Parse.ly Blog

Hello Publishers, Meet Dash.

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:10:42 -0500

Over two years ago, Parse.ly graduated from the then Philadelphia-based (now in NYC and Israel) accelerator, DreamIt Ventures. At DreamIt we planted the seed of an idea that grew into the Parse.ly Reader, an intelligent news reading application that got better as you used it. Parse.ly Reader was successful – it grew in size to several thousands of users in a matter of weeks and had great reviews (ReadWriteWeb, ZDNet, Louis Gray, Thrillist, to name a few).

However, we knew what we built had the potential to not just change the way people consumed content, but how content was created and delivered.

New Yorkers at heart, we came back to the city after DreamIt, itching to contribute to one of New York’s biggest industries – media. Some of the biggest and best publishers on the web call NYC their home, and virtually all of them are looking to leverage new technologies that push the boundaries of traditional content sites.

Several months and meetings later, it was clear that publishers were entering the age of big data – billions of pageviews, millions of readers, thousands of active pages, hundreds of writers and editors. Despite all these signals created by the web, there was a big gap in the tools available to leverage them.

The Early Days

Initially, we thought the problem at hand was content delivery - which is why we built the Parse.ly Reader. The Reader was built to understand a user’s interests, and evolve with the user as his or her interests change. On the web, there were clear examples of other technology companies leveraging personalization technology to fine-tune a user’s experience (Amazon/products, Netflix/movies, Pandora/music). Yet, when it came to content, most online publishers were treating each user the same.

This was our initial Aha! moment and with confirmation from the publishers we were talking to, we were off to the races. We built P3, the Parse.ly Publisher Platform, to deliver personalized recommendations of content to users based on a slew of inputs, ranging from the context of the current article to what other, similar users were interested in. We launched on a few publishers including a top 100 news site and were increasing engagement and readership across the board.

Then, a curious thing happened…

It’s The Data, Stupid!

Some of our publishers started to ask us how we were recommending content. Editors, in particular, were really interested in how we decided what article to show to one user versus another. So, being the tech geeks that we are, we began explaining the whole stack:

We analyze all content on your site to understand exactly what each post is about from a topic perspective
We measure reader interest across these topics and start to build interests graphs between users
We look at topic, post, and author velocity combined with referral information to give us cues on what might pop
We mash up the treasure trove of data that’s on your site to come up with recommendations that your users will love

Specifically, editors at separate organizations asked us the same question: Can you share some of that data with us? You know, the topic data and the data on authors?

Begrudgingly, we agreed, and started to send out reports on a monthly basis.

Editors: “Hmm, this is great! Can we get this quicker?”

Parse.ly: “Uh, sure. We can give it to you weekly.”

Editors: “Awesome! Actually, it’d be great if we could get this daily.”

Parse.ly: “OK, what’s up here? Why do you care more about the data than the recommendations?”

Well, as it turns out, nobody had really showed them this data before, and the data was simply eye-opening for the editorial team. They were using it to go beyond monitoring individual articles to understanding what was resonating with their audience.

Queue the second Aha! moment in early 2011. We took a step back and did some research on analytics tools for online publishers. What we found was astounding. Almost no innovation had happened on the analytics side for online publishers. Most tools were one-size-fits-all systems that treated an e-commerce site the same as a content site, and obviously, that’s not the way to do it.

Content-based sites are dramatically different than an e-commerce property from both a data and business perspective.

It’s no wonder these publishers were clamoring for data that provided fresh insights on their property. Publishers need to know how their content breaks out by topic, what causes a post to go viral, why one author does better with search traffic than another, and a bevy of other key insights that are specific to their needs. We knew this was a big opportunity, and decided to dive head-first into the analytics space.

Meanwhile, In The Workshop…

2011 was the year Parse.ly Dash was born. We quickly built a bare bones tool to surface some of the data that we were collecting for publishers in the early months of 2011, and released it into private beta shortly thereafter. The response after showing a few major publishers the first version of Dash was both invigorating and a bit unexpected.

Not only did they understand what we were building, but they were extremely vocal with feedback that helped shape and evolve Dash throughout the year. This feedback can be summarized through three key areas that represent he biggest opportunities for improvement:

Tracking. Publishers had tools that tracked data, but unfortunately they were not tracking the data that these publishers really cared about. Key metrics around topics, authors, sections, referrers were just not available. Luckily, our backend technology was built to pick up on exactly these areas.
Planning. Tracking wasn’t enough to really be competitive in the media industry. Publishers needed to be proactive around topics that were trending on their site and across the web. Further, they needed tools that look at what would happen in the next several minutes, hours and days. We spent many engineering resources developing technology that would measure trends local to a property against trends that are happening across the entire web. This allowed publishers to not just identify patterns, but actually understand what was causing them. This has become invaluable for many of our customers.
Promoting. As social media became a major distribution channel for content, so has the need to understand exactly how content goes viral and who on the social web has the most influence. Marketing to the right audience and in the most effective way is incredibly important to publishers moving forward, and Dash gives them this capability by actually plugging directly into the biggest social APIs.

We are also proud to say that Dash has offered a humane interface for analytics. We built the product with the user in mind. Most analytics tools are clunky, have a steep learning curve, or don’t go far enough with their analysis. Dash is different. It’s beautiful to look at, simple to use, and almost unassumingly powerful. The data, and as a consequence the insights, are what shine here.

Finally, Dash was built with the understanding that most publishers aren’t interested in doing heavy integrations. We make it a snap to integrate with Dash. You simply drop a Javascript include on the footer of your site, and we give you the most powerful analytics tool on the market in about a week. Really, that’s it. No coding, customization, or painful backend integrations required!

Without further ado, meet Dash

I’d like to invite any publisher who’s interested in trying out Dash to do so. We offer a 30-day free trial and tiered pricing to match your size and needs.

Thank You

I’d like to thank our early pilot customers. You’ve been incredible to work with, and have provided us with invaluable feedback. We’ll continue to work tirelessly to give you the best analytics tools on the market.

I want to thank our investors and advisers for giving us the resources, experience and insight to capture this opportunity and many more in the future.

And of course - a big shout out to the Parse.ly team. I’ve lost count of the tireless hours and late nights that have gone into Parse.ly Dash — from the earliest days in 2009 to present. The team here is inspiring to work with, and I can’t wait to keep pushing online media forward.

There’s much more work ahead of us, and we’ve already started on the next phase of Dash, so stay tuned for latest updates and more from the team, right here on the blog, or you can follow us on Twitter.

"And while the advances in media consumption technology for readers have been rapid, the publisher..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:20:55 -0500

“And while the advances in media consumption technology for readers have been rapid, the publisher side of web technology hasn’t kept up with the pace.”

- http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/why-publishers-are-about-to-go-data-crazy017.html

By Sachin Kamdar

Parse.ly's "Pageview Generator" Featured in TechCrunch

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:53:13 -0500

You may have seen that Parse.ly was featured in a TechCrunch article a couple of days ago. It was a great writeup by Sarah Perez, and we wanted to share it with you here.

Parse.ly Will Launch Its Pageview-Generating Machine Called “Dash” This Month:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/03/parse-ly-will-launch-its-pageview-generating-machine-called-dash-this-month/

The article actually includes a few screen shots of Dash that had not been seen before, so this is really the first public look at Dash. Now that it’s out in the open though, we encourage you to take a look!

Here’s a quick summary of the article as well:

Parse.ly has been in stealth mode, but we’ll be launching Dash publicly this month. We have had an amazing group of early adopters that have helped us tweak Dash until we got it just right. Now, we have a fine tuned product that is designed specifically for large-scale content publishers…the biggest publishers in the world honestly. Dash is designed to help publishers maximize their pageviews by surfacing insightful trends and directly actionable opportunities. We’re taking predictive analytics into new territories.

There’s much more to Dash, and you’ll be hearing more about it very soon. For now, definitely check out the TechCrunch article. Say hello and follow us on Twitter for more updates!

Get ready for the iPhone 5 hype...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:18:20 -0500

According to BGR, the iPhone 5 is scheduled to launch in Fall 2012. So what does this mean for the publishing industry? It means there are going to be a lot of iPhone 5 articles coming out over the next 9 months, assuming that’s when the product will actually launch. This is great news for publishers. Apple fans are an extremely loyal bunch and always looking for the next scoop…plenty of opportunity to attract new readers.

So according to the BGR article, the iPhone 5 will have a rubber or plastic case built in, a redesigned antenna, and a 4 inch display. Scheduled to debut roughly just 12 months after the iPhone 4s, I wonder how many people are still glad they upgraded to the iPhone 4s when they did…

In any case, I’m sure the tech publishing world is already salivating over the predictable opportunity that is to come. Yes, I’m talking about that evening when the “responsible” Apple employee “accidentally” leaves an iPhone 5 prototype at a bar after drinking too much, or the prototype gets left in a New York City cab that just happens to pick up a Gizmodo writer, etc. For now, we have a few photos, some reports, and lots of speculation starting to pick up. But if we know Apple at all, expect a steady stream of articles to gradually generate buzz until the iPhone 5 just dominates the news. It should be a fun ride!

Obligatory Tim Tebow Post

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:36:00 -0500

Since Parse.ly is in the business of providing analytics for content publishers, nobody knows better than us that Tim Tebow is by far the hottest trending topic of late. We’ve seen the Tebowing craze, he’s been on ESPN non-stop, and now most recently we learn about “Tebrew,” a beer dedicated to the Denver Broncos QB that has captivated the nation and turned even non-sports fans into avid watchers every Sunday.

Even non-sports and entertainment websites are buying in to Tebowmania, so it only makes sense that we should follow suit…right? I mean the upward trend here doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Let’s cash in on this opportunity!

Well, it’s actually quite interesting to see how some publishers are taking advantage of the current reader demand for Tim Tebow content. Here’s one example from the National Journal that we thought was particularly genius: Quarterbacking Our Country: Tebow Style. The article compares the leadership of Tim Tebow to Barack Obama, and it’s interesting. Perhaps more importantly though, it’s catchy. The title will grab your attention and probably get you to read the article, even if you are not inherently interested in the theme of the article.

These days, the fight for an audience is as fierce as ever. Publishers are being forced to innovate to stay competitive, and decisions influenced by data is helping some get to the top. Understanding trends and demand go a long way when going through the editorial planning process and even knowing how to promote articles for maximum traffic.

We’ll post a few more examples and talk some specifics on how data can contribute to successful editorial decisions on a daily basis. Do you have an example of an article that was able to capitalize on a globally trending topic? Post it here and we’ll discuss.

Insights for the web's best publishers

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:02:33 -0500

Parse.ly Dash - Insights for the web’s best publishers…

Sounds great right? But who are some of these publishers and what type of insights can you expect from Parse.ly? Well, you’ll have to wait just a bit longer for a full answer, but here’s what we can tell you now….

Our semantic analytics have been breath of fresh air to editorial, audience development, analytics, and ad sales teams at some of the biggest content publishers on the web. We are finishing up what has proven to be a very successful pilot program and are really excited for the public launch of Dash (coming very soon!).

We’ll have much more info to come, so make sure you check back with us, or drop us a line now. We’d love to hear from you.

Our UI/UX engineer, Toms Baugis, grows Parsley (parse.ly!) in...

Tue, 10 May 2011 08:53:33 -0400

Our UI/UX engineer, Toms Baugis, grows Parsley (parse.ly!) in his living room!

Parse.ly Closes $800K Financing Round

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:50:00 -0500

Parse.ly Closes $800K Financing Round:

Parse.ly (http://parsely.com), the intelligent personalization and optimization engine for content providers, raised $800,000 from Blumberg Capital, ff Asset Management, Scott Becker (formely co-founder and CTO of Invite Media), Don Hutchison (formerly principal at Netcom, Work.com), Jeffrey Greenblatt (senior principal at Ankyra Capital) and Jon Axelrod (formerly founder/CEO at MusicGremlin).

The investment will be used by Parse.ly to increase its sales efforts, hire key staff, develop partnerships and ultimately build new ways in which news and blog content can be distributed and targeted. Already, millions of users across the web are utilizing Parse.ly technology to connect with content they love.

The Startup Diet, how our founders lost 10-15 lbs living on $4/person/day at DreamIT Ventures

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:58:00 -0400

The Startup Diet, how our founders lost 10-15 lbs living on $4/person/day at DreamIT Ventures:

From the article:

One of the most successful runway-extending pieces of advice we have given has been to keep food costs low. We were able to get our food cost down to $4/person/day through some simple planning during that summer, and each of us also lost 10-15 pounds in the process. We felt great, were productive, and made our DreamIt investment last. I think this might be one of the core reasons for our company’s survival and success.

Parse.ly's CTO profiled in NY Observer today

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:02:00 -0400

In an excellent article discussing some software engineers’ transitions from working on Wall Street to working on startups, our very own Parse.ly CTO, Andrew Montalenti, is profiled.

You can imagine the surprise when we discovered the article as the top choice in our Parse.ly team account today (see above!). How very meta.

A relevant quote:

[…] soon the work grew redundant, Mr. Montalenti said, and the problems he was asked to solve as part of his day-to-day responsibilities started to seem technically uninteresting. Like many other creatively inclined, intellectually ambitious programmers who took high-paying jobs on Wall Street after college, Mr. Montalenti found himself disillusioned and restless.

Then, in March of last year, he did something very few people in his predicament have the guts to do: He quit his job and founded a company of his own with one of his best friends.

“I’d just like to be able to point to at least one thing after 15 years of working as a software engineer and say, ‘I built that thing,’” said Mr. Montalenti, who, at 26, is now happily running Parse.ly, a Web-based recommendation service.

Click here to read more from Observer.com.

Parse.ly presenting at Hoboken Tech Meetup tonight

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:02:29 -0400

Should be a good time. See http://www.meetup.com/Hoboken-Tech-Meetup/ to join the meetup!

NY Tech Meetup, API Launch & Consumer Beta

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:09:00 -0400

Tomorrow Parse.ly will be presenting at the NY Tech Meetup. We’re part of the “university demo” segment, though we’re not actually university students anymore (if only!). This is a particularly good time to for us to talk to the New York Tech community. We have a few upcoming product offerings for developers, publishers, and individuals that we’re super excited about.

Primarily, our presentation will be about our API launch and what developers can do with Parse.ly’s personalized recommendation technology. Developers of news/blog content mashups or online content sites can use our technology to offer Amazon/Netflix-style recommendations to their users. Here is what the Parse.ly API does for you:

1) parses and cleans RSS/Atom feeds and other content sources in near-real-time, via an integration with PubSubHubbub (PuSH) technology

2) builds a full-text index of your content, as well as personalized “resonance profiles” for different users that can be trained and queried

3) delivers personalized recommendations (Amazon/Netflix-style) of content to users, that can be listed, searched, and filtered

Our whole value proposition is that, yes, you could build algorithms to do personalized recommendations yourself and in-house, but it’s hard. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes along with it. You or your engineering team will spend months — not days — getting it right. So, why not just plug into our nice API instead?

Our API is a standard HTTP/JSON RESTful API, and we already have a Python binding, with more bindings on the way. We also have an overview of our algorithms online in our developer docs.

We know there are lots of awesome ways our developer community can leverage this technology. However, we want to break the ice, so here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

an iPad application that creates an elegant, full-screen experience for browsing news content from across the web. Think Pandora.com, but for news stories and other content that can be read online.
an iPhone / Blackberry application for getting personalized content recommendations on the go.
an Adobe Air or other desktop technology application that delivers content recommendations as desktop notifications integrated into the user’s operating system.
Blogging platform plugins (e.g. Wordpress) that assist with content writing and editing based on current blog posts, future blog post drafts, and user interaction with existing content.
Custom publishing applications that can produce beautiful, printable flowed layouts of online content, powered by personalized recommendations.
Personalized versions of any of your favorite content sites on the web; for example, personalized versions of TechMeme, TweetMeme, TechCrunch, or other aggregators.

We’ll be collecting e-mail addresses and info for developers that want an API key to play with our tech. We’ll automatically add interested people to the Parsely API Developer Google Group. Interesting ideas and discussions should emerge there. Then, within the next couple weeks, we’ll send out API keys to those who signed up.

At the meetup we’ll also discuss our re-vamped Consumer Beta that will launch within the coming months. When we launched our private beta last August, we wanted to release a minimal, productive reading interface that allows users to interact with as much content as they wished. Since then, we’ve been curating feature requests and usage to plan for the next release. We have excellent ideas about how to make the our web application the best reading interface on the web. Expect to hear more about it soon.

Finally, Parse.ly is partnering with a number of high-traffic, original content sites on the web through our Parse.ly Publisher Platform, aka P3. Within the next couple months, you’ll see Parse.ly powering content personalization features ranging from personalized e-mail solutions, to widgets, to full-on Netflix-style experiences. We’ll be rolling this out with some top online publishers, and will let you know once these are live!

Algorithms as a Service and P3

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:28:00 -0500

Mike Singleton of FourSquare recently wrote a blog post entitled, “Algorithms as a Service”:

I think there’s a market opportunity to crease an AAS (algorithms as a service) company which provides simple APIs to implementations of common algorithms… Algorithms as a service would give you development efficiency, problem scalability (access to CPU farms), and confidence in the results.

Andrew chimed in with this:

I think what you’ve identified is that some APIs are about getting data into and out of an existing system that sort of lives on its own — e.g., Twitter’s, FourSquare’s, Flickr’s.

Then, other APIs are about abstracting certain problems and simplifying them to a simple API call. These are “algorithms as a service”.

So, in this category I put things like OpenCalais.com (entity extraction algorithms) and SimpleGeo.com (geolocation algorithms). I also put my own startup, Parse.ly, in this category; see http://parse.ly/p3 and http://parse.ly/api. For Parse.ly, what we’re doing is simplifying the following painful steps:

1) parsing and cleaning RSS/Atom feeds and other content sources in near-real-time
2) building personalized “resonance profiles” for different users that can be trained and queried
3) delivering personalized recommendations (Amazon/Netflix-style) of content to users, that can be listed, searched, and filtered

Our whole value proposition is that, yes, you could build algorithms to do personalized recommendations yourself and in-house, but it’s hard. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes along with it. Your engineering team will spend months — not days — getting it right. So, why not just plug into our nice API instead?

I don’t think it needs a new name — it’s just an evolution of APIs and SaaS given the growing needs of developers to build more complex, dynamic applications and their increasing willingness to license best-of-breed 3rd-party platforms to do so.

January was an exciting month for Parse.ly. At the end of 2009, we were heads-down, polishing our own “algorithms-as-a-service” offering. We aligned our development around a public launch of it at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in NYC, where we were invited to present. Sachin gave a great presentation; here’s what one blogger had to say about it:

Parse.ly, a semantic tool that recommends content, steers users towards content towards personalization and recommendation through their licensed content. When and how [do] personalization really happen? […] Parse.ly collects a little personal interest information from users, “listens” to their content habits and provides recommendations that can be embedded in any number of content applications. Market segmentation data and other demographics fall out of this information naturally. Parse.ly is available to publishers now for integration via their new P3 platform.

At the same time as launching the Parse.ly Publisher Platform (P3), we also put online our API docs and made it possible for you get an API key. Then, we started conversations with some great brands in online / digital publishing (household names, even) about using our platform. These conversations have been going really well — almost too well! These companies know how much more valuable their online properties would be if they were built around engaging, personalized recommendations in the Amazon/Netflix style. And they have a lot of ideas about how to use the data and recommendations P3 will give them. We’ve already started to mock up new user interfaces for our API to make the integration with publishers as smooth as possible.

We’re excited for this new direction for Parse.ly. We agree with Mike that there are opportunities all around us to simplify algorithmically-tough problems to simple and highly-usable APIs. This will not only make web developers more productive, but it will also make the websites we use daily more useful and powerful!

Flavors.me emerges from beta: lifestreaming for the masses

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:09:00 -0500

Our good friends at HiiDef just launched a new app that has been in beta for awhile, Flavors.me. This is an excellent tool that has a great, simple, and usable design.

What’s the value preposition of Flavors.me? It’s to unify your various “online identities” into a single, dynamic, automatically-updated, and elegant website.

From the article:

Flavors.me lets you take all that information and put it together in a single website to serve as your “online identity”. All your publicly shared information, aggregated in one place, and displayed beautifully. […] It’s this kind of simplicity, design sense, and user-centric approach that makes me love the web as a place to develop, deploy, and use software.

Check out Andrew’s full review over at his blog.

Recent Parse.ly Press!

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:59:00 -0500

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, but we’ve been busy changing and improving Parse.ly for the better!

We did, though, get picked up by a couple popular blogs in the past few weeks. Here a few snippets from both ReadWriteWeb and ZDNet.

Bloggers, muckrakers and news fanatics, lend me your ears. It’s entirely possible that we’ve discovered one of the best approaches to media monitoring since RSS itself. My mother always said, “You’ll never get what you want unless you ask.” But with adaptive feed application Parse.ly, that simply isn’t true. Rather than forcing us to abandon our overflowing feed readers, Parse.ly records our preferences and learns to work with us.
ReadWriteWeb 11/11/09

I haven’t figured out a way to manage Google Reader. I tried using Fever, but it doesn’t find news that matters to me… and it cost $30. Techmeme is my home page, but I think it needs an upgrade. I would like a feed reader that saves favorite feeds for me, and finds other content that is similar and interesting.

A new product called Parse.ly caught my eye that makes content discovery a painless process.

ZDNet - The Web Life 11/24/09

Check out our press page for more articles written about Parse.ly. We’ll update you soon about what we have in store for the future!

Parse.ly presentation at NYC Search & Discovery Meetup

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:06:00 -0500

Hi Parse.ly fans. Andrew here. I just wanted to let you know that I presented Parse.ly at the NYC Search & Discovery Meetup on Thurs, Oct. 29. The meetup is organized by Otis Gospodnetic (blog), who is one of the authors of Lucene in Action and the author of the forthcoming Solr in Action book. It was graciously hosted at kgbweb (thanks for making that happen, Joe West!).

We make heavy use of Lucene and Solr on Parse.ly, so it was exciting to get an opportunity to present to a community of fellow technologists building systems with these excellent technologies.

Here is the abstract from the talk:

Parse.ly: Inside a modern RIA built with Solr
Andrew Montalenti
—-
Parse.ly is a rich, adaptive web application that discovers your unique interests to filter and prioritize content from countless news and blog sources on the web. This talk will introduce Parse.ly with a quick demo and then delve right into how the Parse.ly engineering team makes use of the Solr open source search engine. This will include discussion of initial design mistakes that were later revised and “real world issues” that were overcome in scaling a system that currently processes millions of articles per week. Finally, we will discuss the existing Solr and Python landscape, and how we at Parse.ly aim to help the Solr community with the open source release of high-quality, Pythonic components for doing common Solr tasks.

Otis has written about the talk, and the slides are online, as well. Special thanks to my kickass Parse.ly colleague Didier for setting up our BitBucket repository and starting to tease the code out that is ready for the community.

Thanks also to everyone who attended, and if you have any questions about it, feel free to contact us.

Parse.ly back online

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:13:00 -0400

Hi Parse.ly users,

Around 12:16am this morning, Parse.ly’s main database server that powers the Parse.ly news reading interface went down. Unfortunately, our system administrator is on vacation in Greece at the moment — or, should we say, fortunately for him! :-)

I’ve successfully rolled our backups to the failover Parse.ly database server, however since our last complete backup happened before the start of the weekend, approximately 5% of our total users may be affected by some strange behavior until we can recover the data off the original server that turned off today.

If you signed up for Parse.ly over the weekend or activated your account over the weekend, you may no longer be able to sign in with your credentials. If this is the case, feel free to contact us, and we can look into getting you access to your account more quickly.

If you were using Parse.ly over the weekend, you may notice that some of your star / read states may be out of date.

ALL USERS will notice notice a “gap” in your articles for the weekend days, since any articles our system processed over the weekend haven’t yet been reflected in this restored database. Tomorrow, we are going to work hard to recover that last bit of data so that these 5% of directly affected users no longer have the strange experience, and so that the rest have no other issues. But if you notice anything strange that isn’t covered in this blog post, please do contact us to let us know.

Finally, the engineering team here at Parse.ly apologizes for any interruption of service you may have experienced. We are a young service and though we are careful to ensure our systems are backed up and that we have failover servers available for each of our production servers, we do not yet have automated failovers, aka high availability built into our free web application. Tonight’s experience is one of our first lessons about how useful it would be to build out this system. We were fortunate in that today’s outage happened at a relatively off-peak hour, but there is no guarantee this will be the case in the future. Once our sysadmin is back in the states, we’re going to work on making Parse.ly’s disaster recovery more robust, so that users don’t have to suffer the downtime they did tonight. Thanks for baring with us! And we’ll update you on this blog once we’re totally done with the remaining data recovery tasks.

Sorry! Parse.ly is down for some...

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:03:00 -0400

Sorry Parse.ly users, but one of our servers unexpectedly failed on us. As a result, we took Parse.ly down. We’re working hard now roll our backups over to our failsafe and get Parse.ly back up and running. We should back to normal in a few hours. We’ll update this post when we’re all good to go.

New York City DemoDay

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:05:00 -0400

Andrew’s a lifetime New Yorker. He grew up in the city and Long Island (and now lives in Astoria, Queens), and has always been a fan of the New York. I’ve been in NYC for the past eight years bouncing between Mnhattan and Brooklyn (I just moved to Ft. Greene this past weekend), and have grown to love the city

Well, this past week we had the opportunity — the privilege — to present Parse.ly (our baby) at NYC Demo Day, an event focused exclusively on New York City, early-stage startups. You can check out some photos of Andrew and I presenting here.

The event was a blast, as evidenced by Andrew’s inexplicably happy face after it was over (see the photos to see what I mean). Good luck to all the companies: Renthop, Trendsta, SECWatch, LegalRiver, Sensobi, Localytics, Seatgeek, Postling … and, of course, Parse.ly!

Parse.ly releases new version on Sunday, Sept. 20

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:10:00 -0400

If you were trying to log into Parse.ly between 11pm-1am this Sunday, you may have noticed that it was intermittently down for maintenance. Over the last several weeks, we’ve been working hard to roll out some new features, polish some rough edges, and improve our infrastructure after our launch last month. Our first beta users have been amazing in providing us with detailed and specific feedback on what works and doesn’t work well within Parse.ly. We’ve diligently addressed many of the issues raised by these users and rolled out a new version of Parse.ly this weekend.

So, what’s new in Parse.ly?

Faster archiving and deleting: many users have complained that archiving and deleting items in Parse.ly was extremely slow. This was a shortcoming of the beta release we pushed out in August, and we have now rectified this issue. Archiving and deleting should be very speedy, and bulk archives/deletes are just as fast as single ones now.

Keyboard shortcuts: we bill Parse.ly as the most productive way to read the news, but our initial beta users noticed that one productivity feature we are sorely lacking is keyboard shortcuts. We have implemented an experimental cut of keyboard shortcuts in the latest release. Simply click inside the article grid (under “Current Items”) and press the question mark key (?). This will bring up a message box with a list of our keyboard shortcuts. They are very similar to GMail’s; for example, e archives an item, and shift+i marks an item as read.

Username casing problems: we had a silly bug where your username was case-sensitive, even though we use e-mail addresses for usernames. This has been addressed and so now you can use any case you like for your username.

Better De-duplication: we did include a deduplicator in our initial beta release, and we thought it was working pretty well: nearly 50% of the articles processed by our crawler were being deduped. However, many users reported duplicates in their accounts, and when we investigated, we saw that there were many scenarios that fooled our deduper and resulted in an unpleasant reading experience. In particular, resyndicated articles (e.g., those republished after a press release) often had similar titles/summaries but were not exactly the same. So we have included a more aggressive deduper that makes use of fuzzy string matching and seems to work better in the testing we have done so far.

Better sources: we are continuing to improve the breadth and depth of Parse.ly’s sources. We have restructured our crawler so that it gets access to sources that weren’t available before, and also better delivers content based upon your interests.

More frequent crawls: many users were reporting that crawls wouldn’t happen often enough for them, so they wouldn’t see articles published e.g. in their twitter feed right away in Parse.ly. We have re-engineered our crawl infrastructure to be much more performant, which will mean fresher content inside Parse.ly for you.

You can kill the Parse.ly share bar: when you click a link inside Parse.ly, we top-frame it to allow you to share it easily with your friends. However, users rightfully complained that they wanted the ability to easily remove this bar from any page. You spoke, we listened! :-)

Password recovery: some users forgot their passwords and we simply forgot to implement a password recovery feature in our initial release. It’s there now.

User profile editing: users can now change their password from inside the UI. This was an obvious feature just plain missing from the initial release.

We also made some improvements to our Interest Setup Wizard, but this will mostly affect users who first sign up for the system. (You did remember to invite your friends to join Parse.ly, right? :-)) These include:

Better performance when adding new interests: before, there was a bit of a lag when you entered in interests. This should be fixed now.

E-mail is sent to user upon initial setup: some of our users were rightfully confused when they entered in their interests and … nothing happened. We aren’t activating accounts right away, but at the very least, we should send you an e-mail to let you know that your interest entry actually worked! This is fixed now.

We are also working on some big changes within the Parse.ly engineering team to take our product to the next level. We have partnered with our excellent hosting company, The New York NOC (NYNoc ), to scale out our infrastructure and process more content than ever before. We are also planning our future iterations where we hope to innovate and deliver more features to save you time and let you discover the content that best matches your interests.

A Personal Note from Andrew

As the lead developer for Parse.ly, I just want to say “Thanks!” to all our awesome users. The thing that has impressed me most about Parse.ly’s users so far is how detailed, intelligent and thoughtful their feedback has been. We want our company to be driven by your feedback, so please, do not hesitate to provide more of it on our Cog Tree Get Satisfaction Page, on Twitter, or directly via e-mail.

This last few weeks reminds me of something Jim Young, the founder of HotOrNot.com, said to us at DreamIt this summer: “when the site became successful, we were left having to figure out how to change the engine while the car was still running.” It’s going to be a lot of work evolving Parse.ly even while providing the service to our existing users, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Thanks again to all our users for their feedback so far, and I hope you enjoy the new version of Parse.ly! (Also, don’t forget to report any bugs or tell us what is working well for you.) And if you haven’t signed up for Parse.ly yet, what are you waiting for? Do it now at http://parse.ly