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.

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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.

Meeting Virtual Friends In Real Life at Web 2.0 Expo

This week is one of the few opportunities where my work life and my blog life are intersecting. I have the chance to participate at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, and while the show exhibition doesn't start in earnest until tomorrow, I've already had the opportunity to make face to face connections with people who I respect, but until today, had only met online, through Twitter, through blogs, e-mail or FriendFeed. And I continue to be amazed how easy it is to meet somebody for the first time, and feel like we're close friends, solely due to our online connections.

One highlight of the day was meeting Caleb Elston, the creator of Toluu. Caleb, based in Miami, Florida, is far from home, but was nice enough to step out of a session he was attending so we could catch up. In the thirty minutes or so that we talked, he expressed excitement over how rapidly Web users have taken to his RSS feed matching and recommendation service, saying thousands had signed up, with the only limitation being how many beta invites he has offered.

In fact, the early buzz over Toluu, both here and elsewhere, led to some curiosity from colleagues at his day job, where he said he was getting more and better PR than his company. Some friends at the office even thought he might jump ship, to focus solely on Toluu. Yet, he reassured me, that wasn't in the plans. For him, developing and enhancing Toluu is done when he otherwise would be less productive, watching TV or movies, and has helped to keep him sharp and focused.

Eager to keep the Toluu buzz going, I even lobbed a call to Robert Scoble, hoping I could connect the two, but his dance card is full. He said he'd love to meet up, but it's no surprise he has interviews lined up every hour on the hour throughout the show from entrepreneurs trying to gain his attention. I don't exactly envy his schedule.

Wandering up to the press room, as my exhibitor pass wouldn't let me crash any of the sessions, I found Marshall Kirkpatrick and Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb, as well as Brian Solis of Bub.blicio.us and PR 2.0. As Marshall has been one of my more vocal advocates since the turn of the calendar year, and as I respect RWW's efforts, it seemed natural to pull alongside and start trading stories. We talked about what was making news today at the show (not too much), and looked at the latest FriendFeed apps, MySocial 24x7 and FriendFeedMachine, which I covered yesterday. Marshall really likes MySocial 24x7 a lot, and showed me how he had it sitting in his FireFox browser sidebar, but I haven't yet installed it. That led to him teasing me about getting to a FriendFeed app before I did, which I can live with. In turn, I gave him grief for Sarah Perez' continued success at RWW, which I suggested was putting a little more pressure on him to produce. We both agreed she was doing a great job, but I don't know that she's at the show. I certainly didn't see her today.

Richard MacManus joined us at the table just as I had to leave, but I was able to introduce myself and shake hands.

On tap for tomorrow? The exhibition gets started. So, after putting in labor today, we'll be looking forward to meeting more people, both in my virtual address book, and my real world directory. We'll be at booth #115 all day, and can be reached by the contact information on the right hand side of the blog. I'm already looking forward to meeting Susan Mernit, hope to track down the Mashable team, and maybe you too! Send me a note, or drop by booth #115, and we can get connected.

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 Looking Like a Real Winner

Being part of an entrepreneur's launch of a new service is exciting. If I get early access to a product, and think it has real potential, it can be as if in some small way, I'm part of the site's launch team, and every little element of success they recognize makes me feel like I chose well. Sometimes, I really do worry that I'm wearing my early adopter hat so tight that it could be cutting off oxygen to my brain. But with the launch of Toluu ten days behind us, I can easily report the initial response has been more than I could have anticipated for the upstart Caleb Elston and his socially-oriented OPML sharing site.

After my initial coverage of the site last Monday, Caleb's site was almost immediately overwhelmed by eager testers who wanted their hands on the new offering. In the last ten days, Toluu's servers were upgraded, not just once, but twice, as the site saw hundreds of new users pour in, each adding anywhere from a handful to hundreds of their own RSS feeds, forcing Toluu to pull down thousands upon thousands of new items, and using its matching algorithm to crunch the data and help users find new friends and feeds.

(See: Toluu Blog: Toluu gets new server infrastructure)

The growth wasn't all due to my comments, of course. Despite what some say, I'm still very small compared with more brand name sites. The Toluu buzz turned into a roar last week following positive reviews from Allen Stern at Center Networks (Toluu Helps You Like What Your Friends Like) and Sarah Perez at Read Write Web (10 Reasons Why You're Going to Love Toluu). Toluu even gained a position in TechCrunch's CrunchBase company listings. (CrunchBase: Toluu)

Like most new entrants to the market, Toluu has some rough edges. But, like the best innovators, the service responds to user feedback extremely quick. On Tuesday, Caleb introduced two new features he says were the most popular requested features: First, generating an RSS feed or your activity on the site and secondly, delivering an RSS feed for the activity of both you and your friends. As he commented in a blog post, "Now your Toluu activity; the feeds you add, the feeds you favorite, the people you connect with, is now completely portable."

Caleb even chose to highlight the import and activity process using a screenshot which added louisgray.com to his feed lists as the example - no doubt in an attempt to get me to write about it (which apparently worked). Of note, the CrunchBase screenshot has a little louisgray.com touch to it as well (See here).

Sometimes, a site's potential for success is apparent immediately, and sometimes it takes a little more time. Toluu looks like a hit that's spreading virally as bloggers sign in, find new friends and keep talking it up. If he's not careful, Caleb could find himself preparing for yet another server upgrade in the near term.

If you haven't yet jumped on the Toluu bandwagon, there's still time, and I have plenty of highly sought-after invites, so post a comment and get one, or send me an e-mail.

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.