Popping over to Facebook is always a crapshoot. Will it be a picture of a swaddled, newly born baby or your weird uncle spouting Jack Handey-esque aphorisms? You never know. That’s what LeFeed.com is for. It makes sense of your Facebook feed and brings up almost exactly the content you prefer.
LeFeed, launched on April 1, is clearly a work in progress and is, at best, a toy. However, the intelligence behind it is very compelling. Founder Serdar Yildirim says LeFeed has “two main goals: organizing users’ Facebook news feed and recommending new content to the user that don’t suck.” I also suspect his tertiary goal will be to not get sued by Facebook for using a similar logotype and color scheme, but that wasn’t in the FAQ.
Another important organizational tool helps you see various types of content – photos, status updates, and videos – quickly and easily. The system also uses “artificial intelligence” to recommend content and users you may like to follow.
“Its first goal is improving users’ news feed experience. We all get lots of information during the day and most of the updates are from friends that we haven’t talked to for a long time. LeFeed learns how you use a social network. It tries to figure out what types of things the user likes, which friends the user is most interested in,” said Yildirim. “LeFeed analyzes all the data about the user and her friends, and shows what is really important to the user.”
The project started as an experimental recommendation engine and has grown to encompass a full control system.
While it’s definitely not an every day kind of tool, it does have some potential as a utility for pruning out the weirdos in your social feed. While Facebook is presumably working hard at doing this, I still see plenty of stuff that I don’t really want and having a third party do the cutting for me may make Facebook management a little bit easier and decidedly less tedious.