Where Are They Now? A Look at A Dozen Services That Debuted Here

Near the end of 2007, I first came across a service I had hoped would one day challenge Google Reader for the throne of coolest RSS feed reader, Assetbar. With social aspects including shared statistics and comments, it had the potential to become the future of where RSS feed readers were going. While that hasn't yet come to pass, it did mark the first time a service debuted on LouisGray.com.

In the ensuing 9 months or so, I've been lucky enough to either stumble upon, or get engaged with entrepreneurs early enough in the process, such that this site was where they first got started. Some of them have gone on to incredible visibility and success. One has already closed shop. Another looks dormant, and others, somewhere in between. I'll hold off on giving a rating, or "stars" assigned to their success, but believe me, it's tempting.

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Assetbar
Debut: September 17, 2007
Post: Assetbar Set to Launch With Google Reader Inspiration

The Goal: To deliver a next-generation RSS feed reader with integrated commenting, shared link lists, and the ability to see if friends had seen or liked an article.

Status: After gaining the attention of ReadWriteWeb and Mashable, as well as a few follow-up stories here, Assetbar gained several hundred users, but rather than rocketing upward in popularity, issues with the confusing user interface, and prioritizing features over speed had even early adopters not sticking around. The site's gone into something of hibernation and maintenance mode, while the developers consider where to take their participatory social media platform next.

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BlogRize
Debut: April 7, 2008
Post: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers

The Goal: Build a community around a blog, and find new interesting items.

Status: Recently profiled by ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez, who is everywhere, BlogRize has hundreds of users joining communities like ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and LouisGray.com to see what others like them are sharing and commenting on. Updates so far have been somewhat quiet, thanks to developer Jesse Spaulding's recent move to Seattle.

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LinkRiver
Debut: February 13, 2008
Post: LinkRiver Enters Life Streaming Fray, Focused on Link Blogs

The Goal: To let friends follow shared items activity from multiple people in one place.

Status: LinkRiver has a big fan in Corvida of SheGeeks (LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme), and with interesting wrinkles including Attention data, which tracks what you share most often, and the ability to tag items for later viewing, developer Adam Stiles has created a lightweight (in a good way), informative site to find the most popular items of the day, or to see what friends are sharing, without the noise of some other social aggregators.

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MergeLab
Debut: March 4, 2008
Post: Mergelab Emerges to Streamline Friends' Web Updates

The Goal: To follow friends' activity on the Web in a single location.

Status: Mergelab announced last Friday that the site would close down by the end of June. Without revenue, and with competition, the decision was made to exit the game early.

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Rating Burner
Debut: January 30, 2008
Post: Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats

The Goal: To show the most popular FeedBurner feeds, and daily changes.

Status: While not widely known, Rating Burner is quietly doing its job, adding more and more feeds to its library. The developer even added the option to display a Rating Burner badge on your blog so you can show your own ranking from the site.

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ReadBurner
Debut: January 7, 2008
Post: ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items

The Goal: Find the most common shared items in Google Reader.

Status: ReadBurner took off like a phoenix, but after gaining rave reviews from across the Web, the site's lead developer shut down the site, only to see a trio of entrepreneurs, including Mashable's Adam Ostrow, buy its technology and get it up and running again. ReadBurner 2.0 debuted on April 15th and has continued to innovate, issuing an iPhone version of the site, and today, adding support for shared items from NetVibes.

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RSSmeme
Debut: February 6, 2008
Post: RSSmeme Debuts as ReadBurner Clone

The Goal: Find the most common shared items in Google Reader

Status: RSSmeme took advantage of ReadBurner's downtime, and has more shared link blogs in play than anybody else on the Web. RSSmeme also debuted helpful integration for bloggers who want to show how often their items have been shared, and recently integrated notes from Google Reader.

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Shyftr
Debut: March 4, 2008
Post: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings

The Goal: Develop a RSS Feed Reader for friends to share favorite items and make comments.

Status: Shyftr recently added OPML importing, on the back of debuting shared link blogs, making it even more competitive with Google Reader, as Mark Hopkins of Mashable and the Download Squad noted. The service still has a way to go to get in the mainstream, and it will take some time for them to escape the dubious honor of getting Bitchmemed last month, but they continue to work hard.

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SocialMedian
Debut: April 8, 2008
Post: Former Jobster CEO's Social|Median Incubating in Alpha

The Goal: A social news service, personalized based on your favorite topics.

Status: As mentioned Tuesday, SocialMedian is seeing strong growth, even in their alpha stage, growing to 2,599 alpha users, as of this post. The growth in the user base has resulted in a higher amount of interesting news, more clipped items, and the GUI has gotten much stronger in the last month.

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TheStatBot
Debut: May 1, 2008
Post: The StatBot Launches to Analyze Blog and Web Trends, Statistics

The Goal: To analyze blog trends and statistics with insightful commentary.

Status: Yuvi Panda is now posting 2 to 3 new articles a week, starting with Scoble's Twitter feed, and now, dissecting Digg and the Techmeme Leaderboard. His latest post, from Tuesday, highlights those sites most likely to be in the "Discussion" section of TechMeme, not a featured item.

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Toluu
Debut: March 24, 2008
Post: Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones

The Goal: Share your OPML with friends and find new feeds.

Status: Growing like a weed, Caleb Elston's pet project has ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez enamored and just yesterday, Elston announced he continues to upgrade the site, deleting more than 60,000 duplicate feeds, the kind of attention to important detail that has people coming back again and again.

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Yokway
Debut: March 2, 2008
Post: YokWay! Weeks Away from Launching "Digg for Friends"-like Service

The Goal: Share items, videos, and pictures with friends and have conversations.

Status: According to Yokway insiders, traffic to the site is catching up to FriendFeed and beating out SocialMedian, but aside from my coverage, and that from the Last Podcast, they haven't had nearly the exposure of FriendFeed, so that would be a surprise to me. The site has a few hundred visitors, from what I can tell, most activity is still from a select few dozen. Over the last 24 hours, there were 25 items shared for discussion. While the user interface is interesting, as is the application, it hasn't yet gained a lot of public awareness.

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While this list is long, it's certainly a speck compared to that which blog powers like TechCrunch could debut. I've been lucky to play the role of early adopter, and there are a few more items out there cooking which should show up soon. But on the whole, I'm pretty pleased with the efforts made by just about every single one of the players above. ReadBurner and Toluu for starters, changed the game. Others are must-visit sites for me. But in this fast-moving industry, if you're not fast-moving, you might as well quit. I'm looking forward to keeping this going.

Profy Rolls Out Combined RSS Reader, Blogging Platform

Profy wasn't satisfied by simply rolling out a brand-new online RSS feed reader to challenge the established leaders, including Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines. With one massive update, the new service, launched in beta yesterday, not only gives Web users a new option for RSS feed consumption, but also, a new blogging platform, with interesting features that integrate the two, as well as linking in to other Web services, including Blogger.

While the world isn't lacking for RSS readers, Profy's combined offering is very interesting. With some fine-tuning as the company moves out of the beta process, the service could be very compelling to both established bloggers and new ones looking for a simplified platform to get started.

There are a few facets to Profy to focus on, including the "Feed Reader", the "Blog", the "Dashboard" and their messaging system or "Inbox".

The Feed Reader operates much like others out there. I imported my 260 or so feeds from Google Reader, and Profy recognized the folder structure. The Feed Reader is laid out cleanly with multiple tabs, enabling me to select from "Posts", reading the available items, "Feeds", showing me the name of the feed, its URL, and giving me the option to make edits, and "Folders", matching those I had in my OPML file.

I can read posts in list view, showing the source, feed name and author, or I can select expanded view, showing the entire post in the reader. Those are the basics. And aside from adding keyboard shortcuts, like Google Reader and AssetBar, there's not too much to demand before the company hits 1.0.


In the Feed Reader, I can "Add Star" to highlight a post, E-mail it to a friend, add tags, or most interestingly, I can hit "Blog It!", which pre-populates a post in my complementing Profy blog, including the full text and links of the post. Profy essentially copies the full text and headline of the post in my own blog, with me as the author, leaving the deleting to me. It's a cool tool, but one I could see abused by spam bloggers, should they ever get into the system. In my testing, it was easy to use, and I could simply post a Facebook story as my own (See the below screenshot). Profy does give credit to the source in the bottom right corner of your own post, but I expect it'd be a bit better to tweak "Blog It!" to instead focus on the headline and URL.


The Feed Reader also offers some strong flexibility. I can search my feeds for keywords, and I can look at the "Subscribers" link on any feed to see if other Profy readers are subscribed to that same blog. From those results, I can even "Add to friends" to get connected to similar Profy users who like reading what I do.


The Blog operates like those in TypePad and Blogger. There are a wide array of blogging templates provided by Profy, and you're given a Profy URL, like TypePad, with your own username: (For example: louisgray.profy.com)


Once you've selected a blog template, you can edit the layout of your blog, make new posts, or further down the road, read or moderate comments on the site.


Posting to Profy is simple for any TypePad or Blogger user. There's the option to post in either WYSIWYG or HTML, and you can use helpful buttons for styling or for adding images and YouTube video.

But most interesting to me is the ability to cross-post to Blogger or other platforms from Profy. If I were to move to Profy as my RSS reader or blogging platform, I wouldn't have to change a thing on louisgray.com. I wouldn't have to move files from the FTP site, or tweak Blogger in any way, as Profy could cross-populate both the Profy.com hosted blog and my own, just by linking the two. In testing, it was transparent to me that both posts from my Profy blog hit the louisgray.com site. To be honest, I was hoping to make it less transparent, so I could "push" individual posts to louisgray.com or Techaiku, instead of it happening automatically, but I expect either I was missing a step, or they'll make that option in the future by the 1.0 release.

Once the Feed Reader and Blog are up and running, you can manage all activity via Profy's Dashboard. From the Dashboard, I can view blog posts, read feeds, see comments made on my blog, or exchange messages with other Profy users. And any friends I've found through Profy automatically populate my Network, which assuming service growth, would expand over time.


Click for larger Dashboard image
For a beta product, Profy has done a solid job in introducing a lot of good functionality not usually found even in some of the more established feed readers, or blogging platforms. The idea of linking the feed reader and blog, while not abandoning existing services, is a good one. Obstacles in their way, aside from the usual efforts of growing awareness, and keeping up with user expectations, would be to follow the lead of Fav.or.it or others to enable commenting from RSS feed readers to the original blog, integration of Disqus in either area, and the ultra-important area of keyboard feed navigation.

The question is, can Profy rise up, in 2008, to challenge the established leadership of TypePad, WordPress and Blogger? The big three hold a commanding mindshare and user base, which is formidable. But so long as Profy makes it transparent and easy to move data into their service from others, and continues on the path of innovating and linking their disparate services, they have as good a chance as any.

If you're interested in getting your hands on Profy, it is in limited invite-only beta. I believe I have five available, but with any luck, I can get more. Let me know if you're interested!

Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?

One of the more frequently mentioned suggestions for avid Google Reader users is the addition of comments to the service, so RSS readers could respond to blog posts, either directly from the reader and back to the originating blog, or within the Google Reader community itself, in effect, becoming a social network. But while Google Reader has not yet enabled comments, other services are, and it seems the excitement of adding this capability is hardly universal - and its opponents have gone so far as to call it "outrageous" or "theft".

While the discussion around where a blog's comments should reside has raised its head before, especially around services like FriendFeed, (See: Sarah Perez of Read Write Web: Blog Comments Still Matter) it flared up again this afternoon when I had (innocently, I thought) highlighted how one friend's blog post from earlier in the week was getting a lot of comments, and had become the most popular story on Shyftr, a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.

While I had hoped the author (Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist, who I highlighted on Monday and like quite a bit) would be pleased to see his post had gained traction, the reaction was not what I had expected. He said he was uneasy about seeing his posts generate activity and community for somebody else. Another FriendFeed user called it "content theft" and said "if they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice". (See the discussion here)

I can see how content creators can feel threatened or wary of services who leverage full RSS feeds, or might actually have a case if they have publicly asked for no repurposing of their content, via Creative Commons or other methods. But I also see that the whole idea of reading feeds in isolation, without engaging, is going to soon be something of the past. AssetBar, Social|Median and Shyftr have been among the first to add comments in their site. Fav.or.it, via Disqus, offers the ability to post comments to the originating blogs. FriendFeed, RSSMeme and many, many others offer links to the content but contents on their site. And that's not even touching on the social news sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc., where comments and community are generated, essentially through leveraging third party headlines.

As a blogger, I am a content creator. I don't want my content stolen, or reposted without attribution or under somebody else's name. But I am also a huge advocate of RSS and continuing to adapt where the conversation is being held. Just as my blog's RSS views have undoubtedly eclipsed my blog page views, I would not be surprised to see that more comments on my posts might eventually live outside of my blog. It would behoove me and other bloggers to be aware of the other places the conversation will be taking place, and to engage there, in my opinion, rather than railing against the continued evolution of how we're consuming content and engaging online.

Even the conversation about this issue has escaped the blogosphere. Eric, on FriendFeed writes, "It's slightly troubling that this conversation is taking place here instead of on one of our blogs," but it's not so much troubling in my mind, but instead requires a changing mindset.

The Web as a whole has clamored for full RSS feeds, not partial, so we don't have to return to the originating site. Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we're starting to see what it's like, maybe it's not what we had fully anticipated. But it's the way things are headed, and rather than label innovators like Matt Shaulis (Twitter | FriendFeed) and Dave Stanley of Shyftr (Twitter | FriendFeed) as outrageous or possibly illegitimate, we should engage and speak up about what we think is right. As for the developers who enable these services, there are definitely ways they can help raise the visibility of the practice - through e-mail alerts, trackbacks, or even giving the option to opt out. But we'll be seeing this more and more going forward. I promise you that.

Fav.or.it Beta Effort is Not My Favorite. Not Even Close.

Sometimes the concept behind a new service ends up being much better than the actual experience. And try as I might to find out what it is I'm missing about a "good on paper" product, it occasionally happens that holes in the product, a confusing user interface, or a smattering of bugs can get in the way of recognizing its true potential. Unfortunately, so far my experience with Fav.or.it, a new next generation RSS feed reader, has been one disappointment after another, taking what should be an evolutionary step in the way we share data and interoperate with feeds and instead, throwing roadblocks and confusing processes that will surely thwart the site's ability to attract significant users.

I first became excited about Fav.or.it's potential to compete with Google Reader after seeing Robert Scoble's initial gushing back in December. The concept behind Fav.or.it sounds wonderful - offering a fully-developed RSS feed reader with a river of news interface, integrated commenting which feeds back to the originating blog, and a detailed directory of blogs, from technology to news and even sports.

When Fav.or.it opened its public beta in late February, I was excited to see that blogs with Disqus could integrate comments. Also promising attention data and a full API, it seemed the service would be well on its way to being a serious challenger.

But from day one, I've had issues getting Fav.or.it to even function at a basic level. I'm no stranger to beta products with raw edges or underbaked features, but trying to figure out Fav.or.it, or get the service to even find my RSS subscriptions has been one headache after another - one major reason I'd held off discussing Fav.or.it until now, hoping I was just missing something.

In March, I traded e-mails with Fav.or.it founder Nick Halstead, saying it didn't seem "100% transparent to me", and he mentioned having "teething problems" common to any new site, so again, I figured the site would eventually come around. But it hasn't yet been the case.


Fav.or.it choked on my Google Reader OPML every time.
The very first step to creating a service that can compete with Google Reader is enabling simple OPML import to get the feeds I read today into another system. Fav.or.it makes me think it would be easy, but every time I would upload my Google Reader subscription list, I was told the data was in the wrong format - nothing more. Just a failure. There was also the option to add URLs one by one, so I tried that, adding a handful of my favorite sites. Only then did I see a warning that Fav.or.it was only allowing upwards of 25 feeds to be added, less than 5 percent of what Google Reader is handling today for me.


Everywhere I turned, more limits and warnings...
Even nuttier, I was met with warnings when I imported my sites, being told every feed I added would be available to the community at large, not just to me. Further, I was told I couldn't upload feed mashups, Non-English feeds, Spam, Shopping or Porn. While I hadn't planned to do so, the feeling within Fav.or.it was extremely hostile, without the feelings of security you get in Google Reader or other feed readers.

Fav.or.it also wasn't very bright as to handling the few sites I did put in by hand. I had provided upwards of a dozen unique feed URLs, of which half were from FeedBurner. Fav.or.it tried to resolve the feeds, and lumped all those that started with "http://feeds.feedburner.com/" as one single feed. Obviously, that didn't work, so I saw the dozen I tried to put in quickly whittled down to about five. And in contrast to the near-instant adding of feeds to Google Reader, Toluu, Shyftr or AssetBar, Fav.or.it showed a lengthy progress bar, testing my patience.

Slowly, but surely, Fav.or.it managed to import one feed...

But, eventually they did import, and I could add these new feeds to what Fav.or.it calls a "slice". I can view the RSS feeds, in river view, and even see integrated comments for those who use Disqus. One of the major selling points of Fav.or.it has been the ability to defragment the conversation and bring comments back to the original blog.


Fav.or.it in action, showing comments in line...

But while that's nice, and noble, it certainly couldn't overcome the interface oddities I seemingly encountered at every turn. My slice "Tech Blogs" was marked with a number of 1110, with no seeming rhyme or reason, and clicking the 1110 showed Twitter, del.icio.us or send to a friend, without any indication of what clicking those items would do. Clicking the first two items gave me a checkmark, but no action.

What fav.or.it does bring to the table is a detailed blog directory, organized by humans, into categories, much like Jason Calacanis' Mahalo. But for me, I'm not all that interested in finding new sites for Drink, Spirituality, Government and Weather, among the options shown. For an RSS feeder really to blow me away, I need to be able to read my feeds, and take action. On Google Reader, that action is sharing or e-mailing. On AssetBar, that action is sharing, talking with others or rating an item. On FriendFeed and Yokway, it's commenting and liking or giving stars. But while fav.or.it does enable comments back to the blog, unlike the other services, who delivered on their core mission, they never gave me what I really wanted in the first place, a solid feed reader that could handle more than 25 feeds.


Help! Wait... there is no help.
And if that wasn't bad enough, when I finally gave up and went looking for help, giving in to the possibility I'm such a tech dummy that I was missing the obvious, I clicked through to the Frequently Asked Questions area (FAQ). Sure enough, it was blank.

So I guess nobody has any questions. But I sure do - how can you take a service with such good design, slap on so many features that sound compelling, and then reverse optimize it so I'm completely incapable of using it? I'm typically fairly forgiving for well-intended entrepreneurs that are working hard on what could be excellent products, but things have to change dramatically for me to give fav.or.it another run. I need to get all my Google Reader feeds into the system. And the system needs to be ready for people to use it, not for people to be stuck due to its many limitations.

Toluu Offers Gateway to Friends' RSS Feeds, Recommends New Ones

While Google Reader, Shyftr, AssetBar and others have developed strong options for online RSS feed reading, it's still not easy to learn what feeds your friends read, and what feeds you're missing, which could be of interest to you. Now, a new entrant into the market, Toluu, aims to fit this niche, giving you a new resource to match your RSS OPML exploits against those of your contacts, or even find new people who share the same interests, or new feeds.

The concept behind Toluu is fairly simple. First, login. Second, upload an OPML file you've exported from your current feed reader. Third, mark which of your feeds are your favorites. Then, by clicking "matches", you can learn which other Toluu users share your interests, indicated by a %. You can browse those individuals' feeds, see which you are most likely to appreciate, those feeds you both share, and which you aren't viewing.


Toluu says Caleb and I are 79% compatible...
While you can choose to browse feeds in Toluu, it's not aiming to fully replace your feed reader of choice just yet. Its beginnings arose not with the intent of becoming a world power, but instead, to enable you and your friends to share and discover new feeds.


The Toluu feed reader in action on How to Split an Atom
"Toluu got started one day at work when some friends at the office sent me some posts from blogs I had never heard of before. It seemed remarkable that I read over 150 feeds in Google Reader and yet my friends had found blogs that I really enjoyed, but had never read before," lead developer Caleb Elston wrote in an e-mail. "I set out to create a site that was focused on sharing the feeds you read with friends and discovering new interesting feeds. I did not want to create another feed reader, there are many fantastic feed readers out there and new ones being launched and updated everyday."


My Toluu Profile, with Favorites...
Toluu is a lightweight utility that sits between the original source of the information, and your primary feed reader. Toluu even offers a simple solution enabling users to add a feed to both Toluu and their feed reader of choice, by adding a bookmarklet, which first adds the feed to Toluu, and then continues to your preferred solution. In the weeks I've been trying Toluu out, it's been remarkably easy to add feeds to both Toluu and Google Reader, rather than worrying my various OPML files were all getting out of sync.

Toluu also gets smarter as activity increases, thanks to collaborative filtering. Based on your reading habits, and those of your friends, individual feeds can be tagged as "favorites" or "fantastic", rising throughout the user community, also letting you find new recommended feeds you might not have known ever existed. And over time, Toluu is designed, not to find the blogs that are one-hit wonders, with the occasional interesting story, but instead, to find those you'll be returning to time and again - this time, with a little help from your friends.

Learn more about Toluu on the Toluu Blog, see my profile at http://www.toluu.com/louisgray, or request a beta invite. Of course, you can always leave a note in the comments with your e-mail, and we'll be sure to get you in the door. After all, for social services like Toluu, the more friends we have actively participating, the better the service will get.

10 Suggestions for Google Reader, One Year Later

On March 3rd of last year, I posted one of the more active and popular posts in louisgray.com's history, offering my thoughts on where I hoped Google Reader would take the service. In a simple "10 suggestions" format, I listed some ideas that were small enhancements, and others, more broad. Now that we've had just over a year go by, I thought it'd be interesting to check back in with Google Reader and see what's changed. How many of the 10 did they hit, and if they didn't get it, who did?

In my opinion, you'll see that due to Google Reader's not filling all the gaps I laid out a year ago, a cottage industry of RSS readers and link aggregators has emerged - great for the Web, not always so great for Google.

1. "More Like This" Suggestions

I asked Google to recommend feeds based on those I subscribed to.

Google added a broad "Suggestions" feature, based on all my feeds in aggregate. They haven't implemented this feature on a feed by feed basis, as in my example: "Others who subscribed to Jeremy Zawodny also subscribed to Don Dodge or Robert Scoble.", but they do get partial credit here.

Who did implement something like this the way I asked? Nobody, really. AssetBar claimed to have solved this in their initial product description, but I haven't yet seen it. NewsGator, Shyftr, Fav.or.it, also don't do it, as far as I can tell. Neither does RSSMeme, although the service does try to find similar posts, and FriendFeed offers recommended user subscriptions.

(Of interest, I'm beta testing one solution that does exactly this. More on that soon.)

2. Eliminate Duplicate Feed Items

Nobody likes getting the same feed item over and over. Over the year, Google has done a lot of work here to have this fixed. There are still issues with seeing duplicate items if you have subscribed to a friend's shared items feed, or if you've subscribed to keywords via Google News, but largely, this is not as big an issue in 2008 as it was in 2007.

Who else fixed the duplicate items issue? Shyftr's implementation here is flawless. AssetBar also does a fantastic job showing just one item, though if I look at an item I've already viewed, through a friend's shared link list, it doesn't always know I've already seen it. The issue of duplicate items continues to be a major point of discussion on FriendFeed and elsewhere.

3. Add Negative Keywords

For some folks, I'd like the option to get almost all their posts, except when they talk about politics (Dave Winer), fatblogging (Jason Calacanis), or if they just post a series of del.icio.us links (Steve Rubel and Chris Brogan come to mind).

Google hasn't done anything here. But Ionut at Google Operating System highlighted a new Greasemonkey script that works in FireFox to approach this by highlighting posts with keywords you select and grays out those you would like to exclude (See the post: Filters for Google Reader).

Who does do this right? AssetBar again claimed to when introducing their product, but if it's integrated, I haven't seen it.

4. Share Items Without Subscriptions

I'd like to add items to my shared link items feed without subscribing.

While Google didn't do anything about this, I discussed a work-around back in January.

Who does this right? Just about all the link aggregators, including LinkRiver, AssetBar and FriendFeed let you share items without subscriptions. ReadBurner had implemented this as well before Alexander Marktl had to take the site down.

5. Aggregate Reader Statistics

I wanted to know the most frequently read blogs, and what were the most shared items that day.

Google Reader recently added a "Details" item, showing how many Google Reader users were subscribed to a specific blog, but they're nowhere on showing rankings or seeing the most popular shared items in a single day.

Who does this now? As discussed a ton here in 2008, the shared items space took off like a rocket. FeedHeads had done a fantastic job and pioneered this space, on FaceBook, while ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Shared Reader, and LinkRiver all offer details on most popular shared items. Amusingly, in an attempt to discover the most popular items by Google Reader, everybody from Scoble to TechCrunch was fighting to add the data they did have by hand.

6. Addition of Search

At the time, Google Reader was missing core Google functionality - search!

The Google Reader team solved this one in a big way back in September. Nice job.

Who else offers search through feeds? LinkRiver, AssetBar, RSSMeme, and Shyftr all do this very well. So far, Fav.or.it does not, and FriendFeed I'm sure will, but hasn't gotten there yet.

7. Create a Link Blogs Directory

I wanted to see a directory of Google Reader link blogs both ranked by name and by interest.

Google Reader, so far, has largely neglected the power and discovery of link blogs, so this is nowhere.

Who does do this? RSSMeme offers a directory of the most active link bloggers, based on total number of shared items, as did ReadBurner. AssetBar integrates shared link blogs and shows which ones are most read by individuals, but doesn't yet have aggregate data. Nobody has mastered a directory by name, by topic, or by subscriber count yet.

8. Further Integrate "Trends"

I wanted my trends data to be easily accessible from Google Reader.

Google Reader integrated Trends relatively quickly. It was an easy fix.

Who else does this? LinkRiver, as noted last night, features a page called "Attention" on who I share more often and what are the top keywords. FriendFeed offers a "Stats" page showing who I interact with the most, and who interacts with me. RSSMeme integrated global statistics, but not by user. And AssetBar shows all my stats on my profile, in aggregate.

9. Expand Individual Feed Statistics

I'd love to see stats by feed as to their schedule, and if things have changed.

Google Reader has shown basic statistics on how often a feed publishes. (i.e. loisgray.com publishes 10.7 stories per week) But beyond this, more data is missing.

Who else does this? RSSMeme offers the ability to see what the most popular shared items were, by source, which is very interesting, considering individual post popularity, but nobody that I'm aware of has tackled the expanded feed statistics set.

10. Customization Everywhere

Google Reader, unlike iGoogle or other portals, comes in one flavor. So does their link blog.

In the year since my initial post, Google added the ability to customize a small profile to include in my link blog, with links out to other sites, but with that exception, there remains no customization for my application interface or the shared items blog.

Who does do this? Not really anybody comes to mind. iGoogle, My Yahoo! and portal sites that have integrated RSS feeds enable a great deal of customization, but as far as the main application's interface is concerned, it's usually a take it or leave it strategy.

It can be seen that Google has made some strides toward my 10 suggestions. They integrated trends. They nailed Search. They added suggestions. They improved by reducing duplicates. But they dramatically fell short when it came to harnessing the power of link blogs, and this gap enabled more focused services to emerge to fill the hole - services which are now growing and becoming very interesting. The Reader team has also largely stayed quiet, making it uncertain as to whether we should look to them for innovation, or elsewhere. There's no question Google Reader is a fantastic application, one I use multiple times a day, and one I haven't yet seen eclipsed, even by the next generation readers, enough so to get me to switch. But if they get out-innovated, that time may eventually pass.

Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings

In the world of online RSS feed readers, there are the most popular options, like Google Reader, BlogLines and NewsGator, and just below the radar, there lies a group of new entrants to the market, who are looking to change the game through more interactive features - using innovation to potentially gain ground on the big brand names. One interesting entrant is Shyftr, which combines the ease of an online feed reader with the ability to find friends, make shared comments on feed items, and see which are the most popular feeds.


Most popular feeds, and how many have them "Shyfted".

In early beta now, Shyftr has only a few dozen users, and isn't yet overloaded with tech heads, showing a good mix of sports fans, offbeat news and a smattering of gadget lust. What it lacks so far in a thriving user community, it makes up for in potential, echoing some of the pleas I made almost a year ago in 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader, when I first asked for the ability to aggregate user statistics, and mirrors some of the work AssetBar has done in this space, through offering comments to RSS items, and shared comments that can be viewed by all the service's users, along with displaying the most frequently commented items or most popularly subscribed feeds.


Shyftr in action, reading posts in line, with feeds on the left.

Dave Stanley, the founder of Shyftr, came up with his concept for the site about a year and a half ago. As he wrote me in an e-mail last month, he wanted to see what feeds his friends were reading, "and have the ability to quickly add a feed of interest to the list of feeds that I read - a social rss reader." But six months after his idea didn't come to pass from anywhere else, he set out on his own, and with a small team, Dave has seen the service develop to where it is today, offering to give users a single place to read all feeds, share with friends, and discover new sites.

As I stated in December, "Reading one's RSS feeds today is a journey of isolation." Shyftr now breaks through that isolation booth, letting you add friends, make comments on their profiles, or even suggest feeds directly from Shyftr. In fact, Dave, now the proud father of a 5-month old daughter, saw my wife and I are expecting twins, and suggested I check out the feed for Babygadget. We'll see about that, but I liked his thinking. From within Shyftr, I too can suggest any subscribed feed to any friend.

The best way to get feeds into Shyftr is to export an OPML file from whatever feed reader you're using now, and copy/paste the best ones in one at a time, for now, or add sites' RSS feeds as you run into them. They're working on full OPML import, but it's not yet here, something I forgot more than once. :-)

When you've added a feed, clicking on the feed name with new items displays the items in line, with all new items from a specific feed in the viewing pane, much like AssetBar or Google Reader. If others have seen an item before you, it will show you're viewing from archive, and if you make a comment, future Shyftrs will see your note, as you would theirs if you weren't first to the game. Most frequently commented items rise to the top of Shyftr's "Popular" page, and if you find somebody who often comments on sites you read, you can add them as a friend, or view their own profile to see their friends or what feeds they read.

Interestingly, you can even choose to read the feeds your friends have added to Shyftr. All of them. As I had added Dave as a friend, I can walk through the blogs he has subscribed to, see which sports teams he is following, or catch up on his gossip sites. This is a feature called "Their Feeds". Clicking back to "My Feeds" takes me back to those I've added.

Shyftr also is very public about recent activity, displaying the most recent blogs added, or "Shyfted", and the most recent comments. The site also keeps a running tab on the most frequently subscribed feeds, which so far is led by CNN and the New York Times. And like AssetBar, Shyftr wants you to not feel overwhelmed by RSS feeds as they rack up. Offering more options than just a "read all" or "mark all as read", Shyftr lets you mark all items read that are older than a certain point, letting you reduce your feed glut down to a smaller time period. AssetBar said this makes you not a liar. Shyftr makes no claims to your morality, but it is a tidy way to clean up.


Choosing to mark some items makes sense if you're behind.

Can Shyftr gain traction in what's obviously becoming a crowded market? Sure, assuming more people know about their service, find the shared comment streams and popular items compelling. Given the site seems a bit overweighted, thus far, with sports fans, and not enough with the Twitter pushing, TechMeme worshipping digerati, there's significant room for growth from those who have been actively calling out for a more interactive way to consume the news and RSS. As the site grows, adding new features, like OPML importing, improved feed searches and additional social features, it could carve out a space for itself.

Feel free to join in. Shyftr is open for business now. No sign-up codes, and no waiting. You can find me at the ID of "louisgray".

My Double Standard for Web Services

I don't play fair. I admit it.

The kind of miscues and errors that would get big headline, keyboard-pounding rants from me when the biggest of Web services fall short might instead get a pass if I know the service is run by a small handful of developers, or if I'm on a first name basis with the author. Instead of joining a chorus of complainers about why a service doesn't act the way I wanted it to, or implying they are unresponsive or nefarious in some way, I give them the benefit of the doubt.

Part of me wonders if this is just due to my own personal biases, or if I should expect companies that operate to the masses to perform at a higher level. Just as you would expect to get better service from a paid relationship than a free one, does it follow that a company with hundreds of thousands of users should be more tightly honed than one with a few dozen or a few hundred?

I was thinking of this over the weekend as on Saturday, I logged into AssetBar, and found, to my surprise that none of my feeds were updated. Peeking over at Google Reader, I knew that blogs were still being posted to, news was still being written, and keywords were still being discovered by search engines. But AssetBar lied to me and said I had nothing to read. A shame!

Given how fond I am of their service, and its potential, I could have jumped up and down, shaking my fist. But I didn't. Instead, I lobbed a quick note to the site's developers and said there had to be a glitch somewhere. No big deal. And sure enough, AssetBar posted a note to their blog saying they were updating the servers, which had caused my issue.

But if it were Google Reader who had gone hours without updates, there's no doubt I would likely have said something, and many others would have stood alongside me, calling them out. Just see our reactions when this type of thing has happened before:

Google Reader Down Overnight?
Google Reader Glitch Deletes Feeds: Blogosphere Weeps
Ack! Google Reader Update Wipes Out History

Now is that entirely fair? Probably not. Poor Google Reader team. I know they work hard and do a great job. But I also know that when it comes to smaller services just getting off the ground, like AssetBar, FriendFeed, LinkRiver, ReadBurner or RSSMeme, if they blow up something, or a key feature goes bump in the night, I'll likely give them a pass.

After all, ReadBurner did go down hard on February 1st, and took the entire site history away. (See: ReadBurner Down) When it did, I jokingly posted, Forget Twitter Issues... ReadBurner is Down!, and in the same post, gave Alexander Marktl praise for taking the opportunity to eliminate duplicates and add new features.

I never would have let Google get away with that, or Microsoft, YouTube, Apple, you name it. The big guys are held to higher standards, and always will be. It comes with the territory. That might not be fair, but that's the way it is.

Companies That Listen to Their Users Will Win In the End

Continuing in our discussion of acting in the role of early adopters, I've really enjoyed having the opportunity to communicate with developers of new services as they've come to market - sometimes getting the first public account, and helping shape how these new products are interpreted and discussed. And more often than not, while I've certainly been exposed to a lot of new applications, it's those that keep innovating and keep listening that have me bookmarking and engaged.

In August, I wrote a post entitled "Use Your Blog To Talk To Companies", illustrating a few good examples of how companies like Google, MyBlogLog, Technorati and LinkedIn took suggestions I had made on my blog, and made changes to their product, sometimes coming back to tell me they'd upgraded.

In the ensuing months, I've seen this on an amazing scale. Whether it's been ReadBurner, RSSMeme, AssetBar or FriendFeed, my favorite new applications are working together with their users, as partners, to make their products even better.

FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit spells out this process in his blog today, saying, the most important thing to understand about new products and startups is that it's important to release a product early, gain users and listen to them. If you don't, you might keep tweaking and tweaking a product, never finding it complete. (See also: Mathew Ingram: Being smart isn’t always enough)

AssetBar is another perfect example of this. After opening up the service in beta to some early accounts, they've gotten some strong feedback from different corners of the blogosphere, begging for updates to their user interface. Some have said it's too slow or too complicated, or they've erred in favor of features over simplicity. And AssetBar has answered. In a post on Valentine's Day, called "Lots to Learn", Israel LHeureux wrote "the bottom line is that we are really excited to improve Assetbar UI so it’s simpler and easier...Thanks for the critiques, folks–we have our marching orders. And I still have lots to learn."

The key word? Humility. The AssetBar guys have it in spades, and I know they'll get there with time, if they continue to listen to their users, who continue to offer feedback, from th@talldude to Two Point and Unique Frequency.

As famous NHL star Wayne Gretzky once said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been."

I think I know where the puck is going. It's going to the companies that continue to listen. When it comes to developing new Web services, it makes sense not to copy those companies that have come before, as to offer a me-too solution that completely lacks differentiation wouldn't attract users the way a new service that continues development would. And there's no question some of the new ones won't have everything nailed in the first round. Development takes time, and it's hard, or else somebody else would already have it nailed.

FriendFeed listens and participates with you. AssetBar listens. Benjamin Golub of RSSMeme and Alexander Marktl of ReadBurner listen. Adam Stiles of LinkRiver listens. I love it. Keep up the good work, everybody, and keep listening.

AssetBar Adds River of News, Extends New Invites

Every time I talk about AssetBar, the next generation RSS feed reader with cutting-edge social interaction features built on the back of a robust database system, which we've discussed a few times before, I get inundated with e-mails and comments from users eager to try out the product.

I blew through fifty invites in the space of a few hours just last month, and we once again have the opportunity to open up the new service to early adopters.

Go to www.assetbar.com | Code: "2friendly" | My ID is "louismg" | Bring OPML
AssetBar, as you'll recall, takes feed reading to a new level, beyond the passive, silo-like activity one sees now with Google Reader, BlogLines and other Web or desktop applications. Instead of reading alone, you get to read alongside your friends, learn whether they saw an item first and liked it (or not), post comments and hold discussions within AssetBar.


Note how in AssetBar, you can see who shared an item to whom.
You also, unlike with Google Reader, can share items directly to AssetBar, without the need for an RSS feed intermediary.

While AssetBar has been leading the pack in features, the team behind the service has taken dramatic steps forward in recent weeks, with the addition of a "river of news" interface, letting me read many items in succession, and using keyboard shortcuts to both navigate through my RSS feeds, and to mark them "worthwhile", "view now!" or "shared". This addition has moved AssetBar from the "science experiment" level to that of a real challenger to today's market share leaders.


River of News in action. See the # of items per folder on the left.
To be one of the early adopters who doesn't want to just passively read feeds, but instead, share the feed reading and discussion experience with friends, in a new way:

1) Head to www.assetbar.com
2) Enter the invite code of "2friendly", and post your OPML file.
3) Add me as a friend. My ID is "louismg".

Hope to see you there. AssetBar has some amazing potential, and we've been excited to watch it grow. Please be sure to post any comments on the site you may have here, or to their developers within the site.

Also, don't forget to check out their great write-up on some of these new features: " They Still Put Cocaine In Breakfast Cereal"

Warning: Google Reader Congestion of Up to Five Hours

Recently, Google's gained a lot of good feeling in the blogosphere for how rapidly they are indexing blog posts as part of their universal search. But while their search side is getting quicker and quicker, it can sometimes be several hours before some posts make their way from being published to hitting Google Reader, with no apparent cause.

It's enough to make me think we need heavy traffic advisories, or warnings that show when a specific hub is congested, the way we now can with airports or freeways.

Not too long ago, Google Reader added a seemingly-small feature that showed when an item was published, and also when it hit Google Reader. Maybe they thought they were showing off how quickly they were indexed. But without a doubt, it'll likely only serve to highlight the times when they aren't getting there fast at all.


Wow - That Timestamp Gave You Away, Google
Today, my post on AssetBar coming to Twitter's aid took more than five and a half hours to reach Google Reader. In the meantime, I saw the post indexed by FriendFeed and AssetBar, added to Spokeo, and listed under my blog on Technorati. In parallel, a response post at The Last Podcast hit Google Reader several hours earlier, but my original post was nowhere to be found.

Finally, despite being posted at 11:21 a.m., Google Reader didn't post the piece until 4:53 p.m., a virtual eternity in the rapid fire blog world. In those five-plus hours, 37 different posts were added to TechMeme's river. In those five hours, I received 149 tweets on Twitter. In those five hours, my story went from what could consider to be "breaking" to "tired".

At times, it's been obvious to me that while Google Reader leads in offering a simplified user interface and ease of use, it lags other services badly in how quickly they fetch items. I often see stories hit the feed, and click through only to find out they already have dozens of comments - making me late to the conversation. Today, that gap was huge. Google didn't just show up late, they showed up last.

AssetBar Proposes Solution to Twitter Scaling Problem

While I've previously talked about AssetBar's capabilities as a next-generation social RSS feed reader, expected to open to the public soon, the secret sauce behind AssetBar's efforts is a distributed database system that eliminates a lot of the issues with traditional SQL or relational database environments. Their differentiated approach to the database means AssetBar is highly extensible, with futures not only in RSS feeds, but corporate intranets, Web office, and maybe... as a solution to popular services, like Twitter, who can't seem to stop going down.

As services on SQL databases, like Twitter, strain under dramatic growth in terms of users or activities, users can see downtime. And as AssetBar states in a post this morning, where its proposed they could act as a Twitter proxy, you could enter your Twitter credentials on their site, on their database, and it would interact with Twitter just as if you were on Twitter, but without being impacted by outages. If Twitter was down, your "tweets" would remain in queue, not blocked, as is the case today.

So what's the issue causing downtime in the first place?

AssetBar claims that as popular users like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have gained more than 6,500 followers, and follow 6,500 folks, that means every single tweet is written and rewritten thousands and thousands of times. And just imagine if they're talking to each other. Double the problem. And writes are harder than reads. While it's just a 140 character message going out on the wire, multiply that by 6,500, and you're talking almost a million characters going somewhere. Assuming 300 words in a double-spaced Microsoft Word document, a well-populated tweet would have about 3,000 pages of impact, or reading the fabled monolith novel War and Peace more than two times.

But AssetBar says they have a smarter approach, using their database. They write, "It so happens that our new distributed database technology is rather well suited for twitter-style high-volume reliable messaging. "

Would they try to compete with Twitter? No way. They say "Twitter is the new mail", and it is now mission critical for many people. They want to solve the downtime issues, for the community.

Maybe they're on to something. Check out their full post, "Twitter-proxy: Any Interest?", and provide them feedback as to whether you think they should get in the ballgame and help Twitter-holics out. They would first look to the community's blessing, and get a nod from Team Twitter, before moving forward. But if their database is as unique and strong as they say it is, it could get real interesting real soon.

First Round of Fifty AssetBar Invites Gone

Surprisingly, I managed to pass along all fifty of my first-day invites to AssetBar today, through this morning's blog post, and follow-up e-mails I had promised to those who contacted me in the last six weeks, looking to gain access to the new service. Amazingly, I even got a number of e-mails from close friends who tried to get in this evening, but were too late. So if you're still awaiting an invite, I won't forget you. Just send me an e-mail to louisgray@mac.com, and I'll reach out your way should I get more.

While the first few dozen folks find their way through the new service, and uncover a number of kinks, we did see some ineresting reactions in the blog about AssetBar's early debut:

CBS 5.com: Come On Now Social

"When Google Reader made "shared" feed selections truly shared items, people wigged. But a new RSS feed reader is out for public consumption, and the whole idea behind it is about showing off your stuff..."

Unique Frequency: Alerts On Readburner, Social Alternative To Google Reader

"Basically while you can share feeds in Google Reader, you don’t know what someone else might be thinking about it, other than the person liked it enough to share it. AssetBar changes that by allowing users to rate articles and comment on them as well."

I promise to post some more updates around AssetBar in the coming days and weeks. After all, this site is becoming well known as a go-to destination for information on next generation RSS feed readers, covering not just Google Reader, but FeedHeads, ReadBurner, Spokeo, Shared Reader and AssetBar. More to come.

AssetBar Launches, With Google Reader In Its Crosshairs

AssetBar, the next generation social RSS feed reader, has been in heavy development mode since we first got the opportunity to test the service back in December. (See: I Have Seen the Future of Social RSS Feed Readers) After significant infrastructure updates, error-checking and GUI tweaks, the service is ready to debut in pre-release.

Unlike every other RSS feed reader out there which I've tried, AssetBar catapults the user experience out of a journey of isolation, and instead to one of shared activity, commiseration, and comments. It's like taking the power of Google Reader, and spreading over a veneer of FriendFeed. Now, instead of wondering if a friend of mine has already read an article I found interesting, I can share it (like in Google Reader), I can rate it (thumbs down, informative or read now!) and I can post public or private messages to it.

Go to www.assetbar.com. Invite code is "louisgray". My ID is louismg. Bring OPML.


Additionally, as we've highlighted in recent weeks with Google Reader, I can add items directly to AssetBar that are not part of my subscriptions.

Essentially, AssetBar has created a foundation for what I expect to be the future of RSS feed readers - not aimed at individual news consumption, but instead, aimed at collaboration. AssetBar takes a leap forward, similar to the move away from Web portals and toward social networking.

In this pre-release phase, I expect to find issues, and AssetBar has been kind enough to make the site's admin a friend to all early access users, so you can make your suggestions known. In the six weeks I've had the opportunity to enjoy AssetBar myself, I know the team responds rapidly and continues to make updates.

Next up immediately for the service? Developing a river of news and keyboard shortcuts. This will give Google Reader's high-end users a real reason to make a move. As the site's co-creater, Israel LHeureux writes, "Our 100% focus will be on adding features to get high-end users to switch from GReader. You can bet we'll be sweating it."

Want an invite? Go to www.assetbar.com. The access code is "louisgray", without quotes. My friend ID is louismg.

See also:
AssetBar Early Access Delayed, Invites To Come Soon
AssetBar Set to Launch With Google Reader Inspiration

Add Items to Your Google Reader Link Blog Without Subscribing

Unlike newer services including FriendFeed and AssetBar, Google Reader doesn't enable you to share items to your shared items link blog without first having an RSS feed subscription to the said site. But there is a work-around for this limitation, which lets you share an item without committing to any kind of long-term, or even short-term, relationship with the blog it came from.

(See also: #4 in 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader from March '07)

To do so, you need to be using a feature in Google Reader's "Goodies" page, under your Settings, which they call "Subscribe as you surf". Essentially, you are adding a bookmark that with one click, prompts you to add an RSS-enabled site to your Google Reader.


I've personally added this bookmark to my Safari toolbar as "+GR", standing for "add to Google Reader", and click it whenever I find a must-subscribe site. But if you're in a gray area, and find a site that has a great article, but is one you don't think you'll be subscribing to, there's still a way to get it on your link blog.

1. Click your new "Subscribe as you surf" bookmark.

Google Reader will show you what the feed will look like if you choose to subscribe, with the note "You are not subscribed to this feed yet" along with a "Subscribe" button.


2. Scroll to the item or items you want to share on your l