AideRSS Raises Money To Attack Information Overload
The Canadian company AideRSS produces one of my favorite tools on the market right now. Their RSS feed filtering service is very useful in all kinds of circumstances. You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.
The company announced today that it's closed a round of funding from Waterloo, Ontario early stage investors Tech Capital Partners and a collection of Canadian Angel investors.
The basic functionality of AideRSS is remarkably simple but powerfully useful. It's the kind of thing everyone I talk to about it says "wow, that's cool and useful looking." Getting a little money in the bank should help AideRSS make its product more robust as well. To be honest, I have experienced frustrating performance issues since I discovered this service - but its functionality has been so compelling and unique that I find myself coming back to it regularly anyway.
ReadWriteWeb first covered AideRSS prelaunch in July, when Josh Catone gave it an in-depth review.
Information Overload
The company is positioning themselves as a solution to the growing problem of information overload. That's a big statement and implementation of that idea can take many forms.
I used AideRSS, for example, in building the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008. In that post I made available a collection of the top RSS feeds in each of five fields I believe are going to be hot in 2008 (Data Portability, Semantic Web, Mobile, etc). Each of those topics ended up having quite a lot of feeds in them and for the sake of efficiency there was no better way to offer our readers a feed of just the most popular items in these top feeds than to use AideRSS. I spliced each topic's feeds into one feed, ran than feed through AideRSS and then ran the AideRSS feed through FeedBurner - but you don't have to do anything nearly so complicated to use this very useful service. You can do a lot of very cool things with AideRSS, though. Try putting in del.icio.us feeds and search feeds, for example.
A simpler example is this. You might feel overwhelmed with the number of posts that ReadWriteWeb makes each day and want a feed of just the most popular items. You can visit or subscribe to this URL to do that: http://www.aiderss.com/best/readwriteweb.com
Limitations of AideRSS
There's lots of different ways to try and determine what the best items in feed are. AideRSS uses explicit Attention Gestures on 3rd party networks to track global popularity. Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.
AideRSS is clearly taking a different approach than other systems based on your personal Attention Data, like FeedHub (our coverage) and some of the Newsgator products that rank news according to your reading habits. Other apps can filter news according to what's hot among a particular group of users you belong to (Attensa in the enterprise and to some degree Google Reader).
Everyone wants to tackle these issues and AideRSS has a particular approach to doing so.
Reaching Out
AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.
This little Canadian company could have a bright future ahead of it. It does a great job of serving both a core need for all users and satisfying the need for magic that RSS power users have. Check it out, it's worth at the very least a few minutes of your time. You might find yourself coming back to it regularly like I have.
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Marshall,
We - NewsGator - are a big fan of this company as well. Personally, I like the simplicity of the concept and that they hide the complexity of the underlying process. It's a very cool way of attacking content discovery.
Posted by: Jeff Nolan | January 9, 2008 9:46 AM
Good for them. I have been testing the site since you (Marshall) and I talked about them in Vegas at BlogWorld Expo. I think it is a solid and useful product for sorting through and determining the popularity RSS items in a feed or (OPML) reading list.
Posted by: Frank | January 9, 2008 9:54 AM
1. I’m a heavy user of Google Reader and, although I tend to be very strict in what I subscribe, I have to rely on the Scoble method which is, in itself, very time consuming.
For me Feed Readers are the central block of any Personal Knowledge Management system, so filtering (ranking) your feeds by relevance based on a certain number of metrics is one of the top features that any feed reader must have.
Although these two services are addressing that necessity I see some problems in terms of reaching a substantial share of users:
1) Biased results towards english written blogs
Since a big part of the rank is comprised of the position achieved by the posts in digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc., the ones made in other languages are not properly ranked and hence the service could be less valuable for people in non english speaking countries.
2) Successful feed readers offer a set of integrated killer features
Trying to compete in this market with only one distinguishing feature, albeit a killer one, is, in the long run, not sustainable because you are very vulnerable to disruption by a bigger player like Google. Also there is more value to the consumer in a integrated app than to have to export an OPML file and upload them to another account and another service. I think this elevates entry barriers for users’ adoption.
Although I want several things from a Feed Reader, for now I’m asking 3 killer features:
1) The ability to build, from within the feed reader, feeds from a site or sections of a site that is/are not rss powered,
Using Google Reader as an example, the ideal would be: whenever you put a site address in the “add subscription” field it would present a set of options: a) subscribe to site b) subscribe to specific sections of site.
2) Feeds and posts ranked by relevance using a set of metrics
This is what the companies above do. However I think Google could offer a better ranking because of Pagerank. Using Pagerank as the foundation it should also allow the user to select sites that could tweak the ranking accordingly to the user interests (that could help the languages bias problem that I referred )
3) The ability to comment within the Feed Reader and to be alerted when someone comments to the same post
I don´t want to go out just to comment. Also I want to know who is commenting to the same post that I and be alerted when that happens. This is very important because I can’t count how many conversations I’ve lost just for not being able to track them.
There is a recently launched company that does this called favorit. There is a review in Techcrunch. One of the things mentioned that I liked was the ability to track attention metadata.
According to Techcrunch “Because Favorit uses Javascript it will gauge how long you read a post and what you did before during and after. This data is invaluable both for advertising targeting and for data mining, and its far more suitable than Digg’s voting system”.
If Google Reader could do this it would be great and it also integrates well with the recent Feedburner acquisition.
Trying not to be far fetched, but if Google integrated this 3) feature it could built a social network based on blogs, or sites that allow interaction with users via comments, therefore making a dent in Yahoo’s turf by displacing mybloglog.
Now, with the acquisition of Feedburner, it could offer metrics about users to the site owners (Rank of power users, defined by who comments the most; Rank of popular posts, etc.), and to users too (ex: your conversations pattern). Also to fully replace mybloglog it just needed to add a widget to replace the one people use from mybloglog on their sites.
So all this leads me to expect that these companies (Feedhub, AideRSS and Favorit) will be:
a) Acquired by Yahoo or Microsoft in an effort to gain a web based feed reader to compete with Google;
b) Acquired by Bloglines to enhance its capability to compete with Google;
c) Acquired by Google in an move to speed up innovation in its feed reader, outpacing its competitors by, simultaneously depriving them from good technology/smart engineers and farther distancing himself
d) Disappear because no one bought them while Google built all those features
Posted by: Ricardo Proença | January 10, 2008 4:46 AM