Feed Topic has been in private beta for a few weeks now, and there has been a lot of people asking, "what exactly is Feed Topic?"  We started thinking about doing screencasts with our geeky voiceovers, screenshots of the private beta, and even a music video!  But we ended up having our designer, the awesome Tyler Bass, whip something up for you guys to truely understand what we're building.  Hope you enjoy the video introduction!

For those wanting to read more about the origins of Feed Topic, I give you the Superbowl Story (it's for reals, not made up):

Superbowl Story

During the superbowl this year when the Packers played the Steelers, we noticed a huge problem.  Most of our friends were on Fanvibe.com talking trash, but I knew for sure there were more friends watching the game who weren't on Fanvibe yet.  I headed over to Facebook and tried to see which of my Facebook friends were watching the game and what they were saying.  Unfortunately, I only saw two posts in the strange "Top News" sort on Facebook, and two cross posts from Fanvibe on the "Most Recent" sort.

The problem of getting all your friends watching a sporting event in one place, earning points and free tickets, predicting plays, and just giving context to everything was still broken on Facebook.  Let's face it (hehe), Facebook has probably the most complete representation of your entire socialgraph in terms of "internet hubs".  Fanvibe solves it for most of your friends, but those who are still lonely and lost on Facebook are still missing out.  Or worse, you're missing out on them.

Heck, even those who breathe Twitter are cross posting to their close friends into Facebook.  So we decided, let's solve this problem straight into Facebook.  Enter "Feed Topic"

Feed Topic will solve problems of missing out on topics your friends are talking about in many ways.  Organizing your newsfeed into events and topics on FeedTopic.com is only the first step.  Browser extensions which improve your Facebook.com experience without a new site are coming, a mobile app doing the same thing will give you updates on the go, and following events and topics will activate some awesome email updates on the newest posts your friends have made.

Signup for the Beta

Interested in trying it out?  We're giving away groups of beta invites every day!  Signup on http://beta.feedtopic.com

Remember how excited you get when you're about to show something to the world and you really hope it will be as cool to some people as it is to you?  That's how I feel right now.  I'm also freaking out a bit that people won't think it's that cool, but seriously, when you see it there's no way that could happen.

We have a few super exclusive invites to give out (which is just ninja speak for how we love all who sign up for a beta invite, and want you to feel crazy good about it), and we'll start handing them out quickly.  The biggest reason for the beta invites is that we're still doing early testing and a lot of things are changing every few minutes on the site, which includes cool things that requires us to pay out of our own pockets when we have a lot of users.  Of course this won't happen when we're officially launched out of beta, but that's what betas are good for, testing and growing in a controlled fashion.

Also fun and a shameless self plug: the photo we decided to use was one I took from Treasure Island of the San Francisco skyline.  Bay bridge on left, financial district in the middle, and nob hill etc. to the right.

I don't know about you, but I'm so excited that I'll probably send everyone invites right away until this coffee wears out, then I'll be sleeping.  So get in before I'm out!  The whole team has been working hard on this for a week now, we hope you like it!

http://feedtopic.com

FeedTopic will start releasing beta invites soon.  FeedTopic has been developed by Joe Pestro and Art Chang.  Leave a comment if you're interested in participating.

This is the fun blog for FeedTopic.

FeedTopic is your Facebook news feed, now with smart topics!

Developed by Joe Pestro and Art Chang

Designs by Tyler Bass

Business Development by Vishwas Prabhakara