FeedBlendr is a web service that lets you remix your
feeds. It has just launched the public beta of its second version. At first glance
FeedBlendr does not appear to have a lot of bells and whistles, but it is an interesting
and intelligent service that lets you easily remix many kinds of RSS feeds. And after
closer examination, we can see that developer Beau Lebens has put a lot of love into the
site - and actually there are bells and whistles after all. Let's take a look...
The basic idea behind the service is really simple - it's a pipe that takes one or more RSS feeds (or OMPL file) and outputs a single feed. For example, if you are into gadgets, you might combine Engadget, Gizmodo and CrunchGear like this:
The service allows you to combine RSS feeds with Atom feeds and it also produces the output in both formats. Here is the resulting gadget blogs feed in RSS 2.0 format. The items (posts) are merged together and ordered by date. This is the basic function that you would expect, but FeedBlendr also innovates with a set of additional convenience features.
Firstly there is a set of buttons that lets you subscribe to your output feeds via your favorite news reader. But the next feature is really convenient. You get two URLs that let you view the feed either in the browser (WYSIWYG format), or on your mobile device. Here is the browser version of our gadgets feed:
The title of this week's poll is taken straight from Matthew Ingram's post about USA Today's re-design. The new-look USA Today incorporates many of the social networking features that have become popular over the last year or so. Or as the editor of USA Today put it: "the real change is in the approach, not the appearance." And the approach, in a nutshell, is to merge traditional journalistic reporting with social software. The changes, as summarized by USA Today, enable their readers to:
• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.
The USA Today re-design has predictably caused a massive weekend scrum at Techmeme, with many bloggers excited about the changes. But as Don Dodge precisely points out, 92% of USA Today's own readers dislike the changes. This is reminiscent of the Netscape re-design last year, when the portal Netscape changed overnight into a Digg clone - causing howls of outrage from Netscape's traditional user base.
So to the poll. We're interested in the high level trend here. Are newspapers going to morph into social networks over time, a place where people not only read the news but socialize with other readers (and journalists)? Or is this more evidence that the MySpace craze has gone too far...
The Library House blog has done a geographic analysis of Charles Knight's Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. After a bit of Web research, Library House was able to find out where 94 of the 100 search engines in our list are located. The result is that the US, and California in particular, is the place to be to develop a ground-breaking search engine - with 25 of the 94 search engines coming from California. Perhaps unsurprising, but it does prove that Silicon Valley is still the center of search engine innovation at least.
Library House came up with this very nice tag cloud, showing the results:
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
The main Web tech news this week was Adobe's unveiling of Apollo, their next-generation web development platform which integrates the desktop with the Web. R/WW covered the news in this post, followed by Jay Fortner's analysis of how it will affect mainstream users. In related news, Adobe announced an online version of Photoshop.
Also in the news this week was Microsoft's acquisition of MedStory, a Health Search Engine. We explained in our post how this is continued proof that vertical search engines are a strong Web trend going forward.
The Techmeme scrum of the week has to be Ning's announcement of a meta-social network. The 'new ning' essentially lets people build their own social network. It will be competing with existing products in this space, like PeepAgg and Explode (profiled recently by Steve O'Hear). I've written before how meta and open social networks are the future of social networking - and certainly Ning's Silicon Valley PR network and slick UI will come in handy in this market.
It was a great week for in-depth analysis posts on R/WW. Charles Knight released the February version of his Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. There were 32 new entrants to the list, which meant 32 had to drop out. As he wryly commented afterwards, he now has 32 CEOs mad at him and he's just made 32 new friends! :-) In all seriousness, this list is proving very popular and we will be ramping it up over the next couple of months. The next list will be categorized, for example.
Recently I was contacted by the
publishers of YeeYan, a website that translates
articles from english language blogs into Chinese. They asked for my permission to
translate some of Read/WriteWeb's best posts into Chinese, so that people in China can
read and comment on them. One of the founders, known as "thunder", told me their goal is "to
discover valuable contents in foreign languages and to provide high quality Chinese
translations for them." I was happy to give my permission, because I really want R/WW
posts to be read all over the world - I especially like that Chinese people can comment
on R/WW posts in their own language, thanks to YeeYan. Note that YeeYan always links back
to the original article and they don't monetize the translation in any way.
I know that Read/WriteWeb is quite popular in China, Korea and Japan (where CNET Japan syndicates R/WW). So YeeYan is another way for english blogs to really become 'worldwide' - and I hope it goes both ways too. I've long wanted a way to keep up with my friends in Asia, e.g. Danny Kim's Korean Web 2.0 blog, but so far there's been few solutions. Over time, I hope more translation communities spring up to solve this language problem on the Web.
In New Zealand this week,
two new Web portals were announced: Yahoo!Xtra and
the launch of msn.co.nz on 1 March 2007. The background,
briefly, is that both of these new portals take over from previous market leader site "XtraMSN". Essentially what has
happened in the NZ market is that Xtra (New Zealand's leading ISP and a subsidiary of the
national telecoms provider, Telecom) has parted ways with MSN and hopped into bed with
Yahoo. Literally, given the clever promotional image you see to your left (which I
received by email).
While the news itself of the two new portals is only of interest to kiwis, it does illustrate very nicely the growing trend of big Internet companies partnering with local media companies and/or telecoms providers. Indeed the best example of this may've come from Australia at the start of 2006, when Yahoo teamed up with local media powerhouse the Seven Network, to form a joint company called Yahoo7. I said at the time that it may be the start of a trend - Internet-bigmedia marriages, especially as rich media ramps up on the Web (online video, interactivity, etc).
The new msn.co.nz is backed by Microsoft New Zealand, ACP Media and ninemsn (the latter two owned by PBL Media). It features Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Live Search, and portal news. The new service replaces the now defunct XtraMSN. I asked Microsoft NZ Director of Innovation Brett Roberts for some comment on the news and in particular of this trend of big Internet companies partnering with media and telecoms companies. He firstly told me that the decision by Xtra and MSN to part ways was "mutual and amicable". On the overall trend, Brett replied:
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
It is no secret that we live in an information overload age. The explosion of new types of information online is a double-edged sword. We both enjoy and drown in news, blogs, podcasts, photos, videos and cool MySpace pages. And the problem is only going to get worse, as more and more people discover the new web. Consider the two charts below, illustrating the growth of the Blogosphere at large and also in number of posts published by tech news blog TechCrunch:
There's been lots of talk
recently about desktop/web platforms. Last week we mentioned more News Reader desktop
apps powered by
Microsoft's WPF platform, and of course this week Adobe has featured twice on R/WW
due to its unveiling
of Apollo. We've also profiled smaller companies in the past - e.g. Laszlo and Morfik. The latter company, Morfik, has mostly been
flying under the radar for the past year, but their 100% Ajax platform is getting set for
its 1.0 release at the end of March. I caught up with the team recently to see what
they've got under the hood....
The last time I profiled Morfik, in April 2006, I noted that their goal is to push the edges of what can run on current browsers. They're doing this by creating a platform on which developers can develop complex and highly functional Ajax applications. Morfik then, is designed to take advantage of the browser rendering engine to its fullest potential.
One of Morfik's more intriguing lab experiments currently is the transformation of the Salesforce.com interface into a purely Ajax one. AjaxSalesforce was described to me as a demonstration of "what a Salesforce.com experience could truly be like, if state-of-the-art Ajax technology is used". Created with Morfik AppsBuilder, the app aims to create a UI that mimics the functionality of a desktop CRM system - but using 100% Ajax.
