If you’re having a hard time keeping track of what your friends are saying on Facebook, then we have great news. Starting today, Wowd is introducing a new feature called SmartFeeds. SmartFeeds automatically finds natural groupings of friends and creates customized views of your Facebook news feed that let you instantly see what these groups of friends are talking about on Facebook.
The new SmartFeeds feature is helpful because it automatically analyzes your Facebook account, figures out who is related to whom and what natural groups exist, and then creates SmartFeed views of your Facebook news feed. The SmartFeed views let you easily see what different groups of your friends are talking about and lets you finally get your social information overload under control.
When I ran the SmartFeed feature over my own Facebook account, it helpfully found some interesting groups of friends and colleagues right away. For example, I used to work in Artificial Intelligence and software at NASA, and Wowd’s SmartFeeds found a group of my friends from both the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and NASA’s Ames Research Center.
With one click on the new SmartFeed, I was able to see what those friends were talking about. SmartFeeds automatically created a title for the new feed, which in this case used the names of three friends from the list. You can choose to leave the title alone, or edit it to reflect how you know this group of people came about. In this case, I renamed the new SmartFeed to be “NASA friends”.
Wowd’s SmartFeed feature also found all my family members from Facebook… my sisters, cousins, my mother, and even my aunt! Two clicks later, and that SmartFeed was called “Family”, and now it’s really easy for me to keep up with what’s going on in their lives. It’s definitely a time-saver. It was also great to have the SmartFeed constructed automatically -- I didn’t have to laboriously go through a long list of names, picking out only those people who are family members.
Personally, I find the new SmartFeed feature particularly helpful in the context of Wowd’s ability to summarize conversations. For some time now, Wowd has delivered a summary of topics in any feed you select. We call this the “Hot Topics” for a feed.
You get a Hot Topics summary for all feeds that exist inside Wowd, so of course you get Hot Topics for a SmartFeed, too. This means that when I click on the NASA friends SmartFeed, I see the list of posts, updates, comments, etc. from those friends, but I also see a nice compact display of the topics that summarize the conversation. Each of the topics is a clickable link, so with a single click on any interesting topic, I can find all the posts, updates, etc. that mention that topic.
This has really transformed how I use Facebook. I use my SmartFeeds to pick out specific groups of people, I use Hot Topics to figure out what they’re talking about, and then use Wowd’s social search to dig in deeper, to explore specific topics. It really is an awesome experience, and I encourage you to download the Wowd client to try it out for yourself. Please also share your feedback with us on Twitter, @Wowd.
With this new feature, we hope Wowd will be even more helpful to you when it comes to organizing your online social life and cutting through social networking clutter.
Stay tuned for more updates and exciting new features in the coming weeks! We're working on some really powerful features, and will be talking more about them soon.
To read more click here, or check out this excellent Techcrunch article by Erick Schoenfeld about SmartFeeds.
