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.

Mergelab Comes to an Early Close, Shutting Down in Beta

Not every social aggregator is on the path to riches or fame and fortune. Even the best designed, thoroughly coordinated sites can find the push to grow a user base and generate community difficult, especially as the number of similar sites spirals ever higher, driving a need for differentiation and specialization.

With this background comes the news that Mergelab, who I helped first cover back in March, is shutting down completely by June 30, having never reached an open beta period.

Unlike other sites which operate with you as the anchor, asking you to set up the many Web services you use and then share your profile with friends, Mergelab asked instead for you to put in your contacts, and then, it would scour the Web and grab their updates, giving you their updates all in one place, much like Spokeo. Also unlike other sites, Mergelab had opted to not integrate comments or rating systems for shared content.

While the site's interface was clean and showed promise for some who would like a less-noisy area to keep updated on friends, Mergelab never got the chance to succeed on the public stage.

I talked with Alan Steele, one of Mergelab's three employees, by phone yesterday, and he helped paint a picture of how the team quickly learned that not only was the space crowded, but that venture capitalists were looking for more than a stand-alone site.


My Mergelab feed in actionAs he put it, VCs and investment bankers, upon hearing Mergelab's position, would quickly ask about two things: their Facebook application strategy, and how they would approach Open Social. He said, "There is so much investment in the social networking side of things. All the investors are pouring their energy and money in the space. Intellectually, I should have figured this out six months ago, but I didn't understand this all viscerally until recently."

It was just two months ago when Mergelab first became comfortable opening up and being covered on my blog. In the ensuing weeks, while focused on building a product, external pressures to gain revenue and pay employees grew too overbearing, and more profitable opportunities came up for two of Mergelab's team, making them reevaluate along the way.

"At every stage of building something like this, you have to ask where are we, what are our prospects, and should we keep doing this instead of other things," Steele said. "(Shutting down) was a rational decision on where we were and what our needs were."

Mergelab's strategy to scour the Web and find data on friends turned out to be a contributing factor to the stress of growing as well. With about 100 invitation-only beta users, Mergelab had seen tens of thousands of contacts imported, meaning the company's servers were tracking thousands of feeds, aggregating data, slicing it per user and presenting it in a simple way. As Steele said, "A small number of users can create large amounts of data. To scale up to an open beta, we would have to had fired up a significant farm of servers."

Looking at significant new expenditures ahead, combined with negligible revenue, and the prospect of other alternatives, Steele and team figured the right thing to do was to close early, rather than getting the site so far out ahead that more users would be affected. And despite the crowding in the space, with alternatives like SocialThing, FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Spokeo and others, Steele said even thinking about competition was the wrong step for the company, so early in its process.

"It's too early to think about destroying a competitor or going ahead of them. Instead, you have to focus on your differentiators and your business model," he said. "Competition wasn't a huge factor, because when you're at this stage, you can't spend too much time worrying about competition."

The official announcement of Mergelab's shutting down comes at noon today, with final closure on June 30th. The company's technology assets are now up for grabs to interested buyers.

Mergelab Emerges to Streamline Friends' Web Updates

In the second half of 2007, Jobster, a popular online recruiting and career site, was hit with news that a number of their executives, including the former CTO, Phillip Bogle, and Alan Steele, the company's fomer VP of Engineering, had left the company to forge their own secretive startup. The pair, joined by Mark Aiken, the company's chief architect, are now ready to unveil their site, Mergelab, which offers a new approach to the increasingly competitive world of Web activity aggregation. (See: Mergelab Company Blog: About Us)

Featuring one of the cleanest interfaces I've seen in this space (and I've seen my share), Mergelab automatically discovers photos (from Flickr and other sources), status updates (i.e. Twitter), blog posts and Amazon.com wishlists from individuals you add to your friend base. To pull down your data, it doesn't require friends to also be Mergelab users, and Mergelab makes it incredibly simple to drill down by user or by specific service, all while giving you a stream populated with friends' recent updates.


Mergelab, after getting one or more data points, gets the rest.
You can add friends to your Mergelab feed one by one, by entering a name and its associated e-mail or Web site address, or you can auto-discover links and news for contacts you have in popular e-mail accounts, including GMail, Yahoo! or Hotmail, similar to other services in the market. However, unlike Spokeo, Mergelab isn't targeted at condensing multiple social networks into one, and unlike FriendFeed, Mergelab isn't yet focused on enabling conversation through comments within a person's updates. Also, in contrast to LinkRiver, Mergelab is more about a person's direct activity, not so much about the items they choose to share.


In this example, I add Chris Brogan's blog and e-mail address to start.


Or, I can import my contacts from an e-mail account.

Now that we've gotten what Mergelab is not out of the way, it's worth highlighting how easily and cleanly the service proactively retrieves updates and adds them to your personal feed. I was able to add friends like Chris Brogan, Jason Kaneshiro, Steven Hodson and Tony Hung, simply by posting their e-mail address. Mergelab went out to do the hard work, and found their blogs, Twitter accounts and associated Amazon wish lists. This is a step beyond FriendFeed's "Imaginary Friend" feature, as Mergelab made the process automatic, not requiring me to post each of their individual IDs for each service.

The resulting Mergelab news feed has some interesting characteristics relative to other sites in this space.



First, as best displayed on co-founder Alan Steele's feed, you can see what type of services a user's friends most frequently use. In addition to Flickr, Twitter, blogs and Amazon, Alan's feed shows friends using LinkedIn, FaceBook, Jobster, iLike, YouTube, Shelfari and many others. Essentially, if it has a feed that's identifiable to an individual, it looks like Mergelab can pick it up.

Second, if consecutive updates are from a single individual, regardless of the service, it groups them under that individual's name. For example, if I enter a blog post, and then send a note to Twitter about it, both are shown under "Louis Gray". with a thin line separating my updates from others. In contrast, most other aggregators would break the activities apart, either by specific action or service, for example saying "Louis Gray posted a blog entry." and then "Louis Gray sent a message to Twitter."

Third, and very interesting in terms of keeping visitors on the site, you can choose any blog post from your friends, and read it within the Mergelab news feed, just by clicking [more]. When done reading, just click back on the blog headline and it collapses, returning you to the feed. It's still the RSS version from your selected feed, so you can't comment directly to the original site, but it's a good feature, nonetheless. (See the announcement here)

Fourth, you can choose how your feed is displayed, choosing to block Twitters from day one, or even to opt in to showing Google AdSense. But it's a little hard to figure out why one would opt in to Google ads, as they are disabled by default, unless you felt maybe you were doing Mergelab a favor in return for the service.

And fifth, Mergelab separates activity by calendar, putting an interesting real-world delimiter as you scroll through old updates, from "Today" to "Yesterday", "Sunday", etc. No other site I've seen of this nature even knows there is a clock at all aside from relative information (i.e. "11 minutes ago", "2 hours ago", etc.)

While Mergelab is just getting started, open by invitation only, it offers the opportunity to elegantly aggregate friends' updates without the noise of comments, liking and voting common with most social participation sites. It's also easy to add new subscribers from other users' feeds. If they have a friend you find interesting, all you need to do is subscribe to their news with a single click. Over time, as the service opens up, I could see myself adding my friends' friends into my feed, and being as interested in their minute by minute updates as I have been on FriendFeed, only in a quieter way.

Get your own sneak preview or request an invitation at www.mergelab.com.