Toluu is a service which allows you to upload their OPML files and share them. Sharing them allows you to discover more feeds which your contacts read, in addition to seeing which feeds you have in common with other users and new feeds you can discover from them!
If you don’t know, an OPML file is essentially a list of feeds which you subscribe to. Almost all newsreaders can export your feeds to one of these.
Nils kindly gave me an invite to Toluu and I immediately proceeded to exporting my OPML file from NetNewsWire, joining Toluu and importing my OPML.
Joining Toluu in itself is a fairly nifty process. Besides typing in your invite code, there’s very little else you have to do because you have the choice of using OpenID, letting Toluu import profile data off other social sites like Twitter or of course manually inputting it! Toluu can even import your avatar off third-party websites.
Toluu itself is remarkably simple to do, you simply upload your OPML and you’re good to go. You can add friends by finding their profile, but I think it would be fantastic if like Twitter you could download your email contact list into it. You can view your friends’ feeds and there is also a Twitter-like list of recent activity, in which you can see what feeds your friends have added lately.
You can also set Toluu up so that it updates your Twitter profile each time you add a feed. Adding a feed can be done by importing another OPML feed or manually entering the feed’s URL into Toluu.
You can discover new feeds by scouring your friends’ listings, by going onto the page for a feed you read (each feed has a page) and seeing who else subscribes to it and then scouring their listings or by using the ‘matches’ feature which gives recommendations and suggested contacts (it did a fairly accurate job too, pointing me to my fellow Grand Effect member: Paris Lemon!).
The site is fairly user-friendly and doesn’t unnecessarily use Ajax. The whole site is pretty self-explanatory, which is great!
Unfortunately, I have no invites but if you’re already a member feel free to add me as a friend. I’m computer.. I have 10 invites, comment if you want one.
Hi Joe,
Thanks for great review! Happy to have you on the site and finding it useful. We work hard to make things easy to use so it is great to hear you liked our registration process.
Regarding your note about importing contacts, we hear you 100% and this is a feature we will add before launching publicly.
Please feel free to email me any time and I will add 10 invites to your account right away so you can invite your readers who want to join too.
Caleb
Toluu
I’ve found Toluu to be highly useful and addictive. It’s a del.icio.us for feeds almost and I appreciate its ease-of-use. I do hope they’ll add a couple features but don’t try to turn it into yet another social site. It’s there, it works, I like it. That’s enough for me. Enjoy.
Great article – i’ve been trying to understand what http://www.toluu.com was all about and you’ve convinced me. I’ve tried other tools, but nothing has brought it all together well. I believe this site has real potential.
I’d love an invite if you still have a few.
Merci buckets! (thank you)