Toluu | Discover The Feeds Your Friends Read [Review]

Update: Apparently Toluu has bit the dust. Which is too bad because it was a really awesome tool.

Today I got an invitation to Toluu, “a utility that makes it easy to discover the feeds your friends read and find your new favorite feed.” It’s a very basic looking site, easy to set up & you can also integrate it with your Twitter account (if you choose to).

In their own words:

“You import your feeds and then your friends can easily see what you actually read. You can also find others who have similar tastes in feeds as you do and discover feeds you may find interesting. It is quite simple.”

Now you might be wondering why you would use this site. Well, it’s basically another way to connect with others & also a way to show off the feeds that you like to read. You can’t invite someone to see your feeds on Google Reader but you can invite them to view your Toluu feeds!

What I like most is that when I added my own blog feed to Toluu, I can then see everyone else who has added my blog feed to their Toluu account. So, it allows me to see who likes my blog & allows me to connect with them.

Of course to join, you will need to be invited. I only have three invites, so you’ll have to be quick to respond if you’d like an invite. Also, don’t forget to add Social Web Tools to your feeds there!

After joining, you will be given the option to import your feeds of choice by entering the blog URL. If you prefer, you can also import your feeds from an OPML file or by using their bookmarklet.

Once you’ve added a few contacts, you can see a stream of what they’ve been doing through the activity stream on the homepage. When you find an interesting new feed you can add it by simply clicking on “Import“ in the top menu.

The “Match“ option in the top menu is also nice because you can find others who have similar feed interests as you. There is also something you’ll see on your profile called “Fantastic Feeds”. These are feeds that are determined by one of their algorithms to be on the rise on Toluu. The one feed I imported that was determined to be “Fantastic” has over 300 Toluu subscribers; so it seems to go by subscribers.

Lastly, all of you Twitter addicts will be happy to know that you can connect your Twitter account to Toluu. Once you do that, anytime you add a new feed it will automatically send a tweet with the text of you choose (in your account settings) along with the feed info.

Toluu seems like a great tool to use. Personally, I don’t want to import all of my feeds there, because some them I’d prefer to keep private (they’re my secret weapons). Toluu is still a nice way to show off my favorite feeds though & I’m sure it will help in making new connections.

What do you think? Does it serve a purpose? Is it worth using or is it something you’ll forget about in a few days?

[tags]toluu, rss feeds, subscribers, feed import, twitter[/tags]

Technorati Tags: feed import, rss feeds, subscribers, twitter