ReadWriteWeb

Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn't able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was.

Back when there was hope for Needlebase, the Social Graph API and for Postrank, those services represented hope for the web making the world a better place. Of course people can still use stupid Facebook to organize a protest, or Twitter to speak without hinderance to the world, but with the demise of these three efforts, some important things are lost from the web. These are the kinds of things that a benevolent organization would have invested a lot of support in, for the sake of the world.

One of my favorite startups in the world, Postrank, has been acquired by Google. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use Postrank every day and if Google shuts it down I am going to be sick. New account creation has already been shut off and a shell of the technology is most likely to become a part of Google Analytics.

Here's what Postrank does: you plug in any RSS feed to the system and it scores each post in that feed by the relative number of comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter, saves on Delicious and other social media metrics. Then you can subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most-discussed items in any feed. It's magic, it's gold and it's all too often unappreciated. Unfortunately, the company hardly focuses on that aspect of its business anymore. This deal could go one of two ways, very good or very bad, not just for Postrank but for its users and users of the entire social Web.

When you've got just a moment to spare and your brain has a hunger for the freshest good news in whatever field of interest you focus on - what do you do? These days I spend those times perusing hot blog posts, fresh Tweets and great screenshots from the Web's most prestigious designers. I've been enjoying a mobile Web app I built with help from a service called iSites.us and I thought I'd share with you details about how I put it together. You could really do something like this on any topic.

To check out this app yourself, navigate your phone to the URL designnews.isites.us. Read on for screenshots and a description of the geeky fun behind this little creation.

Social media analytics company Postrank has found two new ways to make use of the massive pile of data it collects each day concerning social media engagement with web content. Postrank scores pieces of content by the number of comments they receive, the number of times they are shared on Twitter, bookmarked on Delicious, linked to by blogs and much more. The company is tracking social media engagement with all kinds of things.

Yesterday Postrank announced the expansion of its browser plug-in to include Google search results, so that select Google results will now be appended with data about their social media engagement. (See screenshot below.) Today, Postrank launched a new data blog: tracking variable social media engagement between players in various industries, like auto manufacturers or newspaper websites. This is super smart and should be a great read.

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

PostRank, a social media analytics service we use every day here at ReadWriteWeb, will announce today a new Facebook application that automates the publishing of your content onto Facebook and captures reader engagement statistics to incorporate into analytics for your content across the rest of the social media world.

PostRank keeps track of how content gets passed around on sites like Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Reddit and many more. The service's ability to track reader sharing and discussion on Facebook has been hampered, however, by Facebook's being closed off to outside data collection. This new solution, a Facebook app that publishers authenticate with, is a smart way to make progress towards solving that problem.

Mainstream media in a social media world - who gets it? Who gets the love from readers and Tweeters, Facebookers and Diggers? Social media consultant Adam Sherk ran a list of major media outlets through the API of engagement analytics company Postrank and found out. Postrank looks at any RSS feed and analyzes the items in it based on number of comments left, number of mentions on Twitter, bookmarks in Delicious, votes on Digg, inbound links from blogs and other social media metrics.

Postrank co-founder Ilya Grigorik added another metric to Sherk's analysis: engagement per unique visitor. Can you guess which major media outlet scored the highest? It was the Guardian, in the UK. Next in line for most engagement per unique visitor were Slate, The New York Times, the BBC and The Economist. See below for a chart displaying the top 30.

Postrank is one of my favorite web services online, I use it all day long, every day. The service performs real-time social media metrics to show you how much discussion any post in any feed has received in comments, on Twitter, in Delicious, and across many other services. Then it allows you to view just the most-discussed stories from any source. It's great.

Now it's easier to use than ever if you're a Google Reader fan and on the Chrome browser. The company just released a Postrank extension for Chrome. It's not perfect, but it works much better than the previous Firefox extension did. You should try it.

Before now, PostRank, the popular social media analytics service, had to manually crawl all Google Buzz accounts and subscribe to the public feeds it found separately prior to meshing that information with the rest of its data. It was unlikely that all the public feeds made it into PostRank and the process "imposed a high server tax for both sides."

Now, however, with the Google Buzz firehose, PostRank subscribes to one real-time PubSubHubbub feed of all publicly-available Google info. PostRank's users, the company says, will notice a big difference in the amount and depth of Buzz content.

AltHouse, Citizen WElls, Economist's View: These are some of the most popular blogs in the world and their streams of daily posts get hundreds of legitimate comments. They are published on Blogspot, WordPress and Typepad, respectively. A report published today by data analysis service Postrank concludes that legacy-hosted blog platforms are still far ahead of much-hyped microblogging services like Tumblr and Posterous in terms of reader engagement. This despite the fact that you don't hear about people using Blogger and Typepad much anymore in early-adopter circles.

Read on for graphs of engagement below. The same analysis performed here can be run on any sets of top-level domains using the newly released Postrank Domain Activity API.