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Welcome!

Welcome to Feed Foo, the answer to feed overload.

What does it do in 30 words or less?

It filters low-quality feed entries, so you don’t have to, and helps you make the most of your feed reading time by suggesting related feeds. More to follow.

Say What?

In terms of applications that you’re perhaps familiar with, you can think of Feed Foo as a combination of some of the features of applications like Slashdot or Reddit or Digg (which let you filter stories or comments based on the ratings other users have given), and features such as Netflix’s ‘Other Movies You Might Enjoy’ or Amazon’s ‘customers who bought this item also bought…’, as applied to feeds and feeds entries instead of movies, web pages, and books. That is, it aims to alleviate information overload by filtering lower quality feed entries, and assist in information discovery by exploiting knowledge about other Feed Foo users to help you find new and interesting feeds. That’s the current vision, at least.

How does it work?

You fetch your feeds (RSS or Atom) from Feed Foo URLs instead of from the original location, using your normal feedreading program, and Feed Foo filters out the entries that have an average rating less than the default threshold that you’ve defined. It gives you the entries in a standard format, with the addition of two small buttons for rating an entry up or down (or neither). Ratings are assigned by you and other users of Feed Foo, and the average rating is the average for all Feed Foo users. And that’s about all there is to it!

For example, if you don’t have much time for reading feeds, you can set your default threshold to 5 , and you’ll only see feed entries that have an average rating of 5 or higher. You don’t have to submit a rating for all or even most of the entries. It takes a second or less to rate an entry, and you don’t have to go to any other page or do anything except click a button at the bottom of each entry. If each user rates just a few entries a day, with enough users, we still have enough information to be able to tell the good from the bad and filter accordingly.

What is your target audience?

Feed Foo is designed for feed power users. If you subscribe to many feeds and don’t always have time to read all the entries/articles in all your feeds, and you wish there were a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, then you are definitely in the target audience. If you subscribe to only a few feeds (e.g., less than 20) and find that you have plenty of time for reading the feeds that you’re subscribed to, then you don’t need Feed Foo, but it still might be able to introduce you to some interesting new feeds based on other users that have similar reading habits and tastes as you do.

Great, how do I get started?

After making sure your feedreader is supported, here is the process:

1. Sign up for a free account, which requires only that you choose a username and password and give us an email address. We’ll send you a confirmation email immediately.
2. Click the confirmation link in the email to activate your account. Your account is now ready to go.
3. Use the OMPL converter to convert all your feed URLs to their Feed Foo equivalents. The converter will convert all your feeds at once, and you can resave the file and then reimport them into whatever feedreader program you use.
4. That’s it. Your initial threshold is set to 0, which means you’ll see everything that was rated up at least as much as it was rated down. Since nothing is filtered until an entry has at least a few ratings, you probably won’t notice much difference until Feed Foo gets some more users. When that happens, you can change your default viewing threshold if you decide you’d like more or less entries, and you can then view recommendations and more.

This sounds like a lot of work, but you can be setup and reading your feeds in less than 3 minutes.

Do you ... / can it do ... / is program xyz supported?

Please see the FAQ for more questions, and if your question isn’t answered there, email us.

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