Shyftr Introduces Extremely Versatile RSS Filtering Engine

A year into the service's head to head fight with Google Reader and others to make an advanced RSS reader, the Shyftr team has essentially thrown in the towel on their first plan, changing course to let you filter your own content and receive specific news you want to see, with less of that you don't. Their new RSS filter tool, which debuted today, lets you create any number of filters, by author, by title, or by keywords, from a wide number of preselected blogs, or those you add yourself, and roll your own RSS feeds.

Today, when you subscribe to an RSS feed, it's essentially an all or nothing bet. By subscribing to my site, for instance, you are going to get every article I write about Apple even if you love Windows. You are going to get additional posts by the other writers on the site. And you can't dodge posts on Twitter and FriendFeed, even if you're sick of hearing about them.

Shyftr is looking to help, and even comes loaded with some example filters to get you started, including: LouisGray.com Posts from Louis Gray: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/sux0ju/

Browsers (Chrome + IE + Safari + Firefox): http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/gycxxn/

TechCrunch Posts from Michael Arrington: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/4x545a/

iPhone Titled Posts: http://alpha.shyftr.com/i3qzmd

But the fun comes when you start to make your filters, such as:

Posts from Mashable and VentureBeat Without Twitter In the Title: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/qiroqp/

Posts on LouisGray.com That Were Not By Me: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/bjzbpo/

Posts that Start with "Porn": http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/al35fd/

Posts by Om Malik on GigaOM: http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/dp2drb/

Posts that mention "Robert Scoble": http://alpha.shyftr.com/f/fq8dgb/


Setting Up a Filter that Avoids Twitter and Facebook
Over the last few months, Shyftr has been making significant changes, ditching the reader, and building a customized newspaper (like MeeHive), powered by your favorite topics and sources. But the new RSS filter takes personalization to a new level. You can find the new approach at http://alpha.shyftr.com and you can find the filter tool here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter/


Shyftr-Powered RSS Filters for LouisGray.com
And the fun doesn't stop there. The company has set up new "Publisher" accounts, targeted at multi-author and multi-site blogs, to help authors distribute personalized feeds, by author, by topic and by site. I can see mega-blog sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and CenterNetworks looking into this option, as I will be, and I've been supplied with a handful of invites from those who are intrigued.

You can check out the new Shyftr at http://alpha.shyftr.com. Start your own filters here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter. You can also start with a set of pre-loaded tech blogs here: http://alpha.shyftr.com/filter/popular/

Google Reader Adds Comments for Social Conversations

Google Reader, the RSS feed engine that has become a major hub in my daily information gathering, pulling in feeds from the hundreds of blogs and Web sites I follow, is taking a step forward in terms of making the service more social, by integrating private conversations between friends. With today's release, every post and every share has an option to add a comment, which will be displayed to your friends who you are connected to.

Google Reader, which started out as a data silo, where you could passively read your news in isolation, has since expanded to include shared link blogs, the addition of notes, and the ability to follow friends and their items within Reader. Items from my shared link blog play a critical role in populating my profile on a variety of social services, including Socialmedian, FriendFeed and Facebook, as well as social news sites including RSSmeme and ReadBurner.

And now, you can make comments and have a conversation with friends, without having to e-mail articles out, and without having your private conversations aired in public on the original blog.


Making a comment on a shared item in Google Reader


The comment, added to a shared item in Google Reader
Last year, we saw a great deal of controversy around publishers like Shyftr, who, at the time, ran a service that displayed comments along with full feeds. In that case, many blog owners felt that Shyftr was potentially making money (through ads) on their content, and hijacking comments. The Google Reader team, who I met with today at their headquarters in Mountain View, is very keen to do the right thing, and is not confusing public, centralized, comments with the private conversations available in today's release. And, so far, there are still no ads.

If you are a Google Reader user, you can see a new item called "Comment View" below "Friends Shared Items". If friends have made comments you haven't seen, the item will be in bold. You don't yet have a parenthetical number showing how many comments are left unread, as you do with total available items. (1000+ anyone?), but you can see if conversations are happening, either on your shared items or those of your friends.

As a Google Reader junkie, I was worried that conversations happening in my shared feeds would bump them back into my "unread" items and make me have to see items more than once. But Google Reader is not doing that. Read items stay read, but are available in the "Comment View".


A Popular Comment Thread in Google Reader


The Expanded Comment Thread in Google Reader
As you make comments within the shared items of Google Reader, those comments are visible to all friends of the original person who shared the item - and you can see comments by other people on those items, even if you are not friends with them yourself, but unlike Notes, they aren't exportable to services like FriendFeed, so they stay internal to the Reader.

You can see which friends are connected to you, as their names will be links to their Google profile, and those who are not friends display only a gray avatar. And today's post by the Reader team clarifies that, at launch, this is English-only, and not yet available in the "All Items" feed. But you can probably expect those to come with time.

The new addition is yet another way that Google Reader is looking to get more social. They've come a long way since my original post two years ago now that asked them to integrate trends, recommendations and more social features. And from today's meeting, it's clear much more is coming to what is now clearly the gold standard for the online RSS experience.

Introducing Exchange Rates for Blog Comments and Interactions

Editor's Note: Allen Stern and CenterNetworks are not affiliated with this post or the exchange rates table -- yet. The CN logo has been helpfully borrowed.

In May, Mathew Ingram, Fred Wilson and others said that for non-professional bloggers, comments were how they got paid. The interaction and discussion that takes place on blogs, between the author and the consumer, is what most write for - the conversation. But recent tools that let people comment elsewhere, or interact on the original content in other ways has some saying users' actions simply aren't enough. As much of the conversation moves off the original blog, or people are sharing items in Google Reader or hitting "like" in FriendFeed, they are showing interest, but not engaging, causing some to wish for a simpler time when those services didn't allow users to show passive approval.

One of the more outspoken voices on this topic has been Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, who wrote on this blog earlier this month:

"early adopters are screwing early adopter blogs - period. Clicking share on google reader is not like leaving a comment on the source. Clicking like on ff or retweeting on twitter is not the same as leaving a comment on the source. I will have more on this soon as I think that lazyness has slowly ruined what was something beautiful."

And while he and I don't always line up with our beliefs on the same spot in the blog evolution chart, there is no question that some activities do more to encourage the original author and their content than do others.

In that spirit, here is the first attempt at an exchange rate for interacting with blogs. As Allen has been a chief proponent of giving original authors their due, I believe the unit of metric is best labeled as a "CN", in honor of CenterNetworks. It's also no coincidence you could call these "C Notes" or "Comment Notes".

To start, I argue that a comment on the original author's blog post should be counted as "1 CN", to establish a baseline.


Actions that are worth more than 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include:

• Making a comment on the original blog, then blogging about that discussion on your own blog. (10 CN)
  
• Writing a new blog post on the same topic and linking back to the original author as the source. (5 CN)
  
• Submitting the blog post to StumbleUpon with a strong description and good tagging. (3 CN)
  
• Submitting the blog post to Digg, Reddit, or Hacker News. (2 CN)

Actions that are worth between 1/2 CN and 1 CN, depending on one's network size and influence, include:

• Retweeting the item on Twitter. (.8 CN)
  
• Digging an already submitted story. (.6 CN)
  
• Adding a vote on Reddit, Hacker News, or Mixx. (.5 CN)

Actions that are worth less than 1/2 CN, depending on one's network size or influence, include:

• Posting the item natively to FriendFeed. (.4 CN)
  
• Posting the item to Socialmedian or Strands. (.3 CN)
  
• Posting the item to Facebook. (.25 CN)
  
• Adding the item to your Tumblr blog. (.25 CN)
  
• Sharing the item in Google Reader. (.25 CN)
  
• Adding the item to your Delicious. (.2 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the original item on FriendFeed. (.2 CN)
  
• Liking the item on FriendFeed. (.1 CN)
  
• Adding a comment to a reshare of the item on FriendFeed. (.1 CN)
  
• Liking a reshare of the item on FriendFeed. (.05 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the item in Shyftr. (.05 CN)
  
• Adding a comment on the item in Facebook. (.05 CN)

These exchange rates show current market valuations, and are subject to change, based on the increase and decrease in popularity of associated networks and the sway of conventional opinion. Rates quoted are valid as of November 23rd, 2008, and were determined by a non-scientific measure of effort, influence and reach of the aforementioned external sites and activities.

As your activity gets further and further away from the original blog post, and the blog post becomes less of the story, but the third-party service gets to be more of the story or the destination, it delivers less perceived value to the original author, be it psychological, social, or in some cases, actually financial. While some of us early adopters are all too happy to expand a blog post's reach through our various social networks, and enjoy the new communities that are built there, it's not surprising that those who are seeing less activity on the original source of their stories are feeling something's amiss. I know that as I've gotten busier, I've taken less time to comment on the many blog posts out there, even as I'm making comments on the various social media sites, and sharing like I always have through Google Reader.

So if you want to show your appreciation to the author of a blog you've found particularly insightful of late, or who has opened your eyes to a new topic, don't just take the easy way out and hit "share" as the item flows through your RSS reader, or hit "like" on your social site, but take the extra time to rise up the CN chart and put some food on that blogger's table by making a comment and engaging. Allen and many others will be happy you did.

Does Anybody Care About Non-Blog Commenting Anymore?

This Spring, when the tech blogosphere discovered Shyftr, a next-generation RSS reader, had launched with comments on their service, alongside full feeds, you would have thought they'd barged into bloggers' homes in the dead of night, stealing their money, their laptops and punching them around besides. Despite comments from me and others who believed this to be a natural progression of RSS readers and aggregators, their missteps landed them on virtual page one, and they haven't really escaped the many bad things thrown their way since.

But since Shyftr's unfortunate early flub, we have seen sites that are centered around other people's contents continue to grow in popularity, and in many cases, they feature conversations that are native to the service, but don't flow back to the blog. Meanwhile, some are doing more than just featuring a headline, but have excerpts that can at times display the vast majority or the entirety of a blog post. Has the Web collectively grown numb to this, and have we accepted this as "fair use"?

One tech developer wrote me yesterday, highlighting the way many posts were being displayed on the growing news discovery site, socialmedian. He wrote, "I'm sitting here finding example after example of this on Social Median? Do you think people are giving them a pass? Do people not realize that this is happening? Or do they just not care anymore?"

As socialmedian displays upwards of 1,100 characters of any given story, shorter stories could be posted in their entirety, without the original author's permission. As socialmedian now lets its users pull in content from Google Reader shared items and other sources, the author doesn't have to explicitly provide approval for their content to make it to the site. And on that site, users can engage in conversations around the content, without that data being ported back to the originating blog.

Some examples of these short stories (plus conversations) on socialmedian are here:

• Original story on Twitterati: Twitter Revenue Just a Matter of Time
• socialmedian story: Twitter Revenue Just a Matter of Time
• Original story on GHacks.net: Is Windows 7 any different?
• socialmedian story: Is Windows 7 any different?

As Shyftr operated this Spring, before having the Techmeme crowd go after them with pitchforks and torches, socialmedian unifies each article shared to the site in one thread, showing the multiple people who "clipped" it, and unifies the comments in one siloed stream.

So how is this different than the mini-scandal that erupted just over six months ago?

I've been a vocal proponent of socialmedian, and have seen the site take off over the last several months. I have also seen that the site doesn't pull in full feeds, but instead clips longer items. I can't remember the last time I published a blog post that was less than 1,100 characters after all. So I asked Jason Goldberg, socialmedian CEO, to help explain their limits and thinking. He wrote:

"While crawling the sources, we fetch short summary and full content (if exists in feed). While displaying the story on different pages of socialmedian, we first check if we have short description and show it after truncating to a certain limit. If short description is not present for the story we truncate the full content and show it. On the story page we check if we have full content for the story and display it after truncating it to 1100 chars. If we don’t have full description, we show the truncated short description."

Goldberg's response shows the team has given the issue of "fairness" a lot of thought. Unlike Fav.or.it, who believes it has every right to show full feeds and pull in comments from the original blogs, socialmedian consciously clips the data after a certain length. And outside of the story itself, depending on the page, or whether it's in an e-mail alert, these limits are even smaller, between 130 and 325 characters.

So what's fair? We've largely accepted that aggregation and bookmark sites like FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News and others are allowed to post URLs and headlines and allow for conversation. We have largely accepted that it is bad behavior to keep the full content of a post and integrate comments. But in between is a gray area. Can I borrow one paragraph? Two? Can I show the first few graphics you use? At what point does it move from linking and enter the land of scraping?

I would venture a bet that as the social Web continues to evolve, we have gotten more accepting of sites centered around other people's content. I believe you can't undo the move to aggregation sites, and conversations will occur where people want them to, not necessarily on your blog. I believe that sites that offer attribution and a link back to the original source are providing their own sites as a distribution and reference medium, so I don't find fault with services like socialmedian. But it's likely that others aren't realizing their content is getting in the site, and it's not getting out. So what are the standards that one should follow? And do we care anymore?

You can find me on socialmedian here: www.socialmedian.com/louisgray

Shyftr Reloads With New API, Activity Stream, Widgets and UI

The crowded world of online RSS feed readers is one that's been dominated by names like Google Reader, Bloglines and Netvibes. But underneath that layer you have a few interesting innovative players, including FeedEachOther, and Shyftr. Shyftr came to prominence this spring, drawing attention for a shared comment stream on linked items, and has been quiet for the last few months as they worked on enhancing their platform. Today, they woke up in a big way, revamping the service, while adding an API, activity streams and widgets for bloggers.

Shyftr's main draws continue to be the same. You can add friends on the service, and see which RSS feeds they are following, or have "Shyfted". You can see who else is reading feeds that you have added, which you can do manually, or by OPML. And despite your reading your feeds in your own space, you can make comments and see them shared with the broader Shyftr community, much like other aggregation tools, including FriendFeed and Strands do. But unlike those services, Shyftr deduplicates, providing a single instance for each unique URL.

In addition to the social aspects of Shyftr, the service offers what they call a Pocket blog, the equivalent of a Google shared links blog, letting you see what friends have found interesting, as they "pocket" new items they discover.


Today's announcements set the foundation for Shyftr and for outside developers to further enhance the service. The API can tap into just about every aspect of the service, except for actually reading feeds, Shyftr reported in a blog post this morning. Among the first introductions is a new activity stream, which shows your activity, or that of your friends, as they "Shyft" new feeds, "Pocket" new items, or make comments.


Like FriendFeed and other social tools, you can filter whether you want to see "Everyone's activity", "Friends activity" or just your own activity. You can also view a single individual's stream if you like.

The last addition are embeddable widgets. Every Web service under the sun has a corresponding widget these days, and Shyftr is no different. You can make widgets for your activity stream, for a specific feed, or to show all activity on Shyftr itself.

As Shyftr founder Dave Stanley wrote in this morning's post, the development of an API was critical to expanding the site's social features, and bringing it to be much more than a passive RSS reader. While the service remains small in the shadows of giants, it has set the groundwork for growth. You can see my profile here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray.

Hey Bloggers, We're Discussing Your Posts At Social Median!

Duncan Riley calls the new world of multi-locational blogging and aggregation Blogging 2.0. I call it being flexible and adjusting to how technology advances change how we communicate, collaborate and share, without being set in our ways. And like FriendFeed, Shyftr and other sites before it, Social Median, a new entrant to the social news space, is giving us yet another forum to add comments and discuss blog posts in a smaller social circle, away from the original source. And while Social Median doesn't commit the "cardinal sin" of copying over a full feed and enabling comments that got many in a ruckus over Shyftr last April, the site does provide a headline and an excerpt - good enough for us to get started.

Despite only being available in beta for less than a week, Social Median has been shoehorned into my online news consumption activity, lopped on to my staples of Google Reader and FriendFeed - and each site performs a different critical function.

Google Reader continues to be the lifeblood of my news consumption. It is where I get every single story from hundreds of feeds in rapid fire, and I get to share them to my shared link blog, and to FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is where I'm broadcasting all my online activity from multiple feeds, and engaging with peers about everything from Smugmug to YouTube to Last.fm.

But Social Median is focused. It is all about finding who is creating news, finding new news sources and discussing the topics of the day. Keeping my geek propeller hat on, I am signed up to follow topics like Apple, Blogging, Social Media Watch, Social Networking and Tech News. So far, I've found about 40 different "Newsmakers" in Social Median whom I trust to bring me the news through their submissions and clips.


A Recent Active ReadWriteWeb Story on Social Median
Keeping the topics focused and my peers as the sources makes a combination ready to talk tech. This means rather than passively hitting "share" in Google Reader in isolation, I can browse the 22 comments on ReadWriteWeb's story "Twitter Versus Plurk: The UI Advantage" on SocialMedian (see it here), while only 21 were on the original site. I can add to Social Median's 14 comments on Mashable's Checking Email in the Bathroom? You’re Far From Alone story, which got 18 comments on the original site. (See the Social Median copy) We're also talking about stories from TechCrunch, from ChrisBrogan.com, and even the New Yorker.


A Mashable Story On Social Median With Activity
Blogging 2.0 is about participating everywhere, and understanding that the comments can't be controlled just on your blog. They're moving to micro-communities where people are comfortable discussing your content with peers. In the last few months, we saw talented developers issue applications that let you embed FriendFeed conversations back into your blog (as I am running). Given SocialMedian's early success, it's possible we may see this happen again. I've seen a lot of interesting sites in the lifestreaming and social news space over the last few years, and Social Median is among the few I expect to be using every single day. If you're a blogger who wants to be part of the full conversation, and not just a partial view, make sure you're signed up to Social Median and monitoring or participating. You can find me here: http://www.socialmedian.com/louisgray.

RSSmeme Creator Served With Legal Threat Over RSS Shares

The foundation of RSS is in its syndication (the second 'S'). A feed, published from one location, can be read in a different location, whether it be a feed reader, a blog widget, a lifestreaming application or any number of aggregation services. The simplicity in sharing has also led some to worry about where their content goes when they hit "Publish", as, often, they lose control over where it can go.

Today, RSSmeme's Benjamin Golub, who has developed a tracker for the most popular shared items on Google Reader, saw one unhappy publisher threaten him with legal action after she had found her feed included in the service.

The RSSmeme service utilizes Google Reader's shared link blogs as its underlying database. Those items that receive the most shares from Google Reader rise to the top, and Benjamin, over the last few months, has updated the service to sort by categories, by languages, and highlight the most active users and tags. But one thing he doesn't do is hand-select the content displayed. That's done by the thousands and thousands of people using Google Reader every day, and sharing new items. So when he received a takedown request by e-mail, he was a little surprised.

Talking with him by phone this afternoon, he said the complainant's feed had only been shared two times, by a single sharer. But she had essentially penned an e-mail saying to "remove all content, or I will send a lawyer."

Not eager to have legal trouble, Benjamin removed the offending shares, and recommended to the publisher that her feeds be set to broadcast as partial feeds, not full feeds, assuming she was concerned her content was being stolen, or used in a commercial way. Benjamin told me that he anticipated such a threat might happen once he posted ads on the RSSmeme site, but said with rising Web hosting costs, monetizing in some way soon became necessity.

"When I started RSSmeme, it only cost $20 a month, and (due to site growth), it doesn't cost that much any more," he told me. Since launch, costs have more than tripled, and the Google-sourced ads are used to offset any out of pocket expenses.

While Benjamin considers his options, at the time, he has globally altered settings on RSSmeme to show only the excerpts of feeds, removing the ability to read an entire blog post on the site, the same approach taken by Shyftr back in April when similar complaints arose.

The issue of how RSS-enabled content is monetized, where comments lie, and who has full control over blog entries isn't going away any time soon. Even if Benjamin never hears back from the woman threatening to take him to court, it's definitely got him rattled, and once again is stirring up discussion, as you can see on FriendFeed.

Giving a Service Wings By Pushing Them from the Nest

For those of us blogging who like to break the news by announcing new services, and using our site as their platform to debut, it can be tempting to pull an "old world" journalism mentality and claim that topic as "our turf", resenting anybody else who tries to step in and steal the thunder by posting the news first, or even feeling betrayed if the entrepreneur takes the news somewhere else. But I've seen that after what I consider an incubation period, the fastest-growing services do best when I can step back and let them take their first steps away from the nest, as they engage with other bloggers, gaining them a new audience and greater exposure.

In this analogy, it can be nerve-wracking to see the little ones as they leave the nest. I worry the new caregivers might not see them in the same way I do. The new influencer might be cruel or may not recognize their talents. But to try and protect them by keeping them in the nest could stunt their growth.

As mentioned in yesterday's popular post, the first stage of being an early adopter can at times be indistinguishable from the service's PR or Marketing firm, as you try to make a product you like extremely visible. You've no doubt seen me do this, as I'll not just help by introducing a product, but keeping you posted on its updates, from Assetbar to ReadBurner, FriendFeedMachine, RSSmeme and Toluu.

But there comes a time when the right thing to do is let go, when the service has gained such momentum that I instead suggest the developer reach out to other sites to get a broader perspective and more exposure, so that their service is less tied in with me, and seen, instead as more of the broader landscape.

Don't get me wrong. I love exclusives, and part of my journalism background makes the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I know that someone who might be considered competition is writing about the same topic at the same time with the same deadline. But lately, for services that have gotten some traction, I've opted out of story opportunities and encouraged the developer to get some new voices talking instead.

A prime example of this was with Toluu yesterday. On Wednesday, Caleb Elston reached out to me with some great new service updates, including details on subscriptions within Toluu by feed, and story popularity, in part helped by AideRSS. I told Caleb that instead of waiting for me, to take his outreach to the next level, and it worked, without question. Yesterday ended up being a record-setting day for Toluu, after what Hutch Carpenter called a great example of social media marketing, by participating and reaching out to bloggers and following Toluu references on both FriendFeed and Twitter.

Similarly, RSSmeme announced options to find similar sharers of data to you, and integrated widgets on each page that show top tags and sharers for that blog or topic. See: Using RSSmeme To Find Similar Sharers: Louis Gray’s Example. Having just given RSSmeme a ton of credit last Saturday on being the authority on Google Reader sharing notes, I again waved the white flag, and told Benjamin to spread the word. He did, leveraging a custom room on FriendFeed for RSSmeme, to update followers, also adding RSSmeme as a user of the service, and today, leveraging the FriendFeed API to speed up the site.

You can see how other services have taken steps to leave the nest, as other sites, often much bigger than mine, take up the rallying cry:

ReadBurner:
The Inquisitr: ReadBurner Gets Digg Like Features

Shyftr:
Mashable: Shyftr Beats Google Reader with OPML Imports

LinkRiver:
SheGeeks: LinkRiver is My Personal Techmeme

Part of being a good partner to new services is knowing when to let go, and to see if the service has wings. A few weeks ago, I wrote to one pair of entrepreneurs, "Let me know if there's anything else I can do, but I do believe it's going to come down to you guys being more visible." With everything else that's going on, I can't possibly do it all myself. That's why, even though it can be bittersweet on occasion, the right thing to do is let them take a risk and let go. It gives others, like Corvida, the opportunity to do a social media roundup on service updates, and it's best for the community at large.

Dealing With Capacity Overload and "Laying Off" Features

If you take a step back and think about popular Web services, be they RSS feed readers, communications tools, social networks, link aggregators or lifestreams, their core deliverable is data. The way they are differentiating is through enabling that data to be accessed by more people, and manipulated in new ways. But as their popularity grows, with more users, more features, and richer media, be it photographs, music, or video, the data can spiral out of control, demanding larger databases, more servers, faster networks, better caching... you name it. And if they don't deal with it? Death. The services can slow down or crash, and users will move on.

Not every Web service has had the structure, the planning or the money of Google, so not every site can keep going with all features, saving all data, forever and ever.

Twitter's recent struggles keeping up with user growth and resulting issues have been extremely visible. To cope with the load, the microblogging service started whacking features one by one. At various points, Twitter turned off the @Replies tab, removed pagination, reduced the number of times that external services could access its API, and eliminated the use of instant messaging services. Limping along, Twitter has slowly returned to speed, as one by one, most of the pieces have been turned back on, but not everybody is happy about it.

But don't think Twitter's alone. Just yesterday, I logged into SocialThing, a lifestreaming service thought by many to have a better GUI for FriendFeed, and found that it had been forced to scale back its offering as users grew.

Rather than supporting many different services, SocialThing only lets me include Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, with LiveJournal, Pownce and Vimeo also being options. But the many other sites I use? Blocked. They write, "We have had to temporarily disable a few of our services, due to user growth. We hope to have them back up soon!"


At a time when FriendFeed is gaining notoriety for supporting rapid access to the streaming of 35 different services without slowdown, that kind of scaling down can't be good.

For Shyftr, a new RSS reader I've covered quite a bit here, they too are seeing the challenge of user growth. As we saw with Mergelab's closure, the act of tracking thousands of feeds and storing their data for an infinite amount of time can be very challenging. I've already seen Toluu upgrade their server farm, and Shyftr has done the same recently. But more changes are coming to handle the rising user base.

As founder Dave Stanley wrote in a blog post, Notice: System Changes and New Implementations, Shyftr will be removing "a substantial portion of backdated data" which should reduce recent issues with database performance, and let them turn on services that had been disabled thanks to site slow-downs, including search. As he said, "It's time we trim some fat while making the system leaner, more efficient, and better prepared for future growth."

If you have a Shyftr login, see the full post:
Notice: System Changes and New Implementations

I expect that the rules for small companies are different than the rules for big companies. Twitter has gotten such a bad response for its issues in part due to its popularity, and in part due to its criticality for some communications. For smaller sites like Shyftr and SocialThing, users are more likely to be accepting of temporary scale-backs or data removal. But if the big guys like Yahoo!, Google, Apple or Microsoft, took the route of deleting data and reducing features, it'd be likely that we'd see an uproar.

So how should they handle it? Do you, as a user, have an absolute right to all your archives, ever? Do you have the right to demand that once features are added, they never be removed? And do services have an obligation to scale up their hardware and infrastructure to keep you happy? Would you help fund their upgrades? Handling growth is critical, in my opinion, and those best prepared for scaling will leapfrog those who are forced to "lay off" their data. We're wishing Twitter luck, but there are a lot of smaller services struggling with similar issues.

FriendFeed and Google Reader Are One. Sort Of.

Not too long ago, ReadBurner upgraded, including a new tab that essentially added Google Reader in an iFrame, letting you check your RSS feeds without leaving the site. At the time, I openly speculated that I would love it if FriendFeed would do the same thing.

In my fevered brain, FriendFeed could tie in with Google Reader, and let me see if other friends of mine have already "liked" or shared an item. Imagine seeing a feed from TechCrunch, and a little icon on the right saying 5 friends "liked" the item and 6 had "shared" it and there were 3 comments in FriendFeed. So far, the closest solution to this had been Assetbar, but that data, so far is siloed, and the service didn't gain the traction I had hoped.

So... to my rescue came Matt Shaulis (FriendFeed page), who you know from his work on one of my favorite Google Reader alternatives, Shyftr. Matt spun up a quick bookmarklet, which, if you add it to your toolbar, lets you log in to Google Reader while logged into FriendFeed, defaulting to your friends' shared items. See the below screenshot:


(Click for the full screenshot)

Use FriendFeed? Use Google Reader? Want to make sure, unlike Loic Le Meur speculates, that both are here to stay? Use the below bookmarklet:

Drag Bookmarklet to Toolbar: FriendFeedReader

Shyftr Gets More Social, Showing Who Reads Feeds You Do

One of my positions I've long held from my RSS bully pulpit is that rather than viewing feeds alone, and sharing to a mystery audience, I'd like to know if my friends are subscribed to the same feeds I am, if they've read articles before I have, and if they liked them. This wisdom of crowds theory helps me discover not only new sources for news, but also new peers I may not have known I had.

Yesterday, Shyftr, a next-generation social RSS reader, took another important step toward fulfilling this vision, following in the footsteps of fellow innovators Toluu and Assetbar.

Now, while you read your feeds in Shyftr, a rectangular box at the top right of the feed shows up to twenty avatars of fellow users who also read the feed. If the feed is not popular, all avatars will be shown, while if the feed has more than twenty followers, a random sample will be selected.

Clicking on any of the avatars leads to the user's profile.

Shyftr's Matt Shaulis asked on Twitter yesterday, "Ever wonder who else was reading the same feeds as you?"

Now I know. In fact, as a gradual student of these avatars I've seen used everywhere from MyBlogLog to BlogCatalog, Twitter, FriendFeed and elsewhere, I'm eerily able to recognize avatars, even of people I've never met. Just this morning, after looking at the avatars in Shyftr, I learned that Chris Miller of IdoNotes reads ReadWriteWeb, as does LiveCrunch.

Additional good news for Shyftr comes from the aforementioned Toluu today. Caleb Elston helpfully added Shyftr as a feed reader option in the open OPML sharing and matching site, letting users of both services add feeds to Shyftr with one click through his custom bookmarklet. (See: Shyftr: Our latest feed reader option)


Toluu has integrated Shyftr as a feed reader option
There is definitely a market for social RSS feed readers that let users find what other peers are reading, sharing and commenting on. Shyftr is methodically hitting all the key points one by one, rather than overwhelming users with feature overkill. I know I'll be clicking through these new avatars to see if there are even more peers whom I should know.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

Shyftr Adds OPML Support To Intriguing RSS Feed Reader

With RSS becoming ubiquitous now, it is not uncommon for Web power users to have hundreds or even thousands of individual RSS feed subcriptions, covering anything from sports to technology, news and blogs of friends and family. But adding these feeds one by one to a new feed reader is simply out of the question. It takes too long. That's why the majority of RSS feed readers, both online and off, have moved to support OPML, enabling the portability of both your feeds and your folders.

Today, Shyftr, an online feed reader that lets you share comments within the Shyftr community and learn what are the most popular feeds and items, added this crucial capability, making them a stronger competitor to other market leaders, such as Google Reader, BlogLines and NewsGator. (See the official post: OPML Support Is Here!)

Shyftr first caught my attention earlier this year, when I highlighted their integrated comments system and blog rankings. (See: Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings) But at the time, I had no choice but to highlight their lack of OPML, a real sticking point for me. Later in March, Shyftr added pocket blogs, much like Google Reader's shared links blog.

You might also remember that last month, the Shyftr team was engaged in some controversy over their practice of displaying full feed items and comments away from the original blog, a position from which they later relented, following criticism. While I didn't have any issues at all with what they were doing, others did, and Shyftr was smart to quickly adjust.


Like with other RSS feed readers, adding OPML to Shyftr is very simple. Just export your OPML from your existing reader, and from your Shyftr Profile, click the "+" button under Feeds to add new items. Once you upload your OPML file, Shyftr will then keep you updated as to its progress, first by laying out the specified folder hierarchy, and second, showing how many feeds have been imported.


For somebody like me, this process can take several minutes. It's not the fastest OPML import I've ever seen, but it definitely works. Just make sure you don't close the browser window while it's operating.


What I liked best about Shyftr's implementation is that the system automatically recognized if I had already manually entered a feed. If I had, it would correctly move that feed, which was duplicated, into the folder specified by my OPML file. I was at first worried I would have to manually move each duplicated feed, but it took care of the hard work for me. (That also explains why in the above graphic, the total number of feeds imported is less than the number processed)

With the addition of OPML, Shyftr has many of the major checkboxes for next generation RSS feed readers nailed. They have online feed reading. They have user profiles. They have comments. They have popularity rankings. They have a personalized link blog. Just about the only thing that Google Reader and others have that they don't yet is keyboard navigation through feeds. If they can manage to get that nailed, Shyftr could be even more compelling than it already is today. It has been fun to watch the team go from pet project to serious RSS feed reader alternative in the space of a few months, and I expect that adding OPML is just the beginning.

BlogPulse Offers Insight into Blog Trends, Conversations and Influence

While BlogPulse has been around since 2005, I have largely ignored it, relying on Technorati, Google Blog Search and my own internal metrics to gauge momentum, trends and how conversations get shaped. But in light of this weekend's discussion, I was drawn to the site, and found it offers the best, closest, picture to how the story developed, who linked to who, and how a story can gain influence.

You can even see which people, famous or otherwise, are getting cited most frequently, or are the most "bursty", showing they are climing the ranks. (Key People for April 13, 2008)

Part of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, BlogPulse highlights the top blog posts, news stories and videos on the Web each day, and offers the ability to search for trends, track conversations across multiple blogs and get profiles of a site. Interestingly, I was alerted by Technorati to the fact that Friday night's post was somehow labeled the second-highest "top blog post" by Nielsen, and Scoble's follow-on "Era of Blogger's Control Is Over" ranked fifth. This was tabulated by the blog posts gaining the most external links. You can see the top forty for today listed on their site, ranging from technology to politics. Unsurprisingly, the weekend discussion on Shyftr figures prominently, with Scoble and me being joined by Tony Hung.


What makes BlogPulse most interesting, at least to me, is the ability to break out conversations between blogs, like a family tree, seeing who linked to who, and how while I may have kicked off the discussion, its clear that Scoble and Hung have their own spheres of influence. Of course, as some reactions linked to all sites, it's not a perfect measure, but BlogPulse is the best I've seen here. (See: BlogPulse: Conversation Tracker)

But BlogPulse does more than just track the conversations. Like Technorati, BlogPulse can show charts, displaying if one topic or another is capturing the fancy of the blogosphere as a whole.

Here is the chart showing Shyftr's spike over the weekend:


The same chart for FriendFeed:


And for Twitter:


And if you're so inclined, you can even search for yourself, like I did.


Drilling down further, BlogPulse offers site profiles for the many blogs they index. The front page of the site claims nearly 78 million identified blogs, with more than 80 thousand net new in the last 24 hours, with almost 700,000 new posts indexed. Now that would make for a big fat, RSS to-do list, would it not?

Looking at my BlogPulse profile, common keywords in my recent posts include "TechMeme", "Blogosphere", "Subscriber", "Momentum", "Anticipated", "Linking", "Embedded", and "Screenshot", to name a few. BlogPulse also offers graphs showing the number of posts per day, and how often the site has been cited in the last month. The chart for my site is below:


Can BlogPulse replace Technorati, as many have expressed frustration with the one-time blog search king? Maybe not, but it certainly has a lot of very interesting elements that I like. While it's not new, I'm definitely going to be paying a lot more attention now to BlogPulse than I ever did before. After a crazy blog weekend, it's offered us the best picture of how it all unfolded.

Shyftr Responds to Critics, Alters RSS Commenting Strategy

Friday night's discussion around the fragmenting of comments between blogs, FriendFeed and RSS readers grew well beyond what I had expected. While the issue of comments and where they should live, relative to the original blog, has come up before, new entrants to the market, like Shyftr, Plaxo and AssetBar made some uncomfortable about how their full feeds were being utilized. After a few days of some high-profile trashing, as well as some supporting posts from people like Robert Scoble and myself, Shyftr has capitulated, by pulling full feeds where discussions are taking place, while retaining full attribution, in hopes to quell fears about stealing the conversation away from bloggers.

In a post this morning (RSS Feeds, Community, Publishers, and Revisions), Shyftr's founder, Dave Stanley, reiterates the key goal of Shyftr, namely:

"Shyftr was developed to help people find and subscribe to publishers that they otherwise would have never found on their own, through the community and network of friends. Having a community where people can share and discuss the feeds they read helps to facilitate this goal."

But, as mentioned, not everyone liked Shyftr's plan to have full discussion on the full feed, so given some of the feedback, Shyftr has adjusted their approach. Stanley's post shows that for those feeds which enable discussion, Shyftr will no longer show full feeds. He writes:

"We have decided to revise the format around our discussions. We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease."

You can see how this has changed by looking at some of the commented posts within Shyftr, including one from Tony Hung (Fine, I'll Say It: Shyftr Crosses The Line), another from Mashable (Shyftr: Good, Bad, and Potentially Quite Ugly) and mine from Friday. (Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?)

I made my opinion clear on Friday that I personally had no problem with what Shyftr was doing. Sarah Perez's initial coverage of Shyftr on ReadWriteWeb (Social Feed Reading With Shyftr) didn't bring up fractured comments as an issue, nor did my coverage back on March 4th. (Shyftr Offers Social RSS Reading, Including Comments, Rankings). Corvida of SheGeeks was the only one to bring up the issue prior to this weekend, that I can tell, in her review: Google Reader Trumps Shyftr.

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I've grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I expect that over time, the RSS community will band together and find a great way to cross-pollenate comments from Readers to bloggers, and all will be one. You can see Nick Halstead's post on the Fav.or.it blog (Fractured Commenting - Again) where he offers Shyftr use of the fav.or.it API to do just that. I don't think we're all that far away from getting this issue solved. Luckily, Shyftr is listening and already making change. The question is, will these changes be enough? If you had issues with Shyftr's approach, let me know what you think about their update.

You can also find me on Shyftr here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray

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.

Shyftr Puts Favorite Blog Posts "In Your Pocket"

Social RSS feed reader Shyftr added an interesting feature this week, which, like Google Reader's shared items, lets you choose your favorite posts from your subscribed feeds, and create a mini link blog of sorts.

Shyftr calls their version a "Pocket Blog", and like Google Reader, you can take the new RSS feed from your Pocket Blog and invite others to subscribe, making you a human blog filter, featuring not just the posts you put in your pocket, but taking steps beyond Google Reader, featuring other friends' Pocket Blogs, and customization of the look and feel, something Google's refused to do, even though I asked (politely) way back in March of 2007.


You can find my Shyftr Pocket Blog here


As mentioned in my initial coverage of Shyftr two weeks ago, the new service enables friends and peers to make comments on RSS feeds, highlighting both the most commented items, and the most popular subscribed feeds. As with other online feed readers, you can add new feeds and view stories within your Web browser.

Now, with this new addition, not only do you see how many comments are on a story, but there are buttons for "Quick Pocket", adding a story to your pocket, and also "Suggest to a Friend", which lets you forward a feed to another user or any e-mail address. You can see my Pocket Blog in the above screenshot. Interestingly, you aren't bound to an item's title as the author intended, but can title it as you wish.


By hitting "Quick Pocket", you are prompted to title the article, and then are notified, via an alert, that this has completed. It's not as quick as Google Reader's one-click option, but just as effective. You're also not bound by only the items in your own feeds. If you look at a friend's feed list, you can even "Pick Pocket" and add one of their items to your Pocket Blog. (See the Shyftr blog for more.)

The advent of Shyftr's Pocket Blog again brings up the issue of link blog portability I raised in January. While today, Google Reader's shared items are the most popular link blogs, no doubt spurred on by Feedheads, RSSMeme and ReadBurner, those who want to switch RSS readers may have to abandon their shared feeds. In a perfect world, I would be able to pick up from one service, move to another and share to a common space. Whether intentional or not, Google Reader's shared link blogs have become a key asset keeping users on board. Maybe Shyftr's Pocket Blog can do the same for them.

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".