Spectives and Readfresh are the sites in question, and both offer thumbnail images and a limited amount of text. Readfresh monitors sites and brings the most recently updated sites to the top of a user's page, allowing users to see what's new at a glance. Spectives, on the other hand, gives users "one page, a lot of pictures, updating constantly" from RSS feeds and websites. Read on for a side-by-side comparison and our assessment.

In other words, if you already know what sites you want to read, but Google Reader makes you cross-eyed and/or frustrated, either one of these sites might be great for you to try.

Spectives

One thing we love about Spectives is that it takes the tech out of subscribing to RSS feeds. Users can add a feed or type in a web address and click a link for the feed or feeds for that page. The content then appears in a user's "collection" of feeds with no futher fuss.

Content consists of a post title as well as a thumbnail of an image pulled from the post.

Here's a quick, one-minute demo video:

And here's what our collection looks like:

Collections are shareable and linkable, and Spectives offers their own curated collections for popular verticals such as humor and gadgets.

But be warned: Only sites and feeds where Spectives can find images will be added to a user's collection. So it might not work for some types of feeds. And with this stipulation comes a couple bugs.

We were beyond disappointed and slightly confused that the site couldn't find images on Penny Arcade and for some reason, the site bugged out once when we tried to add Questionable Content to our collection and once again when we tried Awkward Family Photos.

Readfresh

One thing we love about Readfresh is that it doesn't rely on RSS feeds to serve updated content at all. Users simply enter the URL of the websites they want to track, and content is served, with a thumbnail of each website gliding to the top of the stack when the site shows new content.

According to the developer, Emil Schutte, Readfresh "uses a combination of text and image analysis to decide when a site has changed. That's where most of the interesting work happens. It attempts to zoom in on new content in the thumbnail image when a site updates. The results right now are usually pretty good, but it depends on the site.

"It also has some smarts to discover changes as quickly as possible without flooding sites with pings all the time."

Indeed, Readfresh seemed to do really well at serving timely content. However, users will see one thumbnail per website as opposed to one thumbnail per post, and each thumb links to the site itself, not to an individual post.

Also, we can't figure out a way to share our Readfresh collections, which is a disappointment, indeed.

Who Wins in a Sudden Death Round?

As of now, each site offers unique benefits. We like Readfresh's implementation of non-visual content and sites without RSS feeds. We also like Spectives' post-by-post updates, which will surely make content easier to keep track of. Both offerings need work, as newly launched products, and Spectives seems particularly buggy.

So which site wins you over, readers? Let us know what you think about these two products and visual RSS in general in the comments.

RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web. The element was just added to the WordPress code this afternoon. The implications of this big vote of support go beyond reading WordPress blogs; this is the kind of traction that new technologies can leverage to gain support in many different applications.

Google Reader, the dominant RSS aggregator on the market, began a limited implementation of a related protocol called PubSubHubbub last month. Facebook-acquired FriendFeed worked with Google on that system.

Now RSSCloud has a posse. Half a million blogs are created each month on WordPress and if Google Reader keeps taking its sweet time checking those blogs for updates instead of turning on support for RSSCloud, it's going to look slow as molasses.

Real time updates could enable several things. Faster distribution of blog posts, more compelling conversations in real-time and a renewed timeliness for blogging vs. services like Twitter are all likely consequences. The list of possible technical developments on top of RSSCloud could be as open-ended as the developments enabled by the core of RSS.

RSS has made blogging viable by freeing readers of the requirement of visiting each site they are interested in. It has made podcasts subscribable. It has made wiki change notifications trackable outside the mess of the email inbox. It has made search a persistent action, instead of a one-off occasional delayed reaction. RSS is mixable, mashable, parsable, filterabile.

Now RSSCloud could add a real-time dimension to all of that. The paradigm just got a very big vote of support.

This move probably makes a lot of sense for NewsGator, as the company can now focus more on working with its enterprise and government customers. Running an online RSS reader is pretty resource intensive. For the most part, NewsGator was only duplicating Google Reader's features anyway, though it did offer a number of features that Google doesn't yet offer in its online RSS reader.

The most important part of the announcement actually comes at the end of the FAQ about the transition. NewsGator argues that its enterprise products have grown at a record pace in the last 18 months. The company also announced that its Social Sites product already has over a million paying users. Under these circumstances, offering a free online news reader probably didn't make any sense for NewsGator anymore.

Free Desktop Readers Will Live On

It's important to note that the company will continue to develop and support its free desktop and mobile readers, though NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile will no longer be available for consumers after August 31. NewsGator's browser toolbar and desktop notifier will also be discontinued.

The Good Stuff Machine

While my6sense is a capable feed reader in its own right, it's what my6sense's founder Barak Hachamov likes to call the company's "good stuff machine" that makes all the difference. While traditional feed readers just organize items chronologically, my6sense actually watches what you do while you read your feeds. The app, for example, looks at messages you read, links you click on, items you share and the position of these items in your stream, as well as items you skip. You can also actively mark a message as interesting by clicking the 'I like' button.

After you have spent only a few sessions with the app, my6sense will have already gotten a good sense of the items that are probably most relevant to you. Of course, the more you use it (we used the web app regularly since the beta launch last December), the better the recommendations get.

In our experience, my6sense's algorithms do a great job at figuring out a user's interests. If you are a real news junkie, you will probably still sometimes want to switch to the regular timeline mode that organizes items chronologically. After all, the items you don't usually think you would be interested in can sometimes really grab your attention (which is, to be honest, a problem that all recommendation systems have to grapple with).

Import and Share

It is worth noting that the app can also import your streams from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Flickr. From within the app, you can also share the most interesting items you find on Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

My6sense can import your feeds from Google Reader, iGoogle, MyYahoo, Newsgator, and NetVibes. Thanks to this, it's quite easy to get started. Sadly, though, the app doesn't sync with any of these services, so items you read on my6sense won't show up as read in your Google Reader subscriptions. My6sense also offers a curated lists of feeds that new users can subscribe to.

A Few Things to Improve

There are a few nagging omissions in the app, though, that keep it from being really great. Most importantly, you can't tell the app to only display items that were posted in the last 24 or 48 hours. In a way, this makes sense - after all, the app is trying to give you the most relevant items, including those that you might have overlooked. But often, we just want to see what the most interesting items posted today are, and as of now, my6sense can't do that.

Another problem with the app is that once you import your social network feeds from Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed, your timeline often gets overwhelmed by these items. At least for us, my6sense performed far better when we disabled these feeds.

Currently, my6sense also doesn't offer an offline mode, so you can't use it to read feeds while on a plane or far from the nearest cell tower.

Overall, we recommend you give my6sense a try. After all, the app is free, and importing your feeds from your current feed reader is easy enough - just give it a day or two to see if the recommendation system works for you.

Prior Art?

While the patent was filed in November 2003, it is not clear when exactly VoloMedia argues to have invented podcasts. In his blog post, however, Navar argues that this was "almost a year before the start of podcasting." We have wondered about this timeline, however. Using enclosures in RSS feeds was first publicly written about by Dave Winer in January 2001. Indeed, the system for downloading and distributing podcasts in Winer's "Payloads for RSS" from 2001 looks quite similar to VoloMedia's patent. When we spoke to Winer earlier today, he also pointed us to an early podcast by Chris Lydon from July 2003.

The podcasting movement only really picked up steam in 2004, when moving downloaded files to iPods (which were also just coming of age) and other MP3 players became a lot easier thanks to numerous developers who wrote the first podcast clients.

Looking at the patent, it quickly becomes clear that VoloMedia laid out the fundamentals of podcasting in great detail, including how to synchronize content between mobile devices and PCs. Navar argues that in November 2003, it wasn't obvious that users would start to download episodic content. Given that Dave Winer first met with Adam Curry to discuss the concept in December 2000, however, we really have to wonder if this claim would hold up under greater scrutiny. We asked VoloMedia for a statement and will update this post once we hear back from them.

More to Come

For VoloMedia, which just switched gears towards a stronger focus on serving ads after it fired its sales team, this patent obviously comes at a good time. With some luck, the company will either be bought by another podcasting company interested in the company's intellectual property (and Navar says that more patents are in the pipeline), or it will receive a nice influx of cash based on licensing deals with other companies in the podcasting business. That is, of course, if the patent really holds up...

According to NewsGator's Brent Simmons:

"The idea behind TapLynx is that you can take a collection of feeds and some artwork, make choices about colors and gradients and behavior (all in a configuration file you edit), then create an iPhone app. Without doing any programming.

But you can do programming if you want to -- use TapLynx as the base and add more features. (In fact, that's what I'm doing with NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone -- it's a custom app built on TapLynx.)"

Being able to rapidly develop customizable and unique iPhone apps with no need to learn Cocoa is great news to those of us who are interested in building such apps, but know very little about developing them. We are anxiously awaiting for TapLynx to make its way out of beta, but meanwhile you can sign up for the SDK here and the company will let us know when it becomes available. Be sure to follow @taplynx on Twitter.

The core of the plugin is the ticker, though, which also features a nice pop-up with a story's excerpt when you hover the mouse over a story. While a lot of similar tickers can be distracting because the developers insist on making new stories scroll horizontally, Feedinvader just fades stories in and out, making the ticker far less intrusive.

Feedinvader's feed reader itself is also worth a look, too, though in its current iteration, it is held back by a few missing features. By default, Feedinvader uses a standard, email client-like, three-pane view, with a color scheme that is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft Outlook. You can also switch to an 'expanded' view that shows the full content of a feed without a separate pane for the headlines, but one feature we really missed in Feedinvader was a river of news-style view. What's far worse, though, is that you can't mark a story as read, and hence you also can't see how many unread items you have in any given feed or folder, making Feedinvader almost completely useless as a stand-alone feed reader.

On the positive side, the RSS reader does allow users to import and export OPML files and even import Live Bookmarks from Firefox.

If you like the ticker feature, then the feed reader definitely makes for a good way to manage these feeds, but we wouldn't recommend you ditch your favorite RSS reader like Google Reader, FeedDemon, or NetNewsWire for it.

As of now, because feeds aren't marked as read (at least as far as we can see), the ticker will loop from feed to feed, instead of listing stories in chronological order, making it best for small, high-value collections of feeds instead of a way of keeping an eye on a large collection of sources. Because of this, we would rather recommend you use a program like Snackr if you are looking for a news ticker.

Pingdom also reports that the average loading time for the Pingdom feed was about 0.8 seconds, which has gradually improved since March. Overall, this number might be a good indication for the health of the Feedburner service, but for most users, 0.8 seconds will probably mean very little, as it often takes Feedburner 15 minutes or more to even update a feed with a new post.

The Feedburner service has definitely had its fair share of problems, including major issues with the stats it reports, but uptime was never really Feedburner's most pressing problem. On our personal blogs and here at RWW, we have often seen that Feedburner would not respond to pings or took far too long to update our feeds.

While we have seen a few startups in this space, including FeedBlitz and Feedsqueezer, for most bloggers Feedburner is still the de-facto standard for managing their RSS feeds. And while it is nice to see that Google is doing a good job at keeping it up and running, it would be nice to see some general fine-tuning of the service. Even Google is now getting into the real-time web, and RSS feeds, which used to feel like a very speedy and efficient way to subscribe to information, but now are starting to feel rather slow.

Announced yesterday (with early coverage from Louis Gray), the initial alpha has a public filter that lets anyone test the technology on a group of a few dozen feeds, and a registration-only Publisher area that allows users to add up to 5 of their own feeds to use with Shyfter Filter.

The core product is the filter itself. It consists of three types of search criteria (title, author, and article/body) that can be used independently or together to produce a customized feed of just the content you want. The public version has 44 feeds as source material to work from, of which all or just a certain subset can be chosen for the filter. Each criteria can be narrowed down to a dozen or so levels of strictness, from any of the terms to exact phrase match. Once the terms are entered and the source feeds chosen, you can grab the resulting RSS feed. I took a moment to search all the sources for the terms iphone and blackberry, you can see my results here.

You can also exclude terms that perhaps you don't want to see coverage on. Do you just hate seeing any mention of the terms iphone or twitter in a tech story? In this example we chose to exclude those terms from all sources in the technology category. And remember, you can one type of criteria with another, say searching for a particular author but excluding anything article with particular terms in it.

The Shyftr Publisher

This technology has a lot of potential, but right now it is more of a tech demo as long as you can only apply it to the 44 feeds that are listed on the public page. In recognition of that, Shyftr is building a service for muti-author blogs (like ReadWriteWeb) or blogs with a lot of diverse content to be able to build custom-filtered feeds with certain criteria. Once these filtered feeds are created, there's even a widget for the blog to display. Unfortunately, there was some trouble getting output from the Publisher feeds so all I can show you is a screenshot.

Summary

This service brings some powerful tools to the growing field of RSS feed curation, which got its start with do-it-yourself tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Tarpipe, and a more refined application in PostRank (which we cover here and here) and Grazr. How does Shyftr Filter stand up to these other tools? We can definitely say that the approach Shyftr is taking is more like the DIY tools, but makes creating a curated feed easier and with some sacrifice in flexibility. We don't think being less flexible is a problem - the DIY tools can be awful hard to get working correctly, so we are all for an easier-to-use solution.

What PostRank has created with the Discovery Engine, though, is completely fresh. This is a new function that the site brings to those looking to find new, great content online. Simply use the search bar at the top of the main page to look for a topic, user name (mine is eng1ne), or feed address. If you choose a topic, for example Twitter, you will be directed to a list of feeds centered around that topic. You can open each feed and look at some of the most popular posts in the feed, and choose to subscribe to it if you like it (requires free login).

Once you have done this a few times, you will have a list of feeds that you can then look at in your favorite feed reader. Once over in the subscriptions area, you can choose what quality of article you prefer seeing for each feed (from all to best). You can also assign your own topics to your feeds, which automatically organizes the feeds into topic lists, like my topic list of Austin blogs. At this point, you can subscribe to this custom feed by topic. Your resulting feed will be a combined river of all the different sources in that topic list.

Finally, PostRank has added a Toluu-like social component where you can discover other people using the service, and choose to follow them and check out what feeds they are subscribed to. The PostRank discovery engine keeps track of how popular feeds are getting, and will take that in to account for their placement in the topic lists as well.

Overall, PostRank has taken a very effective system for selecting only the best content in the topic areas you are interested in, and added a personal curation aspect in the form of users interacting with the system, causing popularity to affect the rankings of the feeds. The only problem is, you may choose to use PostRank feeds to escape too much noise, and end up drowning in quality content instead!

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

We use PostRank every day here at ReadWriteWeb, for everything from finding the weirdest stuff on the internet to tracking the hottest conversation among GenY, semantic web or mobile blogs.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over a period of the next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field, and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and evaluating subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Some issues encountered so far include; finding feed URL irregularities, catching strategies that didn't work out, and server troubles. As a result, we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular basis to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately so they could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, then drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_feedburner_be_replaced_by_postrankcom_redux.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_feedburner_be_replaced_by_postrankcom_redux.php RSS & Feed Management Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick If you like to follow the hottest news at Digg.com and use the Digg RSS feed to do so, you've probably been a little overwhelmed by the number of stories it pumps out. Now there's a simple web app that lets you customize the Digg RSS feed by the minimum number of diggs a story has received. You can then view the stories on the disstill web site or you can subscribe to your new, filtered feed. Sometimes it's little things like this that really make our day.

]]> Sponsor

]]> It's So Easy!

There's really not much to the disstill web application, but that's okay with us. This is definitely an example of how the simplest web apps can be the most useful in the end.

The only thing on the disstill web page is a little slider bar that lets you filter Digg.com stories based on a minimum number of diggs. You just drag the slider to adjust the number of diggs that stories need to have in order to be included in the RSS feed. The low end of the slider is set to 100 diggs and the high end is 5000. Obviously, the higher you go, the more filtered the feed becomes and the more likely you're only going to see the really, really hot stories.

Once you have the slider set, you can either view the page or click "get the RSS feed" to add the customized feed to your preferred feed reader. It's a lot easier than using Yahoo Pipes, that's for sure!

A Couple of Suggestions

Our only complaint about this nifty little web app is that it doesn't let you choose which section the stories come from (Politics, Technology, Science, Gaming, etc.). Instead, it looks at the entire Digg website. We would also love to filter for images and videos, too. Perhaps in some future version, we hope?

At any rate, this is one of those little tools that can end up making your life a little less info-overloaded. And for that, we thank you, Mr. Alex Rabarts. (P.S. Can you build a generic version of this that lets you enter in any URL and then filter by PostRank? That would be amazing!)

Alex also created a nice visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker News, and Yahoo Buzz that's worth a look. Check it out at oursignal.com.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/disstill_a_tool_to_filter_diggs_rss_feed.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/disstill_a_tool_to_filter_diggs_rss_feed.php RSS Aggregators Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:40:00 -0800 Sarah Perez

When reading your RSS feeds, do you prefer a local application versus one that is online-only? If so, look no further than ShareFire. Besides being platform-independent (courtesy of Adobe Air), it is also completely free and open-source. It was created with article sharing in mind, as its name implies. According to its creators, Christian Cantrell and Dan Koestler, this was a priority.

]]> Sponsor

]]> ShareFire supports sharing stories to AIM, Twitter and email, and posting articles to many services including Delicious, Digg, MySpace and Windows Live Bookmarks (now called favorites).

Additional features include a keyword-based notification system (which they call Smart Topics), posts arranged by topic, a switchable viewer between RSS and live web, and support for over a dozen foreign languages! You can also easily import and export OPML files you have generated from other utilities such as Google Reader or Toluu.

We found ShareFire to be on-par with other standalone feed readers when it comes to displaying and managing feeds. However, its built-in sharing links make it a cut above most basic readers and the alert system for keywords could come in very useful. One bug we did notice is that lack of any way of deleting a Smart Topic once created, and its somewhat heavy memory usage, even with only a few feeds in the queue.

More information can be found on Adobe's Air blog here.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sharefire_an_adobe_air-based_o.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sharefire_an_adobe_air-based_o.php RSS & Feed Management Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:20:00 -0800 Phil Glockner RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.

]]> Sponsor

]]> To tackle these issues, Notifixious is now building its own 'superfeeder,' which it hopes will be able to overcome some of these problems. The company is also planning to make these updates available to the community by providing access to its own real-time XMPP notifications and SUP feeds to third-party developers in the future.

Pull: RSS

Traditionally, RSS readers pull feeds at a regular interval (usually somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes). In a real-time world, that, of course, is far too slow. Services like FeedBurner introduce even more lag into this system, so that it can often take half an hour or longer before a new post appears in Google Reader. Notifixious itself polls every feed about twice an hour.

Pull Smarter

Thanks to FriendFeed's new Simple Update Protocol (SUP), some of the heavy lifting of regularly polling thousands of RSS feeds can be reduced, but as of now, only a small number of services actually support this new protocol. Notifixous also monitors the public activity of ping servers, similar to what PubSub is doing with its new (though still unreleased) product.

Push: XMPP

Currently, Notifixious can only get 'real' real-time updates through XMPP from Identica, Seesmic, LiveJournal, and Sixapart's TypePad and Vox blogging communities.  Genestoux notes that he would like to see every content provider use XMPP in the future.

Giving Back: Can Notifixious Replace Gnip's Abandoned XMPP Project?

Maybe the most exciting idea here, however, is that Notifixious plans to share an XMPP and SUP feed with the rest of the community. Gnip, of course, at one point promised to do something very similar, but, in the end, pulled the plug on this project.

Other companies like ZapTXT or Pingie offer a similar service - though we have also seen far too many promising services like Rasasa or Immidi.at close before they could ever live up to their promises. Our experience with these services has been quite mixed, however. We will have to wait and see if Notifixious can deliver on its promise.

Notifixious' Service Right Now

As for the Notifixious service itself, the company will send its updates to your cell phone, IM account, or email address. You can sign up for feeds individually, or import an OPML file.

If you want to send your own real-time updates from your blog to Notifixious, you can use the company's plugins and widgets for TypePad, Vox, Blogger, MovableType, and self-hosted Wordpress sites.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/notifixious_superfeeder_realtime_web.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/notifixious_superfeeder_realtime_web.php News Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:49:49 -0800 Frederic Lardinois RSS analystics service PostRank.com is putting out a call to feed publishers for feature requests for a new service that will aim to replace the near-dead FeedBurner. The company's initial proposal looks far, far cooler than anything FeedBurner ever did - but after a Google acquisition turned Feedburner from every blogger's best friend into an unreliable annoyance, it's hard not to be cynical.

PostRank is one of our very favorite services on the web today. Give it any RSS feed and the service will give you a filtered feed of just the most commented on, linked to, saved and Dugg posts from that feed. It's really handy, so we're excited to see what the company can do moving more seriously into the feed publishing and analytics market. Can PostRank pull it off? Below we discuss reasons why they may or may not be able to do so.

]]> Sponsor

]]> We use PostRank every day here at ReadWriteWeb, for everything from finding the weirdest stuff on the internet to tracking the hottest conversation among GenY, semantic web or mobile blogs.

The company says it "will be releasing a collection of products over the period of next six months related to [feed analytics]: helping publishers and readers discover topic experts and measure their influence, engagement analytics (social media analytics), real-time tracking and other tools to help publishers and readers find and read what matters."

Can They Pull it Off?

The main asset PostRank has going for it is that there's a very clear value proposition. We've found that it takes one sentence to explain what this service does and nearly anyone who uses RSS immediately grasps the value of the application and wants it. That's quite remarkable considering how hard it is to explain most things about RSS.

FeedBurner got huge piles of users by saying "go through us and we'll tell you how many RSS subscribers you have." PostRank can tell potential users "go through us and we'll tell you what your hottest posts are, who the most loved writers are in your field and what topics are burning up the charts." And hopefully, how many subscribers you have.

The Challenges PostRank Will Face

There are a lot of challenges that PostRank will face in trying to replace FeedBurner.

Will Google Reader, now the dominant RSS reader by far, report subscriber numbers to PostRank? FeedBurner requires RSS readers to report numbers daily, something that doesn't always work. Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, will they hand over their huge part of the numbers to a competitor?

Far more processing power is required to count comments, inbound links, etc. for every blog post in an RSS feed. When PostRank came out with a Google Reader and Newsgator plug-in, for example, it limited its filtering to just the most popular 1,000 blogs on the web.

It's more complicated to evaluate "social media engagement" than it is subscribers, and subscribers is fairly complicated itself. How many people are still mystified by the way FeedBurner numbers rise and fall daily, or by the obtuse "reach" metric that FeedBurner now emphasizes? Similarly, PostRank appears fairly transparent on the surface, but a closer look at their metrics leaves us feeling more in the dark than we'd like to be.

It hasn't been a bump-free ride so far, either. Feed URL irregularities, caching strategies that didn't work out, server troubles - we find ourselves contacting PostRank on a regular bases to report problems. We also subscribe to the feed of their GetSatisfaction forum and we know we're not the only ones. In their defense, the company has raised more money lately and so could be better prepared for the load. This author also used PostRank on a major public production for a large consulting client 6 months ago and that worked quite well.

Finally, will publishers trust another 3rd party feed publishing service to stand between them and their readers? Some blogs have reported no problems of late with FeedBurner, but a quick search on Twitter shows that many others have.

We're excited to see what PostRank can do, though. If you are too, drop by the company's new Feed Analytics page and share your ideas and feature requests for a feed analytics service of the future.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/postrankcom_aims_to_replace_feedburner.php Blogging Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:57:53 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick