Appealing to users’ laziness is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, you risk offending users who like to think of themselves as essentially industrious, on-top-of-it, finger-on-the-pulse go-getters.
On the other hand, who are we kidding? We love being lazy, and if your app will allow for ever more user laziness, well, that’s just what we call “driving innovation,” now isn’t it? For those of us who are too lazy for RSS feeds but still in the market for real-time, personalized blog searches, we recommend checking out LazyFeed. We’ve got invites, too; just keep reading.
The site launched just two days ago and appears to be a bottomless pit of information culled from the depths of the blogosphere and sorted around a simple system of tags. Users type in a tag or single-word search term, and LazyFeed returns videos, photos, and blog posts tagged with that term. Users are then prompted to add that term as a topic, which essentially means the search is saved and results will be returned in real time through the left-hand topics menu.
Although LazyFeed combs through about 100,000 of the most popular blogs online, users can also add specific blogs, Twitter profiles, Flickr streams, and Delicious accounts for a more personalized feed of information and recommended topics. Topics are updated in real time, so users get up-to-the-minute information.
The drawbacks are apparent. Users can’t refine searches; for example, I can have “realtime” and “search” in my topics list, but I can’t have a “realtime+search” topic. And there’s no way to tell LazyFeed to look for certain types of content within certain domains or accounts. Nor is there a way to limit the stream to certain types of media or block certain tags (such as “marketing”) from appearing in the results.
Still, lazy beggars can’t be choosers. In other words, it’s still a nifty little tool that we barely had to lift a finger to use, and we did get some good reading out of it. Check out our screencast, and if you’re one of the first 100 interested parties to read this, you can sign up with the promo code lazyrww. You’re welcome.
