Genieo – Adaptive Personal News Page

in Reviews by Gal Mor — February 23, 2010 at 12:00 pm | 3 comments

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Genieo is a new gateway for surfing the web – an upgraded personal homepage that requires much less tuning than similar services. Here’s the review of this service, as the company made the official launch.

The flow of information recently turned into a flood. We’re receiving news and updates from a growing variety of sources: news sites, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, email, mobile and others. Keeping up with everything that interests us is becoming a difficult task. Twitter didn’t kill the RSS reader, but certainly gave it big blow and contributes to its fadeout.

Reading news is quickly becoming one of the basic features of Facebook’s feed. Instead of scanning tens of RSS sources or using traditional surfing of websites, we get recommendations from friends. This new behavior reflects the dramatic change in the way we use the web. Facebook users stick their nose to this site than to any other site.

Despite these changes, Twitter and Facebook cannot supply all our news needs. On the other hand, RSS readers supply too much information. By setting just a handful of RSS sources, your feed will be flooded with chaotic list of updates. Finding the interesting headlines will be a tedious task.

To address this flooding, smart RSS readers have recently sprung: Feedly offers an integration with Google Reader, while My6Sense reaches out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more networks in addition to Google Reader, to supply the most relevant headlines for you. After an adaptation period, the quality of its suggestions improves. My6Sense sure has a good direction.

While My6Sense is limited to iPhone users, Genieo, launched on February 16th is available for everybody. And there are additional differences.

After downloading the software, Genieo creates your personal profile by just watching you. During this 20 minute process, your surfing habits are learned, which topics are of interest to you and what pages you visit most. This process might deter some users which might fear their privacy is violated, but note that the information never leaves your computer. No data is shared on the web. In its privacy policy, Genieo promises not to scan sensitive sites such as email services, adult sites, secure shopping sites or any sites that you wish to exclude.

After this process is completed, you’ll be pointed to your Genieo homepage. This can eventually turned into my start page. The page is built in a magazine style and shows rotating headlines on top. Some of these headlines are links to articles that your peers posted on Facebook, together with their comments. For me, this was Genio’s power feature – good integration of content from social networks make this service very useful.

Another advantage of Genieo is its quick setup: You won’t need to modify any setting after the initial process. If you would still like to tweak the results, there’s a “Not Interesting” button under all the items – this makes the service more familiar with your preferences. There are additional settings, but there’s no need to play with them.

Shortcomings

Sharing items in Genieo still has a way to go. The generic AddThis plugin is used for sharing, and this requires too many clicks. This seems like quick and unprofessional patch when we’re used to one or two clicks at most.

The sidebar on the right hand side shows your favorite sites – picked according to the frequency of your visits. In addition, you’ll see your feeds and the topics you’re interested in. Apart from the homepage, Genieo shows breaking items in a small popup window bouncing above the tray. This small window can also be used for browsing earlier headlines.

Searching for something specific? You’ll use Google search, but this integration is also sloppy. I would expect an internal search engine for this feature.

Another shortcoming is found in Genieo’s web presence. As a service for browsing the web, it’s supposed to be everywhere. Genieo’s home page should be accessible from different computers, mobile phones and other web applications. Genieo should develop this field quickly.

Conclusion

Despite these shortcomings, the bottom line is that Genieo is a good service – even very good. After using the application for a few months, I was exposed to many relevant and interesting items that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Before the official launch, I spoke with Sol Tzvi, Genieo’s founder. Adding her insights to my experience with the software, I’m convinced that this Israeli company is on the right path.

Originally posted in HolesInTheNet in Hebrew.

Translated by Yohay Elam.

Tags: facebook featured feedly genieo Sol Tzvi twitter