ReadWriteWeb

Internertnews.com quoted me in their article entitled Benchmark For RSS Client Market Share?, a news story covering Feedburner's RSS Aggregator stats. It's the first time I've been used in the media as a source, so I'm quite chuffed. They didn't contact me, just quoted from my blog - which is fine by me. It's a good write-up and it summarizes some of the caveats involved in trying to measure RSS share. I've been surprised there hasn't been more comment in the blogosphere about Feedburner's stats, but I think that's mainly because people don't know what to make of it. So in this post I'll review a few of the caveats and in future posts I'll address some of the others.

Default Subscriptions

One of the more controversial caveats from the Feedburner post was that some of the Aggregators "ship with one or more of our top 10 feeds as a default" and that this may be skewing the data. Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher emphasizes this issue in the Internetnews.com piece. He is quoted as saying "...there's a red herring created by default subscriptions (built into desktop software) that can skew results in ways that don't reflect the real user base."

Now, I'm not so sure that default subs is as big an issue as the some of the browser-based aggregator caveats (more on that in a minute). Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, which was second in Feedburner's list, left this comment on my blog yesterday about the default subs query:

He also notes that users can of course unsubscribe from the default feeds at any time.

We don't know how many people do unsubscribe, but given that NetNewsWire is an aggregator exclusively for the Apple Mac OS X then I'd say a lot of users would not unsubscribe from those two Mac feeds. But the real question, perhaps, is how many of Feedburner's big customers are Mac publications? Brent's mentioned two that may be, but how many others are signed up to Feedburner's service? Mac publications are known to have large and devoted readerships, so it's quite possible Feedburner's data is skewed to a degree towards the most popular Mac aggregators - if there are a number of popular Mac feeds in their data.

Mac users big RSS users?

Another thing. If Mac publications are over-represented in Feedburner's data, then this would account for the interesting fact that the second-place getter in Feedburner's stats is an aggregator that is exclusively for people on the Mac OS platform. The vast majority of computer users are Windows users and NetNewsWire is, as far as I know, not an option for them. So it's quite amazing that an aggregator that only a relatively small percentage of people can use, turns out to be the number 2 aggregator for the whole market - and by a healthy margin too! I suspect it's got something to do with Macs being very popular amongst the sort of geek likely to read RSS feeds. Is NetNewsWire the iPod of RSS Aggregators? :-)

Yahoo and the mainstream users

Quick note on MyYahoo, which may be best positioned among the current crop of aggregators to get mainstream users to subscribe to RSS feeds (simply because that's their user base). It's interesting that Firefox Live Bookmarks places third in the Feedburner stats - and my stats for that matter. Firefox users are generally of the geek persuasion. And Yahoo is a fair way back in 9th place, which seems to me another indication that geeks dominate these stats - i.e. Mac users come second, Firefox third! I mean come on, Macs and Firefox are minority products still and it's mostly geeks who use them. I use them :-)

Bloglines Caveats

Lest I be seen as picking on the desktop aggregators, I should point out what I think are two pretty big caveats for browser-based aggregators (and let's face it, we're mostly talking about Bloglines!). One issue is that the Feedburner count of Bloglines subscribers doesn't take into account abandoned accounts, another is that a lot of desktop aggregator users do not poll for feeds daily (24 hours is the timespan of Feedburner's study). In the first case, Bloglines stats are probably being overstated. In the second case, desktop stats (like NetNewsWire's) are likely being understated. Those are two pretty big caveats in my opinion.

Measuring Value

We've opened up a whole can of worms in this business of analyzing RSS Aggregator market share. But that's a good thing! The RSS world has long needed a way to measure hits and readers. If blogging is to be monetized with advertising and writers getting paid for niche content, then we need ways to measure the stats. How else will advertisers and media companies, and investors for that matter (IPO anyone?) know how to value RSS-based companies and RSS producers?

So that's why I'm so enamoured of Feedburner - I think they've opened up the market for RSS measurement and are leading the way for us all. Interestingly, Feedburner threw out a broad hint that they're about to release a service that will solve some of these stats caveats:

Summary

I've only scratched the surface of the many issues surrounding the RSS aggregator market share data that has been released by Feedburner. But that's OK, because it means I get to keep digging into and analyzing the data! Now, Feedburner: about those stats minus the top 10 feeds... how about giving those to us? ;-)

Great news! Prompted by my December post about RSS Reader Market Share, Feedburner (the company I selected as the most promising Web 2.0 company of 2004/5) has just released their own RSS Aggregator stats. This is exactly what I asked for, because statistically the Feedburner data is much much bigger - and hence more statistically significant - than my own data. Also I assume Feedburner's data includes Boing Boing's. Feedburner are using their "most highly subscribed 800 feeds" and not only is Boing Boing almost certainly Feedburner's biggest client, it's also arguably the world's most popular blog.

I'll be chewing over this data over the next few days and I'll post my detailed analysis later. One quick observation for now: Feedburner's top 3 is the same as my top 3. Bloglines, followed by NetNewsWire, followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks. However the gap that Bloglines has is nowhere near as large as it was in my stats and NetNewsWire is a very healthy second (still only just over half of Blogline's share however!). This augers well for competition in the RSS Aggregator space, because it's always a worry when one company monopolises the competition. And because NetNewsWire is not a browser-based RSS reader, does this also auger well for desktop clients (i.e. non-Web 2.0), I wonder? And the Apple Mac for that matter... Or is it a reflection of the popularity of Apple Macs and desktop apps among techies, who are still the predominate users of RSS at this stage of the game?

So here are the official Feedburner stats (thanks Dick and the good folk of Feedburner for posting this!):

Top 20 RSS clients across FeedBurner most highly subscribed 800 feeds as of January 6, 2005

Aggregator Name (Market Share Percentage)
1. Bloglines (32.86%)
2. NetNewsWire (16.95%)
3. Firefox Live Bookmarks (7.78%)
4. Pluck (7.20%)
5. NewsGator Online(4.45%)
6. (not identified) (4.07%)*
7. FeedDemon (3.83%)
8. SharpReader (3.27%)
9. My Yahoo (2.58%)
10. iPodder (2.42%)
11. NewsGator (2.23%)
12. Thunderbird (2.13%)
13. RSS Bandit (1.12%)
14. NewsFire (1.05%)
15. iPodderX (1.02%)
16. Sage (0.71%)
17. FeedReader (0.67%)
18. RssReader (0.54%)
19. LiveJournal (0.46%)
20. Opera RSS Reader (0.45%)

I thought I'd trial a new feature on Read/Write Web, a weekly summary of news and views relating to Web 2.0 (Web as platform). Most of the links will be sourced from my linkblog, which btw I'm now managing with del.icio.us. So here are some highlights from this week:

1. Weblications is a must-read article by Adam Rifkin, that clearly explains the benefits of using the Web as a platform. He cites Gmail in particular, which I too cited in my Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004 article. Choice quote: "They don't see that the power of Weblications is that "simplicity and flexibility beat optimization and power in a world where connectivity is key", as Adam Bosworth put it." NB: see also The Web Way by Adam.

2. Tim Porter on morph, re content and containers. Continuing the Tom Curley discussion, Tim gets to the nub of the issue for journalists: "Adaptation, flexibility, innovation, intentional decision-making, distinctive content, recognizable point of view ñ these are the qualities of the news organizations that will flourish in the coming decade."

See also this great post by Jay Rosen from PressThink and a Simon Waldman article on Permanence (also from PressThink).

3. Mitch Kapor converts to Web 2.0! This is big news because of course Mitch made his fortune with the first killer app for the PC - Lotus 1-2-3 - and now he's building a smart client app called Chandler.

Choice quote from Mitch: "For 25 years, I've preached the superiority of the PC as an application platform, but times change and reconsideration is in order. The web browser and the infrastructure of the World Wide Web is on the cusp of bettering its aging cousin, the desktop-based graphical user interface for common PC applications."

4. Shore Communications: 2005 Content Business Models. Quote: "All-singing, all-dancing proprietary content vendor interfaces and exclusive distribution are "out": being able to deliver information built to "just-in-time" custom client specifications, facilitating the collection, distribution and linking of content from individuals and institutions and providing content through any and all distribution channels desired by a wallet-holder are "in" - especially those that build upon the search and aggregation tools which enable users to create content value on their desktops and in portable devices."

5. Six Apart acquires LiveJournal. You will have heard this news already, but here are some good quotes and stats:
- Six Apart pov: "Many of our weaknesses are LiveJournal's strengths and many of LiveJournal's weaknesses are our strengths."
- LJ pov: "...we'll continue to focus on technology and they'll help us make our stuff pretty and usable. They want LiveJournal to stay LiveJournal..."
- LJ stats show what SA is getting: Age Distribution is clustered around 15-20 year olds; 67% female users; 2.4 million "active in some way" accounts (5.6 million total).

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, writes:

I don't call myself a reporter, yet I managed to get an interview with O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly last year. And either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is my next target! (I'm half kidding... actually I think I'll approach the Flickr founders for my next interview).

p.s. perhaps I should ask Simon for a job. :-)

One of my favourite articles of 2004 was a transcript of a speech by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press. In it he said that "...content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the Web]". Why? Because "killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in." 

Curley's speech was timely for me, because a couple of weeks earlier I'd launched a series of posts on a theory I called Design for Data - which was inspired by a Jason Kottke post and before that a Tim Berners-Lee article. Another inspiration was Joshua Porter's article for Digital Web Magazine entitled How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. All those things, plus my own ideas fermenting in my head! :-)

I wrote about Tom Curley's speech in a November 23 post on Read/Write Web entitled Branding Microcontent. I said then that "RSS flow is creating a need for the data itself to be 'designed', not into HTML containers but into chunks of branded microcontent that will probably be XML." 

And that's where I left the theory, until recently when Joshua Porter and I began an email exchange to nut it out some more. At the same time I noticed, via a PressThink post entitled Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container", that the journalist blog fraternity is still talking about Curley's speech and its implications. 

PressThink is an influential media blog by NYU professor of Journalism, Jay Rosen. He summed up Curley's speech by saying that "we who make news content have to re-locate where we brand it, and think about adding our voice at every step." 

Rosen and a number of other media bloggers are looking at Curley's speech from the point of view of news organizations - traditional Content Producers (in 20th century speak). Although I should note that Rosen and others also promote the overlap between news producer and consumer in the 21st century. I'm probably taking a more broader view - where a Content Producer is any person who publishes content on the Web (e.g. bloggers, corporate website publishers). I'm also applying Curley's insights to the Web 2.0 world of web services such as Flickr and Amazon. However despite our different points of view, we're all converging on the same thing - I believe.

Firstly, I liked this observation from Rosen:

I find the "house"/place metaphor to be a fascinating one on the Web. I explored it (in a different context to this) in my Digital Web Magazine article The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites from April 2004. Corporate websites in the 90's were usually designed as 'places', but nowadays they're more likely to be a group of services. For a media website, this may mean for example a news subscription service where the news travels out to users - rather than users traveling to the website 'container' to view it.

Another media person to articulate this well was Tim Porter, in a recent Morph post:

The next piece of insight from Rosen's PressThink was this:

I think he's making a few points here and one of them is that the value in content is increasingly the personality of the writer - the voice. So the voice becomes the design/brand. Of course that's what blogs are good at - and what traditional corporate websites are not so good at (think of all that horrid corporate-speak and bland design from as recent as a few years ago). At a deeper level, Rosen is saying that content is a truer representation of people - and their influence on business - than the franchise 'containers'.

Lastly, the following quote from Rosen is a nice way to tie-in with the techie crowd (which I belong to):

'Write once, run anywhere' is nowadays a basic underlying principle of Web 2.0 (i.e. the Web as Platform). Given that the Internet is the driver of most (if not all) of Tom Curley's insights in his November '04 speech, it's fitting that news media organizations are adopting the same philosophy as Web designers and developers.

Congratulations to The Robot Co-op for releasing their new goal-setting social software app, 43 Things, in time for New Year resolutions. I've only added a few things to my account so far. I'm still working out the balance between private and public goals, but once I sort that out I'll add more things.

Another observation - I originally entered my goals in my own words, but I found myself converting some of those into the words of similar-sounding goals that were already shared by a group of people.

One example is that I originally came up with this goal: "Build a Web 2.0 business." That's what I've got written down in my personal notebooks, but on 43 Things I converted it to: "Start a company that survives longer than 2 years.". I did that because 46 other people share that particular goal and I want to link up with those like-minded people. If you click on the above link and view the goal, you'll see a long - and very interesting - list of comments that folks have made about the goal. A lot of inspiring stories about starting a company, motivations, suggestions, support, progress reports, etc. In summary, a loosely-formed community has gathered around that one goal. That's social software in a nutshell. ;-)

So I'm looking forward to defining my goals more on 43 Things and I encourage you to check it out for yourself.