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.

Checking In With RatingBurner, and Their New Widget

In late January, we first discussed RatingBurner (www.ratingburner.com), an interesting entry in the market, which helped rank blogs by their number of public FeedBurner RSS subscribers, and showed their day to day growth, both in aggregate numbers, and percentage increase. While Alexander Fedorov has been a little quieter than some other new entrants in the Web sphere, he has continued to update the site, adding new blogs daily, and inserting new features - including the debut of a new widget, which bloggers can use to show where they rank in RatingBurner's current standings.

While the value of ranking sites by their RSS count is the subject of some debate, in the absence of public, uncontested traffic and return visitor data, it is one metric available to nearly all major blogs, especially as FeedBurner has become the online standard for RSS delivery and tracking.

In the last few months, Fedorov wrote me to say, first, that support for branded feeds (i.e. not from feedburner.com) was added, and that feeds which point to subdomain of a blog but are still published with FeedBurner, can be added.

This might sound like a minor change, but this enabled sites like Engadget to be included. Engadget, which didn't figure in the first screen capture, now shows 1.6 million RSS readers, and even minute swings can show adds and drops of thousands per day. From January through today, you can also see TechCrunch increased from 654,000 readers to 782,000, and Mashable from 143,000 to 167,000.

As for me, at the time I clocked in with that post, I had 436 readers, and we're now seeing FeedBurner report 1,028 total.

Last week, Fedorov added a button for bloggers to post on their own site. As he wrote, the "button will automatically show a blog's ranking and when you click on it, you will be redirected exactly where they are sitting in the ranking."

For fun, I added mine to the site, and you can see my ranking (in the 400s) on the right side of louisgray.com. Does it add a ton of value? Not a lot, especially as you can consider to Rating Burner doesn't have the entire blogosphere indexed. But the database has grown dramatically since it first showed up in January, and it's always fun to see where you sit against your peers and competition, so if you're so inclined, it's real simple to add the button to your template. You can find out how on the RatingBurner Web site.

The Largest Blogs Are Still Rapidly Growing Their Subscriber Base

There's no universally accepted way to track momentum in the blogosphere. Some point to Alexa and ComScore statistics, while others poke holes at this data. Others instead look to the TechMeme leaderboard to show who has the largest share of voice in tech. But we do have access to some quantitative tools that give us a clearer picture into just how fast the largest blogs are growing their most loyal readers via RSS, thanks to FeedBurner and tertiary services, including BlogPerfume and RatingBurner.

In December I first mentioned BlogPerfume and the site's ability to review your FeedBurner RSS growth, and project your statistics three, six and twelve months ahead. But more interesting than self navel-gazing, you can view any blog's statistics, so long as they use FeedBurner as their RSS engine and activate the Awareness API.

(This restriction made some popular feeds, including Engadget and Robert Scoble, unavailable for analysis.)

I clicked over to RatingBurner, which ranks public FeedBurner feeds from most popular to least popular, and fed BlogPerfume some of the most popular technology blogs.


(Click for larger image)
A quick look at some of the leaders in the so-called A-List, who hover in the 100,000 or so RSS subscriber range and above, shows 3-month growth of 10 to 25% per site. Looking much lower in the list, to those who are in the 500 to 5,000 or so RSS subscriber bracket, you can see a great deal wider range, including some who have nearly doubled their subscriber count over the last 90 days.

Unsurprisingly, TechCrunch is the king of the hill here, with an average of nearly 700,000 subscribers this month. Over the last three months alone, TechCrunch added nearly 84,000 new RSS subscribers, for a growth rate of 13.72%. BlogPerfume also showed single month growth of 4.2%, and projected TechCrunch would break 1 million subscribers before this time next year.

TechCrunch's enormous subscriber base means other sites can grow more quickly, despite getting fewer net new RSS readers. In the same period, Read/Write Web grew 16.47%, adding 25,017 subscribers, and Mashable! grew 15.77%, increasing their total by, 20,954. In fact, Mashable!'s high growth rate, coupled with GigaOM's lower 8.92% growth rate, would see them pass up Om Malik's team before six months are up, if you project that 90-day trajectory forward. Lower down the chart, you can also see Fred Wilson and Brad Feld posting growth rates of more than 20%, as they reach six digits. (Also Included: Guy Kawasaki, John Battelle)


(Click for larger image)
In fact, RSS subscribers are growing steadily at all levels. Looking down where I live and breathe, growth rates over the last three months at those off us under the 5k level show 30% increases for Andy Beard and Mathew Ingram, and dramatically higher levels for people like Tamar Weinberg (78.72%) and Muhammad Saleem (59.67%). (Also included: Mark Evans, Zoli Erdos, Susan Mernit and Sarah In Tampa)


Our own stats reflected one-month growth of 41.88%, and three-month growth of 286.89%, with an average of 708 subscribers, up from just 183 back at the start of December. (See: BlogPerfume: LouisGray.com and above chart.)

Even as some are openly discussing dropping the RSS feed reader, or asking where they are going next, this rising tide is raising all boats. While there's no doubt this initial report is partial, it shows RSS adoption is strong at every level. With anticipated further growth in adoption and gravitation toward tech blogging, the momentum is sure to continue.

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I know I didn't get every relevant site, so if you found one that is remarkable in growth rate or wasn't what you expected, head to http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/index.php, put their FeedBurner URL in, and note it in the comments. I'm eager to see what you find.

Rating Burner's Alexander Fedorov Explains Site, Hidden Features

Yesterday, we uncovered Rating Burner, a new site that ranks popular blogs by their total subscribers, as calculated by FeedBurner. The site, previously unknown to the blogosphere, offered little behind its story, and little clue to its owner, though we did find Alexander Fedorov as the registrant of ratingburner.com. Today, Alexander emerged, and sent me a few e-mails, which further explained the site's origin and purpose, uncovering an interesting approach to discovering new sites and RSS feeds, as well as Web advertising opportunities.

First off, the site is more than an Internet egotist's dream. Rating Burner has its own Web crawler, aimed to discover new FeedBurner feeds and subscriber counts. As Fedorov wrote today, "The rating is growing all by itself. As soon as someone links to your blog, sooner or later it will be found by Rating Burner's bot."

And the bot had to start somewhere. Fedorov kicked off the Web crawling using John Battelle's Searchblog at http://battellemedia.com/. You can see this by using the same type of URL hacking popularized with ReadBurner just yesterday. Try the URL http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=1&dir=a and find the exact order of the robot's work. Hovering your mouse over the "1" in the "N" column shows the site was indexed by January 18th at 11:18 a.m. 4 minutes later, it was off to the Black Hat SEO Diary. 3 minutes later, the robot found TechCrunch, and it was off to the races. The robot eventually found louisgray.com on January 20th after noon, making me #216 in the list, which now has 368 individual sites.

Even more interesting, Rating Burner shows a detailed map of how each of these blogs link to one another. (Download the detailed graphic) The sites with the most links their way have the most arrows, and those sites with the most FeedBurner subscribers have the widest arrows to and from their site. As the below graphic shows, his robot correctly noted I link out to Mashable and WinExtra links to me. The map was generated by GraphViz, an open source tool.


My position in Rating Burner's map.
The robot spawned by Rating Burner has specialized intelligence to discover ad networks, and enables site owners to display going rates. As Alexander explains, the "crawler scans all blogs for signatures of some well known sponsors/advertisers and lists this information. It is possible to publicize prices for banner ads using special html comment . Crawler will find this info and publish price in the rating."

There are also a number of hidden tricks in the database.

To find out the total number of comments in the most-recent post on any included blog, you can sort with the below URL:
http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=17

To sort included sites by the most recent post, it's a different command:
http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=16

... and by PageRank:
http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=12

If you recall, Rating Burner also hinted at further categorization, including tags for SEO and gadgets. Alexander promises there are many more to come, automatically generated, again by the robot and the intelligent database:

He writes, "...categorization is completely automated. I have several samples of texts on special subjects like "gadgets" and then all blogs (5 last posts) are tested againts this texts using bayesian filter and shingles, and if the similarity is close enough, this blog will be listed under this category. I just need to add more categories and collect more sample texts."

Rating Burner is still in its infancy, even after yesterday's debut, without question. But there are some interesting tricks lurking in the database. Want to find recent posts with lots of comments that might be "hot"? Try this link: http://www.ratingburner.com/?order=4&filter=category%3ATOP.

And the blogosphere has noticed. In addition to my post, which hit TechMeme, and Mashable's coverage this morning, the site's debut was included in Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land wrap-up for the day, as well as Marketing Pilgrim.

Kudos to Mashable, and Three Links Their Way

Some companies will talk about change, and not follow through. Mashable is not one of them. After promising to offer an improved level of transparency and attribution, the popular social networking news site has done exactly that, revamping they way they report news, share linkage and introduce original sourcing. Over the last few weeks, Mashable has managed to seamlessly keep reporting the news while adapting to the new guidelines... and that's hard to do.

With that said, I wanted to draw your attention to three great stories Mashable is running right now.

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Podcast: A Conversation with MG Siegler
http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/l33t-reddit/

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins sat down with MG Siegler of ParisLemon to talk about our new joint venture of delivering an "elite" Reddit, aimed at offering the best in tech news, free of the usual nonsense.

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Readburner’s Unofficial API
http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/readburner-api/

Hardly a day goes by without Alexander Marktl's pet project, ReadBurner, making the news. Yesterday, as noted in my link blog, David Rothman posted a piece on Hacking ReadBurner URLs, which can deliver unique, and often unexpected, results. URL hacking is among my favorite past-times. Combine it with ReadBurner, and you've got some good fun ahead.

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RatingBurner Ranks Blogs According To RSS Numbers
http://mashable.com/2008/01/31/ratingburner-ranks-blogs-according-to-rss-numbers/

Mashable's Stan Schroeder also followed up on our piece on Rating Burner from last night, highlighting the new site's ability to rank blogs by RSS numbers. As he writes, "... it’s a ranking system with positive sides and flaws like any other, and I guess it can’t hurt to have another one."

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All are worth clicking through and reading. Make sure you do. And Mashable, nice job.

Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats

There's precious little that bloggers like to do more than measure their own statistics, and gauge how they're doing, relative to the rest of the blogging community. And there's similarly precious little that smart Web developers like to do than harness publicly available data, point it at an intelligent database, and debut a new service.

When the two come together as one, you have the potential for a must-bookmark site that stataholics and egotists alike will visit time and again.

While earlier this month, we talked about two new sites focused on tabulating popular shared links from Google Reader, in ReadBurner and Shared Reader, today we've seen a new, unheralded site emerge, which displays the most popular blogs, by RSS feed subscribers, and shows their day to day momentum in terms of new subscribers or defectors. That site's name, appropriately enough, is Rating Burner.

(Note: There are no blog hits for Rating Burner as of 8 p.m., but the secret is now out!)

Though in its early stages, Rating Burner is accomplishing what many geeks set out to do by hand just a few short months ago. (See: Top Blogs On Google Reader, How Many Google Reader Subscribers Do You Have? and Find the Number of Google Subscribers for Any Feed)

The site, currently holding approximately 400 individual blogs and RSS feeds, at time of this posting, aims to summarize a blog's feed popularity, show its Google PageRank (a measurement often used to illustrate trust), its aggregate change in subscribers over the previous 24 hours, including percentage change, when they most recently posted, and what, if any, ad services they use.


The Most Popular Blogs, According to Rating Burner
While the list isn't yet 100 percent inclusive, Rating Burner unsurprisingly shows TechCrunch, the official Google Blog, Mashable and Guy Kawasaki among the top-subscribed feeds. Amazingly, Rating Burner shows more than 11,000 new adds to TechCrunch's 654k subscriber army in the last day alone, dwarfing the 709 Mashable picked up, and my measly 38, although I did manage to go up more than 8 percent between the two snapshots.

As with ReadBurner, Rating Burner should only get better with time, and with user submissions of new blogs. The site offers an entry form to post new blogs for inclusion, and looks like it will soon add categories, to further segment the data. So far, the site has SEO blogs and Gadget blogs listed as possible filters.

Also like ReadBurner, upon initial writeup, Rating Burner's UI is quite spartan, but the functionality is very interesting. I'm impressed to see the developer has grabbed the FeedBurner statistics for each blog and is hosting the results on their site, rather than externally pointing to FeedBurner graphics. I for one noted the statistics listed for louisgray.com were from Monday night, so it's likely the data trails by a full 24 hours. Thanks to my subscriber count dropping from 436 to 413 overnight, I would expect my own stats to drop tomorrow, reflecting Tuesday's data.


louisgray.com, 37th fastest-growing, according to Rating Burner
If you would like to be included in Rating Burner, post your blog feed at their URL, and they will likely index you for tomorrow's results. While I used the site's contact us form on their Web site to reach the developer, I haven't yet heard back, and we don't yet know for certain the individual behind the service. Domain name records show Rating Burner registered to Alex Fedorov in Massachusetts, so we hope to hear from him soon and see the service further develop.