Feedlooks is a tremendous RSS and Twitter aggregation platform, battle-tested by thousands of responsive users. It’s been a remarkable ride thus far.

Alas, due to my involvement with other projects, I won’t be able to continue Feedlooks’s development. There’s tremendous room for growth, and some killer ideas on the back-burner. So I’m looking for a new home for Feedlooks.

There are hundreds of thousands of feeds in our database, all monitored and updated by a relentless homegrown crawler.

In its 15+ months of development, Feedlooks’s infrastructure has benefited from the constant feedback of our users, leading to an enormous degree of feed compatibility.

By design, Feedlooks was built to be cross-browser compatible. That means for every tiny new feature added, a full cross-browser test was run to ensure everything looked and behaved as planned.

Aside from its solid infrastructure, Feedlooks has also introduced some really novel and non-trivial features, including the ability to display feed contents in their original format (by means of a proprietary proxy), and a custom URL shortener that displays a Feedlooks advertisement (the shortener is used whenever users share an article within Feedlooks):

http://flks.co/1ihent

If you’re interested in adopting it, please contact me at arturadib@gmail.com.

A quick note for users with more subscriptions than they can handle:

You can now move your favorite feeds to the top of the list, so that when you check your new posts they come up prioritized, i.e. on top of all the others. It’s a simple feature, but very handy - after all, we all have our pet feeds!

To use it, click on the ‘Feed options’ menu (upside-down triangle) to the right of the desired feed, and choose ‘Move feed to top’.  You can use the same menu to undo this action (‘Restore feed position’).

As usual, don’t hesitate to leave us a message if you run into any kind of difficulties.

Enjoy!

-Artur

Greetings Feedlookers,

As you may have noticed, our main interface (Home window) has changed considerably. The main goal was to create a more intuitive experience, while also paving the way for some major features coming up in the near future.

The largest change is moving all the control buttons (New, Archives, Add feed, filters, etc) to the left pane. The right pane is now used exclusively to display content.

You will also notice that the New posts option now falls back to recent (last 24h) posts, in case there are no new items since you last checked (with the due alert, of course). This replaces that large blank screen with the sad face, and hopefully leads to a richer experience for new users.

Stay tuned for more exciting changes in the pipeline, and as usual, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line with your feedback.

-Artur

Twitter is a young, skyrocketing platform, so you can imagine the kinds of challenges they must be facing in order to handle the exponential growth of users and Tweets.

Accordingly, they have recently made some internal changes to their platform that affects how clients identify the uniqueness of a Tweet.  Most Twitter clients were affected by this change in one way or another.

One consequence of this change for Feedlooks users is that you will likely see some (probably the last 20) old Tweets in your timeline repeated.

I’m really sorry about this inconvenience - the repeats should happen only once.

PS: Please don’t hesitate to contact us if the repeats happen more than once (there’s a contact form under “More” in the Feedlooks toolbar).

-Artur

Today I’m very excited to make public a major revamp of our web app - I can’t remember the last time we have released so many amazing features in one shot.

The first and most noticeable feature was introduced in response to two common user feedbacks: (1) that the snippets were too short to know what a post is about, and (2) that posts take too long to load.

Our response to these concerns is a two-click feature, which we believe dramatically enhances the overall user experience: when you click on a post once, instead of going immediately to the site of origin, you now get a longer snippet of the post. And while you are reading the snippet, Feedlooks is automatically preloading the post content in the background, so that if you decide to read the post in full by clicking on it again, most of the content will already be available in your browser. Streamlined, fast, awesome.

Next up, also thanks to several user requests, is keyboard shortcuts. Go ahead and use those arrow keys to navigate through your posts, hit Enter to open it, and Esc to bring back the Home window. Additional shortcuts are available; you can get the full low-down by looking for the corresponding question under “More > FAQ”.

You will also notice that sharing is now easier than ever. When you click on a post once, you get the literally hundreds of sharing options offered by AddThis right below the post, for instant access. (By the way, did you know that those sharing options remember your favorite services? The most actively used ones are shown to the left of the ‘plus’ symbol). 

In addition to the sharing options offered by AddThis, Feedlooks is also introducing a one-click retweet button for your Twitter feeds. (Did you know you can link up Feedlooks to your Twitter account? It’s under “Add feed”). Sharing tweets was never so easy.

I look forward to hearing your feedback on these features, and stay tuned - more awesome features are already in the pipeline!

-Artur

Feedlooks is moving to Linode, along with lots of performance optimizations. Expect downtime off-and-on all day tomorrow (Oct 21 2010).

We’re making a quick change on our servers infrastructure that should greatly speed up your response times.

Please check back again in about an hour, or follow us on Twitter for the most up-to-date information.

-Artur

Feedlooks is experiencing a large spike in usage today (Monday, Sep 20), which might be slowing things down for some users.

I’m fully aware of this. Please be patient as I optimize a few things on our end to deal with this increased demand.

-Artur

I have been recently interviewed by Miguel de Luis, an active blogger and Feedlooks user from the Canary Islands (Spain). You can read it in full on his blog [the interview is in English, though there’s a brief introduction in Spanish].

I talked about the infamous debate concerning the death of RSS and the surge of Twitter, about the motives behind Feedlooks, as well as a bit about my own background.

As usual, comments are always welcome.
-Artur

I frequently get asked by our users: How can I mark an item or a feed as read?

The short answer I give is: you can’t. But not because we’ve been lazy and didn’t bother to implement this rather simple feature. Rather, the reason is because you don’t need to, at least not in Feedlooks.

Instead of the Read vs. Unread model widely used in e-mail clients (and, unfortunately, in some feed readers too), Feedlooks adopts a much simpler approach to reading feeds: New vs. Old.

Every time you log into Feedlooks, by default you only see the (New) articles that have been posted since the last time you checked in. It’s that simple. All of the other items (Old) you have already had the chance to see are automatically moved to the, what else, Archives, unless you explicitly ask it not to do so (using the Lock or Pin features).

The rationale behind this model is that feeds are much more like news than e-mails. When I open my e-mail inbox, I know that the vast majority of those messages (spam aside) are relevant; they are, after all, directed specifically at me.

Contrast this to feeds, which can inundate your inbox with tons of ‘disposable’ articles, a small percentage of which you might actually want to read. Most of us simply skim through the headlines and snippets, and end up clicking on a select few only.

The model not only makes sense; it can also considerably streamline your feed reading experience by avoiding the need to constantly mark posts and feeds you have already skimmed over as ‘read’. 

In the New vs. Old model, there is no need to fight against an ever-increasing Unread Counter; the New Counter, by design, will be reset to however many New items are there in the pipeline upon every check. (Again, unless you ask it not to).

Please refer to our FAQ under Help for more information. Also feel free to drop us a line using the Feedback button in the toolbar.

-Artur