LeFeed is a news feed organization tool that uses complex algorithms in order to learn what users like. The app then organizes the user’s Facebook news feed in a way that allows users to see their top interests first. LeFeed also gives users access to a + or – button that allows users to vote content up or down, teaching LeFeed more about what is important to them. Users have the option of automatically “liking” any post that they choose to vote up. The algorithm engages in periodic updates to make sure that it is working in an accurate way. This is an app that works exclusively with Facebook.
LeFeed was founded on April 1, 2012 by Serdar Yildirim. Less than 1,000 users appear to be engaged with using LeFeed. LeFeed was featured on TechCrunch.
It’s unclear why one would need LeFeed when Facebook itself does exactly the same thing for its users, and often with extremely mixed results since posts routinely get “lost” and users have to go through an arduous “subscription” process these days in order to see much of anything, a process that doesn’t seem too different from voting posts up or down. Those who just want to see their posts in chronological order are already out of luck on Facebook. LeFeed just seems poised to snarl up the post order even further.
At the very least, LeFeed doesn’t seem to change the Facebook experience directly. Instead, it opens up a brand new window where all of the posts are displayed in text form, along with some photo and video thumbnails. The plus and minus buttons are prominently displayed on the left side of the page. The app isn’t hard to use, but it gives the impression of redundancy from start to finish.
Users sign up with Facebook, allow the app to access Facebook, and then set their preferences. Once they’ve done these things they can start to use LeFeed to organize their content.
The application is free to use, and there are no ads to contend with. However, given the multiple levels of permissions LeFeed asks for when one signs up with Facebook it is entirely possible the plan is to monetize through selling off user information.
There is really no reason why anyone should use this app given it doesn’t do anything that Facebook doesn’t already do. A user might feel that the app could do a better job than Facebook of organizing and recommending content, and if so, then it might be worth a try. The app doesn’t solve any real problem other than the fact that sometimes people post content that isn’t very interesting, in which case a user always has the option to unsubscribe from that user’s Facebook updates. LeFeed doesn’t solve problems of information overload: it just causes more by either giving users another site to visit or by attempting to essentially replace Facebook entirely (except that users can’t comment on posts from LeFeed, so they would have to return to Facebook to interact with friends).