outbrain

What's up with the relevancy?

Some of you may have noticed some questionable relevancy in the recommendations feed lately (mostly around Flickr photos, and posts from my blog - Web X.0).

This is caused by 2 factors:
1) We're constantly messing around with the algorithm.
2) We opened this up for very few users until we're more comfortable with the product and the algorithm.

You should notice a significant improvement on this in the next week or two, as we send invites to many more users who have signed up for this. Also - In ~2-3 weeks we plan on rolling out a brand new shiny algorithm that should greatly improve overall relevancy and personalization quality.

Thanks for your patience as we try to make this a great product, and... - keep voting!   

Version 0.86.5 released

A new version (0.86.5) of the outbrain firefox extension has just been released. We HIGHLY recommend upgrading to this, as it solves many of the items requested by outbrain users and a bunch of bugs.

The biggest change is that you can now vote on any article / blog post that you read (no more N/A dead ends, as we described here...). We're keeping a quick confirmation filter on pages that do not conform to the permalink URL structure, with the hope that this keeps voting noise down to a minimum. Please tell us what you think.

The other visible change is that "Flashing stars" bug is now fixed - Many of you noted that the voter in the status bar sometimes got stuck in progress bar mode infinitely, making the stars blink like it was 1997 all over again... This is now fixed.

To install the extension - go to Tools > Extensions in firefox, and hit the 'Look for updates' button. Next to outbrain you should now see an 'Install' button. Hit that, and then restart firefox.

If you don't have the extension installed, you can get it here:
www.getoutbrain.com

If you have any trouble, shoot us an email at support (at) outbrain (dot) com.

What's up with the N/A ?

One of the more frequent questions about our firefox extension is the N/A status in the outbrain voter at the bottom of the browser:

So here's the story:
outbrain is intended for sorting through the massive amounts of blog posts and news articles hitting your RSS readers daily.

The problem is - how do we enable voting on all those blog posts and articles without adding a whole lot of noise into the system from other URL's? That kind of noise can quickly degrade the quality of recommendations going out to outbrain users... not something we want to happen...

So we decided to start off by enabling the outbrain voter selectively on pages that can easily be identified as being blog posts. We do that by looking for the permalink structure in the URL. Unfortunately, many blogs do not comply with the permalink structure, and so the N/A status appears on way more pages than we'd want it to.

We know this is somewhat annoying (especially for posts that were recommended in the personalized outbrain feed... what's up with that?!...), and are working to resolve this in a way that allows voting on any item you see fit, while keeping the noise level down to a minimum.

Stay tuned!

New version released

We just released a new version of the outbrain firefox extension. Here are the main changes:

• Various bug fixes, including the conflict with SessionSaver that we reported here.
• Improved login - You can now login from the voter in the browser's status bar. You can also now login to the extension via the extension options window (accessible from the Tools > Extensions menu).
• UI tweaks

To install the extension - go to Tools > Extensions in firefox, and hit the 'Look for updates' button. Next to outbrain you should now see an 'Install' button. Hit that, and then restart firefox.

If you don't have the extension installed, you can get it here:
www.getoutbrain.com

I highly recommend upgrading to this version, as some of the bugs we fixed were quite annoying...

If you have any trouble, shoot us an email at support (at) outbrain (dot) com.

Bug with SessionSaver

We've got a couple of reports about a conflict that the outbrain extension has with the SessionSaver extension. This conflict causes Firefox to constantly refresh open pages.

We're working on this, and will release an update shortly. Until then, feel free to uninstall one of the extensions temporarily.

[UPDATE] - This bug has been fixed with the new version. Details here.

outbrain on Digg

One of our very first alpha users, Rogel, has posted about outbrain on his blog. The post has been dugg, and looks like it's gaining momentum. Feel free to help pushing it up by digging it here - http://www.rogelsview.com/technology-and-software/beyond-rss/

Personalized recommendation feeds

Outbrain is all about 2 things: floating the best articles/posts and flagging the worst. And most importantly - personalizing the recommendations and filters to each user's personal interests.

This week we're releasing outbrain's first recommendation feature - a personalized recommendation feed. After subscribing to your feed (details and links in an email later this week), we will drop up to ~3-5 posts-per-day which the outbrain algorithm found to be potentially highly interesting for you.

We do this by looking at historic votes, and finding people with similar voting patterns. Therefore, the more you vote on items you read, the more intelligent outbrain will get about the recommendations it gives you.

This feature focuses on recommendation - finding those nuggets that you would otherwise probably miss if you had to read all those posts out there all by yourself. Our next feature will focus on filtering - flagging those items that the collective outbrain intelligence thought were a waste of your time. Stay tuned.