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Business Feedhaus

meebo launches games!

meebo_games.PNGmeebo, the multi-band, web-based instant messaging site, just rolled out a host of games that you can play with your IM buddies on any network: AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk or ICQ.

Their platform is open too, so, following in the footsteps of companies like Facebook, I expect to see developers flocking to the site to build applications targeting their million+ unique user per day audience.

meebo launched a handful of communication apps (including voice and video chat) a few weeks back when they first opened their API.

Of course feedhaus is also jumping on the embedded widget bandwagon, having released our widget for Facebook over a month ago. We’re planning a meebo widget launch one week from today and and an Open Social launch in Q1 of 2008.

Update: Michael Arrington just added his take on the meebo games launch over on Tech Crunch.

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Feedhaus

Introducing the feedhaus Facebook widget

We’re very happy to announce that Facebook has approved the feedhaus widget for inclusion in their application directory. Right now the widget is pretty limited — it just lets you add one of your tag clouds to your profile. In the future, we plan to support adding multiple tag clouds and sharing stories and tags with your Facebook friends. But for now, the widget is fun way to show your online compadres what your interests are in current events, celebrity gossip, tech/gadget news, etc.

Enjoy, but enjoy responsibly. Facebook can be addictive — so remember to do some live, in-person networking with your real friends and family members and try not to sink all your free time into online social networking. As a fellow Facebook addict, I implore you to do as I say, not as I do! 🙂

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Feedhaus

feedhaus sponsors MashMeet DC

We’re pleased to announce that we’re sponsoring DC’s first MashMeet, an event designed to bring DC’s best Web 2.0 startups together for a night of social networking (the in-person variety, not the online kind).

Here are the details:

MashMeet DC

7:00 – 10:00 PM, December 7th 2007

MEZÈ, 2437 18th St. NW, Washington, DC

The event is open to all and no RSVP is required. Hope to see you there!

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Feedhaus

Charles Knight’s Christmas List

feedhaus_public_alphaI’ve very pleased to announce that feedhaus was listed among the Top Five Web Applications that Charles Knight wants for Christmas. Actually, there are eight, but we’re still pleased that we made the list.

Charles runs a site called Alt Search Engines, which is part of the Read/WriteWeb blog network. In my own words, it’s a site that proves that there’s life after Google.

In their words:

“The unique approach of AltSearchEngines is to expand coverage of search engines to include the hundreds of alternative / niche search engines. While the editorial attitude will not be “anti-Google”, it will certainly be “pro-alternative search engines” — a showcase of cutting edge innovation. Our goal for AltSearchEngines is to make it the definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines — over 1,000 of them!

Our motto: “The most wonderful search engines you’ve never seen.”

AltSearchEngines is edited by Charles Knight, a respected industry analyst and former SEO from Charlottesville, Virginia.”

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Feedhaus

feedhaus Featured on Robert Scoble’s Video Blog

Robert Scoble and I had a great talk the other day. Robert, an avid feed consumer, was an excellent critic of the site — this video will give you an idea of what features we’ll be adding in the near future, many of which were based on his suggestions. Enjoy!

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Feedhaus

Feedhaus reviewed by KillerStartups.com

We posted our first press release this week, announcing the availability of our public alpha. In response, we picked up lots of new registered users along with hundreds of new tags and feeds, including our first non-American feed content (26 Noticias from Argentina).

In response to the press release, we were reviewed by KillerStartups.com and they had nothing but great things to say about the service, including one person’s comment that:

“the only thing impeding Feedhaus from becoming a very successful service is its publicity.”

So, fans of feedhaus, please continue spreading the word!

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Business Feedhaus

Feedhaus Launches Public Alpha to Deliver Real-time Personalized News, Images and Video

Feedhaus announced today that it has released its social news site into public alpha to deliver real-time news, images and videos that are personally relevant.

Leveraging the power of news feeds and the flexibility of user-generated tags, Feedhaus offers a unique, real-time view of today’s hottest digital media including personalized online news items, images and videos. It gives people the ability to tag and follow their favorite RSS or ATOM feeds from news sites or blogs in real-time so that they can be the first to know about breaking news.

Feedhaus is a powerful new real-time social media website that aggregates content from thousands of user-submitted feeds and tags, offering a never-before-seen mashup of social feed aggregation, user-generated tagging, social networking and rich personalization. Following an extensive private alpha, Feedhaus is now available to the general public, providing for the first time a place to filter out and discover “what’s hot now” across thousands of content sources and topics of general or personal interest.

“Until now, I couldn’t find a good way to keep up with the wealth of news, blogs and other content sources on the internet,” said Chris Bucchere, founder, President and CEO at Feedhaus. “Feedhaus gives you the power to tag feed-based content and design your own ‘My Feedhaus’ pages that deliver specific, personalized news, images and videos to you exactly the way you want them, in real-time.”

Invented and developed by a team of enterprise software veterans with deep internet and intranet portal experience, Feedhaus is led by CEO, President and founder Chris Bucchere, formerly Lead Engineer at Plumtree Software, the market-leading enterprise portal software company that was acquired by BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) in 2005.

Privately held and personally funded, Feedhaus was built by a small team of developers in a matter of months using open source Java technologies such as Rome, Lucene and Apache Tomcat along with advanced Javascript libraries to enable real-time publishing of news, images and video via an Ajax-like technology called Comet.

“Ajax has its place in the industry and we use it throughout the site,” says Feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. “However, Comet allows developers to provide real-time updates to tags and detail pages without any user intervention, providing a whole new twist to our Rich Internet Application (RIA).”

This real-time updating technology, which Feedhaus has dubbed “ActiveCloud (TM),” shows tags pulsating and growing in size when they’re active and shaking and shrinking when activity slows down, giving readers perspective on what topics are currently newsworthy along with a “top story” news ticker to show current breaking news updates. Feedhaus also captures a daily news snapshot, allowing readers to drag a slider bar backwards in time and find out what made the news yesterday, last week, last month or beyond.

Feedhaus also provides a rich set of tools to allow you to click and drag tags to create your own personalized feed-driven news site. Known as “My Feedhaus,” this part of the site gives readers the ability to target and follow only the topics in which they are interested.

Feedhaus already offers integration with the popular social networking site Facebook, allowing Feedhaus readers who are also Facebook users to share tag clouds on their Facebook profiles. More social networking features, including the ability to track view and track other people’s public ActiveCloud (TM) tag clouds, are being planned for an upcoming release.

About Feedhaus

Feedhaus is a privately-held company dedicated to providing real-time, personalized content from a wide variety of feeds, tagged and filtered down to only “what’s hot now” for a set of personalized topics. Feedhaus users engage in an intuitive experience of submitting and tagging feeds and narrowing their interests to only those topics that reflect their passions. Be the first to know at http://www.feedhaus.com or send an email to [email protected] for more information.

Feedhaus is a trademark of bdg, llc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective holders.

Categories
Feedhaus

Make feedhaus Your Own

The feedhaus team here at bdg is very pleased to announce that we’ve added personalization to feedhaus!

The new section of the site — called “my feedhaus” — gives you the ability to organize the news as you see fit. Choose from the hundreds of tags available to create as many of your own “mini” tag clouds as you like and then drag and drop them to organize the page the way you like it.

Like the main tag cloud, your personal tag clouds are also “live” so that as the news changes, you’ll always be the first to know.

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Feedhaus

feedhaus Now Supported by Ads

You may notice that the detail pages are now ad-supported. I would have implemented this weeks ago, but Google was very slow to approve our AdSense account.

We’re not trying to make a killing here — in fact our first goal is just to cover the cost of hosting. . . .

We also implemented Google Analytics so we can track site usage.

Right now the ads aren’t targeting themselves correctly — apparently that takes 48 hours to kick in, so stay tuned.

Categories
Feedhaus

feedhaus Now on New Hardware

In response to some complaints from my hosting company and registrar that we were using too much CPU and bandwidth, I’ve moved feedhaus from a virtual dedicated server to a dedicated server.

I think Lucene was the culprit — as FUD was indexing feeds’ articles, Lucene was consuming WAY too much CPU. Anyway, after a 24 FUDless hours, FUD is happily chugging away to bring you new stories from the 70+ feeds we now have in feedhaus.

I’m very happy to say that I was able to move feedhaus and FUD over to the new hardware with only 30 minutes of web site downtime. W00t!

This incident led me to thinking a bit about scaling feedhaus. My fears about the scalability of cometd/long-polling are probably unwarranted. What I should really worry about is FUD. I think ultimately FUD needs to be separated out from the web server machines so that it doesn’t interfere with web site performance. Furthermore, I think the feed table should probably be broken into segments and there should be a new FUD process instantiated for every 100 (or so) feeds.

I guess FUD and I will cross that bridge when we get to it . . . but for now, performance is snappy as ever AND you’re getting your news in near-realtime. Enjoy!