Cullect Call

One of the challenges of the information age we're in is too much information. We've been using all the major feed readers to aggregate and sort the useful from the less so. It's been a decent experience. Netvibes is beautiful and simple. The GoogReader is very straightforward. Very Google. And then we stumbled across Cullect. Or rather, we had lunch a couple times with Garrick van Buren, the guy who invented Cullect, "the most shareable feed reader."

We're hooked for several reasons:

1. Cullect will import/read almost anything. You're at a blog, news post, whatever--just hit the browser menu button you've added, and the content you want is in your "cullection." Unlike del.icio.us, there's no back-and-forth redirect, or a pop out like Tumblr. Yes, the page reloads, but it's a tiny distraction.

2. Cullect displays everything. If a blog post contained a video, from wherever, it's automatically embedded within your cullection. If there was a "tiny" URL, Cullect automatically extracts the original URL and displays it. If there's an Mp3 file, Cullect displays player controls. Cullect will also display all of the referring URLs for blog posts, and direct links for embedded content.

3. Cullect is easy to whip through. Granted, it's not perfect (yet). But a few simple keyboard commands let you zip past the current item (type "j"), or go back one item (type "k"), or collapse an item to just its title (type "c").

4. Oh yeah, you can share anything from Cullect. That's why it's "the most shareable." As an example, let's say you've got 20 feeds coming in. You want to sift through the latest feeds for a specific term. So you click the "Latest" tab to get the most recent feeds, then in the browser's URL you add "/[searchterm]", hit return and Cullect filters all of your latest feeds to display only the ones with that search term. But wait! Now you add ".rss" at the end of that URL and you've got an instant RSS feed to give clients, friends, etc. Meaning, they'll get a new filtered feed of your feeds. Perfect for sharing specific slices of news and information with co-workers and clients.

5. It's always improving. We asked Garrick for Search, and 2 days later, the functionCu was included.

6. It can be subscription based. Cullect does offer a basic service for free. And it rocks. But we like the idea that more service requires some kind of modest payment, i.e. $6 a month for the mid-level offering. We'll gladly pay that just for the access afforded users in point #5.

So check out our "Important Reading" from the Hello Viking Cullection over in our righthand sidebar. Another benefit of Cullect--you can create widgets for different slices of your feeds (Latest, Important, Recommended). Cullect uses an algorithm to filter "importance" based on things like number of referring posts. This approach provides us with a highly customized news feed that's particular to Hello Viking's tastes and preferences.

And you can check out--and share (without being registered!)--our cullection at http://cullect.com/166.

Comments

[Harold]

I'm trying out Cullect and noticed your post from the Cullect Blog. I'm wondering about this search functionality, because I'm not finding a search field anywhere on Cullect.com. Are you referring to adding your search term(s) to the URL?

[Harold]

By the way, it's kind of neat the way you can simply plug in your search term in the URL. Garrick (the developer of Cullect) pointed out that you can also generate a feed from those results. So if you want a feed of all mentions of your name in the blogs you read you would just compose the URL cullect.com//.rss. Pretty neat!

[Harold]

Hmmm, that didn't come out right. I had posted brackets in my last comment, in the URL, and those were stripped from the comment. So let me provide and actual example URL:

http://cullect.com/169/harold.rss

The number 169 is the ID of my page on Cullect; my search term is 'harold'. I would simply add this feed if I wanted to monitor references to myself (or to the term 'harold', anyway).

[Hello Viking]

Harold,

Thanks for the additional insights. We're loving Cullect. Obviously you are, too.

HV