The Official Genwi Blog

We’ve been busy making improvements. Today we’d like to introduce those improvements and demonstrate the new Genwi! Genwi is a platform for finding and sharing stuff online.

The important thing to do on Genwi is subscribe to content. Subscribing creates your wire - so when you click on “My Wire” you will see updates from your subscriptions. There are 2 easy ways to subscribe - one is Add Subscriptions - and you can browse subscriptions by category (video, blog, TV, news, etc.) and/or by most subscribed and highest rated. The second easy way is to add friends - when friends accept your friend request, you will have the opportunity to subscribe to all of their content.

For those familiar with RSS and feed readers, Genwi also allows you to subscribe by entering the feed under Add Subscriptions. Genwi can read RSS, RSS2.0, ATOM, MediaRSS and iTunesRSS feeds. Genwi also allows you to import an OPML file of your subscriptions from another feed reader. Under Add Subscriptions, there is a link to import OPML.

Once you’ve subscribed to a dozen or more feeds, Genwi becomes really useful. When you login to My Wire you can browse all the updates from all of your subscriptions, including friends’ feeds. You can be thorough and go through every update - or you can snack on updates that might be the most interesting by using Genwi’s filters. You can use the snapshot filter to see only the most recent update from each subscription, the most popular and highest rated filters to see what others found to be interesting, and the shared filter to see only stuff shared with you by your friends. From your wire you can also jump to any single subscription, view updates from a single category (like videos, or blogs) or create folders to organize and view stuff you’ve saved. You can select subscriptions, category and folders from the drop downs or you can click on the subscription name and category name in each update to filter instantly to that subscription or category.

Beyond your wire, Genwi helps you if you have content of your own or if you want to find out where the buzz is online. With your own content, you can add your content from other sites to your Genwi profile. For example if you use a blog, a video site and a photo site, you can add all three to your Genwi profile. This way your friends at Genwi will see all of your content in one place. Each time you update content at the other sites, it will be automatically updated by Genwi and shared with your friends. To add your content, go to edit your profile and add content. You can select from an ever-expanding list of sites or just add a content feed (RSS, RSS2.0, ATOM, MediaRSS, iTunesRSS).

If you want to see where the buzz is online - Browse All will help you. Browse All allows anybody to browse what’s on Genwi. You can filter by categories (videos, blogs, news, etc.) and/or by Most Popular, Most Shared, and Highest Rated. Browse All provides a good guide to what is popular on Genwi. It’s a way to see what is getting buzz. And of course, you can always search Genwi and filter the results with the same categories.

Finally, once you’re situated with your wire and have added friends, be sure to try out some of Genwi’s main features like sharing and saving. When you share you can select which friends to share with - or select them all. When you save, you can add content to a folder. The default folder is called favorites but you can create new folders at anytime. You can manage folders from your account. If you set the folders to be public - that means everyone can view them - and they work like a playlist works for music. You can become the editor and select stuff you think is interesting and share it with the rest of Genwi.

So please enjoy the new site, create a wire (if you haven’t done so) and send us more feedback to let us know what features you’d like to see on Genwi.

Quick steps to getting started with your own wire

Genwi added small filters to the feed reader that will have a big impact. The reader now enables everyone to filter subscriptions by Most Popular and Highest Rated. This means if you don’t have time to scroll through all of your updates - why bother?? - you can just see the most popular and highest rated updates from your subscription list.

Genwi wants to help filter through the noise. With some subscriptions updating every few minutes and others updating only once a week - these new features will help filter the updates - by showing updates others found interesting. The term might be “collaborative filtering” of subscriptions. Regardless of what it should be called, it’s pretty useful. Genwi is working to bring similar filters to provide more options for filtering noise and getting the most important, fun and interesting updates.

Of course - the Most Popular, Highest Rated and Most Shared stuff overall is already available. If you want to browse around to see where the buzz is - you can click Web and see the buzz in each category. Genwi will make more filter options available here as well.

Both of these groups of filters - filters to see overall buzz, and filters for the buzz within your subscriptions - only get more useful with more active people. The more people who use Genwi the more interesting it will be to filter your subscriptions by what was highly rated or viewed the most. So tell your friends to start visiting the site.

Genwi will have more updates soon - and we’ll post them here at the blog. Some of these will be some small changes to the site - which, again, will have a big impact in making things easier to use and more enjoyable.

We’ve updated Genwi with a bunch of new features and a new look and feel. Our goal is to provide a full context for managing and discovering content.

We think a few of these new things will be useful… helping you to share content with your friends, subscribe to your favorite feeds and find new content.

1) We have a new feed import wizard. Now you can add your content from other sites to your Genwi profile without an RSS feed. Check out the My Feeds tab under Account to see the various services we’ve connected, including Youtube, Flickr, and Blogger.  When your friends view your Genwi profile they will see the most recent additions to all of your content online.

2) The My Web section is now a really great multimedia RSS reader application. We’ve added a continuous scroll to eliminate paging through updates from your subscriptions. We’ve also connected filters (feed name, profile name and category) as dynamic links. When you click on a category, for example, we’ll show you only updates from that category! The same is true for filtering by a feed name or a profile name associated with a feed.

3) We’ve improved the organization and look of the site. There are lots of new features, including granular sharing - when you share, you can choose which friends will see the item. Profiles have been streamlined to showcase updates from your feeds. We’ve added filters to the header bar - so when you’re browsing the My Web and Web sections, you can instantly filter down to a certain category of content and subcategory, or filter to a particular feed.

There are many other new additions and improvements with this release that you will notice as you use the site. We will continue  to add new features over the next several months and look forward to announcing them on this blog. Please add any ideas or feature suggestions you have to the comments.