As of today, my OPML is shared. Online. Dynamically.
No thanks to Google Reader, though. Thanks to Toluu.
I got my invite code today and although my first reaction was: “Hang on, what was this about again?” I quickly started using the site and its handy bookmarklet.
What it is
Toluu makes it easy for you to share your feed subscriptions and to discover other ones. These, they claim, aren’t based on mere popularity or sponsorship deals, but on “some crazy math to find others in the system who have similar tastes as you”.
Cool enough.
What you get
Not a lot. That is: Toluu isn’t a feed reader, not an aggregator per se, just a place where your feeds are grouped online and where you can discover new content. Toluu suggests a couple feeds you might like (called Fantastic Feeds) but they’re not intrusive. Nothing on Toluu is, in fact.
How it works
Easy enough. Sign up, upload your OPML and you’re done. If you want to sync with your feed reader, you’ll have to use their bookmarklet.
It’d be nicer if you could tell Google Reader itself, for instance, to do that, but still. Add to that the integration with Twitter and you get a pretty easy yet fully automated system that publishes your new subscriptions and shares them with the world.
Nice.
Verdict
Simple, not intrusive and apart from a few (classic) glitches with my OpenID, it just works. Apple style, almost. If you want to try it, I have three invites left. Contact me I have no invites left.
You know how.
Tags: google, networking, opml, reader, sharing, toluu, twitter
13 June 2008 at 11:17 pm
May I have an invite, kind Belgian?
13 June 2008 at 11:35 pm
Consider it done, stout Englishman.
13 June 2008 at 11:56 pm
Thanks for the great post Nils. It makes me so happy to hear you are finding the simplicity of the site attractive. We want to keep Toluu focused on helping you discover feeds and sharing them with people you care about. We put many constraints on ourselves about the features we roll out so that it doesn’t become a mish-mash of features that are not really that useful. Sometimes less is better.
14 June 2008 at 12:18 am
Thanks Caleb. I’m sure a lot of people would cry: “Show me the money!” as they’ve been doing with the likes of Twitter etc. but to me an idea like Toluu, it’s modest rollout approach, and its clean, simple and useful interface make it a service such as I haven’t seen in a while.
I hope you get what you want out of it, that it stays up when under pressure, and that if you do roll out new features, which I’m sure you will have to eventually, they’ll show the same restraint and value to the users.
Cheers.
17 June 2008 at 8:20 am
Leo and Amber talked about Toluu on the last net@nite. Weird name.
17 June 2008 at 10:31 am
Yeah, name’s a bit off perhaps. Doesn’t even seem to refer to anything. But then again, Google? Yahoo? We’ll just see how this takes off. So far, I’m liking it a lot.
21 June 2008 at 11:55 pm
[...] Nils kindly gave me an invite to Toluu and I immediately proceeded to exporting my OPML file from NetNewsWire, joining Toluu and importing my OPML. [...]
25 June 2008 at 10:44 am
[...] Share OPML, Finally [...]
8 November 2008 at 6:36 pm
[...] with newcomer Toluu to the feed scene, there’s already been more talk about fresh starts and cleaning out feed [...]