Prediction #7 for 2008 was about aggregation blowing up this year. While we saw it towards the end of 2007 with great services like FriendFeed (my coverage) and Lijit (my coverage), 2008 looks to bring many more options - if for no other reason than there are many new things to aggregate popping up everyday.While some people like my friend Steven Hodson are already getting overwhelmed by these aggregators, a few of these newer ones are becoming increasingly useful - especially at doing tasks Google should be doing with Google Reader by now. Another friend of mine, Louis Gray, has done a great job at covering a lot of the launches in this area.
RSSmeme is one of these newer services that takes Google Reader 'Shared Items' data and pumps out useful information such as the most shared items and individual users sharing habits. While it is not the first of these in the field, technically Feedheads has been doing this for months now via Facebook, and ReadBurner came along a couple months ago - RSSmeme does offer a few things ReadBurner doesn't as they lay out here.
The most important to me is the ability to search - which can be done not only for stories but also for site users (sharers) as well. Also very nice is the site's ability to find users who are similar to you based on your sharing patterns. While many of us read hundreds of feeds everyday looking for interesting items, sometimes a little help is nice - and while a popular page on something like RSSmeme is certainly helpful, sometimes so is following other users who enjoy similar stories and can find new ones for you.
The statistics page of the site is also great. I like that I made the Top 50 authors list because of my work for both ParisLemon and VentureBeat, and they still knew that I was the same 'MG Siegler' on both sites.
Benjamin Golub, who created RSSmeme continues to crank out updates on a daily basis to improve the site. It runs smooth, has a nice, simply design, and fulfills something that I have been wanting Google Reader to do for well over a year now - utilize 'share' data in a meaningful way - I definitely recommend RSSmeme.
Louis Gray has more thoughts on the service here and here.
[UPDATE]: Steven Hodson takes a second gander at some of the aggregators here.
4 comments:
Even though I might feel overwhelmed at imes I definitely can appreciate potential. That was one of the reasons I took a second look at both FriendFeed and RSSMeme today (http://www.winextra.com/2008/02/16/2nd-look-friendfeed-rssmeme/) I ended up having a good discussion with Benjamin over some features one of which he implemented in short order.
I like what both services have to offer and will probably keep on using them - espeically if they give developers an API to play with :)
@steven - ahh that's right, completely forgot you wrote that follow up today (bookmarked, haven't read yet) I'll update so people don't think you're too cranky :)
ROFL ... funny guy :)
Thanks for the review!
I didn't even realize that my model allowed for the same author statistics across multiple sources. Essentially the primary key for an author is the name; so if someone used your name on another blog they'd be increasing your total count (hence why "admin" is so high :P). I didn't plan on that but it's nice that it works out that way :)
This works the same way for tags and sources except that for tags I use a slugify method to turn the title into a slug (ie "Google Rules!" would become "google-rules" so it can be placed in the url safely)
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