Finally got a sneak preview of fav.or.it

http://fav.or.it/

I have been really looking forward to getting my hands on fav.or.it, which looks poised to solve the annoying problem, that you can subscribe to a comments feed for a blog, but these comments don't come to your RSS reader with any information about what post they relate to.

Fav.or.it I am pleased to say solves this, not only are you alerted when there are new comments on a post, but you can post a comment to a post from fav.or.it directly. GREAT.

BUT and I think it is a big but, the guy from fav.or.it that I spoke to admited, that they aren't really going for a RSS reader as such, more a platform for mashing up your RSS feeds and producing what they call "slices", streams of posts on a specific theme.

This in itself is fine, but it isn't "Brain Dead Simple" - the interface looks nice - but it isn't intuitive and the concepts behind mashing up web feeds to create "slices" are quite obscure.

What I really wanted to see was google reader but with comment support.

That said - they have been hiding away an amazing feature that I am surprised they haven't made more noise about :

Like many other similar RSS mashup tools, fav.or.it claims that it can learn what you like and suggest similar content. I am always skeptical about this because normally it involves maintaining a list of key terms that I am interested in....

However fav.or.it have put some thought in and developed a system that monitors the time you spend reading about subjects and maintains your interest profile based on this "passive interest".

Without seeing it for myself I cant say that this works, but it does seem like an elegant solution to a problem that needs addressing, and it is the reason that I would be prepared to put the effort into learning and setting up the interface for my use.

So, not the tool that I was looking for, but definitely one to look into.