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.

If you’re like me, you will probably check your RSS feed after you’ve emptied your to-do list and encounter several hundred articles! It is essential to check them frequently, but not too frequently, so it doesn’t take hours to read and you don’t miss any interesting articles.

There are ways to keep your RSS load to a minimum:

1. Do you use public transport? Use your mobile to read your feeds. Consider using an online reader, like Bloglines, which offers a mobile version
2. Use a desktop client, like NetNewsWire, which can sync with online services.
3. Subscribe only to blogs which you truly want to read. Perhaps go for blogs with less frequent posts!
4. Go for power reads if you can. For 5 minutes every couple of hours, check your feeds to ensure that you don’t end up with a massive load of posts to go through. Time yourself though to ensure you don’t go over 5 minutes!
5. Give yourself a limit for one post… perhaps 20 seconds maximum per post (depending on your reading speed!). If you decide to comment, you can obviously exceed this!

Now, it’s time to practise what I preach!