Fast3r Beta Launches - Your New Tool For The Moto World

If you’re like me there are dozens of motorcycle related websites that you check on a varying basis. Some are daily reads, some are bi-weekly reads and some are perhaps once a month reads. Yet as the web continues to grow and expand it’s often times hard to keep track of all your favorite sites, all of the newest, coolest websites, and more importantly all of the news that you might be interested in, whether that’s who won a race or which brand introduced a new model to wet your appetite and thin your wallet.

Enter Fast3r.com with a cutting edge solution; The site is a brand new way to look at the motorcycle website landscape and it’s part news aggregation service, part motorcycle community and part technological revolution.

Several months ago I was asked to take part in the ‘private beta’ version of the site and in a matter of a few short weeks it became one of my favorite motorcycle sites on the net. Not only does Fast3r act like your trusted RSS News Feed program - except better - but the site also has a uniquely cunning web engine behind it that on more then one occasion has opened my eyes to a story that I probably never would have found on my own.

Late last week the site transitioned from a ‘private beta’ to a ‘public beta’ and avid motorcyclist and Fast3r head honcho Lowell Goss (who fwiw I’ve known for years) agreed to sit down with Twisting Asphalt to talk a bit more about the site and what we can expect from it in the coming days…

Twisting Asphalt: What’s the goal of fast3r for a motorcycle enthusiast?

Lowell Goss: FAST3R is meant to be the place you go everyday to satisfy your appetite to know what’s up in motorcycling. We are attempting to bring motorcyclists all of the world of motorcycle news and also make it easy to find only the best stuff or only the stuff about the niche you really care about. We have pages for most of the brands, race series and riding styles from supermoto to adventure touring to superbike. Fast3r allows you to share what you read with friends or follow what your friends are reading. Fast3r is also a way to participate in the community. It’s a central place to submit the cool story you find that you want to share and to comment on what you read.

TA: How did you come up with the idea for Fast3r?

LG: I am a serious motorcyclist (Dylan’s words, not mine) and I thought there were at least a couple of problems. I had some great sites that I read everyday, but I felt like I was missing tons of stuff that WOULD be interesting if I only knew where it was and wanted to put in hours to find it. So I guess there are really three problems. The first is being overwhelmed by a flood of stories, lots of duplicates and variable quality. The second was feeling like motorcycling online didn’t have a central place for the larger community to gather. And the third was feeling that I was also missing cool stuff buried in somebody’s blog or on some news site that was not know to me or my friends. If you go to wikipedia or digg or google, those places aren’t first and foremost about riding and bikes. They are tools. It takes a lot of work day after day to find cool stuff and that’s after wading through LOTS of irrelevant stuff. As a motorcyclist I wanted a place that was broad and deep and ONLY about motorcycles.

TA: Let’s talk statistics - how many feeds currently are being used or accessed by the Fast3r engine? How many stories does it promote on a daily basis? Does it change hourly?

LG: The Fast3r semantic publishing engine reads about 350 feeds all about motorcycling. We also have a number of non-feed inputs so we can help the audience find content that may not have their own feed. It reads about 5000 stories a day and we publish about 1/10 of those onto the site after filtering for duplication and relevant content. All of the content gets autotagged and published to what we call topic pages. Valentino Rossi has a page. Ducati has a page. We update the site about once every 5 minutes or less. We strive to be VERY up to date.

TA: Ok, now you’re a serious motorcyclists yourself - how’d you get started riding? What bikes have you owned? Which was your favorite?

LG: Like a lot of guys I started because a friend let me ride his bike. We were at the Rose Bowl and he was showing me his new Yamaha Seca II. I asked if I could give it a try. He stupidly agreed. I gave it too much gas, pulled an accidental wheelie and scared the shit out of myself. Weirdly I was hooked, but to this day do not know how to wheelie on purpose. I have owned a number of bikes. The first was a Ducat 750 Monster. It had been a press bike and I got a screaming deal from Earl at Pro Italia. After that I had BMWs, new and old, a non-running trials bike a Yamaha R6 and a couple others. The title of favorite is tough. I have a real soft spot for Ducati’s. My S4R was incredibly cool. The Multistrada was the best all around bike. These days I am hooked on orange bikes from Austria. The only bike in the garage is a KTM 950 Supermoto. My wish list is very long though, so maybe it’ll get a garage-mate soon.

TA: One of the things I really like about fast3r is that it combines my moto news with a community aspect — how does that part of the system work? Can anyone add anything at any time?

LG: Any registered user can contribute. We’ve tried to make it super easy to build an informal community around any story and any topic. People can comment on any story or video. If you find something cool you can click “submit a story” and share it with the world in a couple seconds. We have some very clever software in place that reads the stuff people submit to ensure that it’s about motorcycling. We also encourage people to submit topics that we may have missed or sites we don’t know about yet. If people have an RSS feed for their site that means they can automatically submit stories every time they add something new.

TA: Now ‘beta’ is a big phrase in our online world today — what does that mean when it comes to fast3r — i.e. What can we expect to see in the future?

LG: Beta means we’re not done yet. Not by long shot. We are already working on a redesign, faster page loads, personalization and lots more. We will also be releasing a pro version for people who really don’t want to miss a single story.