out the new functionality and leave a comment below with your thoughts we would love to hear what you think.

We have just rolled out 2 updates to every feed page that make it easier to get to the source content, continuing our effort to open up Toluu.

When you visit any feed in Toluu you will now notice that it is RSS enabled with the original feed RSS or Atom and that the title of the feed links back to the site. Now, if you want to see more than just the 5 post previews we display you can click the title and be taken directly to the original source site. 

This is the first of many enhancements made possible by our infrastructure changes we have made over the past month as discussed in yesterdays post; 60,000 duplicate feeds removed.

One of our core beliefs is that Toluu should be as open as possible. These improvements to the feed page are another small step towards that goal. While this will most likely lead to more people clicking away from Toluu than before, to explore the original site, we believe it is the right thing to do for the ecosystem at large. Letting you decide what you do with the content you discover through Toluu.

Please feel free to leave a comment using our new Disqus comment system, letting us know other ways you want to see us open up.