Feed Management: The Internet Monopoly

Surprisingly, feed management is one service where there aren't a million different options available. Unlike Web 2.0 sites like Twitter and Friendfeed, whose competitors are plentiful and varied, FeedBurner stands alone. Years ago there was Feedpass, but it never got off the ground. These days, as Allen Stern just noted on CenterNetworks, the only other viable option is Pheedo, a service that offers basically the same services as FeedBurner, but also seems to come with the same set of issues: feeds don't update too quickly, much less in real-time.

Obviously, this lack of true competition is a giant, gaping hole that everyone is waiting for someone to fill. That's why we have our eyes pinned on Feedsqueezer service, hoping that something will come of it.

Feedsqueezer, the Upcoming Alternative to FB

Today, the Feedsqueezer homepage is nothing more than a promise of what's to come: a feed management platform that delivers analytics, SEO, feed re-distribution, content delivery, and more. There's a quiet Twitter account and an unused GetSatisfaction page set up for the service. The one employee representing the service there is "gadgetboy," aka John Federico, a marketing and business development representative whose prior experience includes serving as VP of Marketing for BlogTalkRadio, Senior Strategist for IconNicholson, Sr. Director of podcasting for Audible, Inc., and more.

The only clue we have to Feedsqueezer's progress is yesterday's one (and only) tweet that announces "getting schooled in all things EC2," a reference to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service where it appears Feedsqueezer will be hosted.

At least a day old tweet appears to be progress. Now, more than ever, publishers need a real alternative to Feedburner. Anyone interested in signing up for the beta can do so from the Feedsqueezer homepage. Who knows? It's worth a shot.

Update: We mistakenly reported that FeedSquuezer was Winer's own project in our initial coverage. Winer is in fact not associated with the service in any way and we apologize for the error in reporting. The confusion resulted from his statement on his blog: "I also volunteer to help get a Feedburner competitor on the air...update:Feedsqueezer."

However, another service that was once exclusively for Google Reader users is expanding to give users a more accurate analysis of what's popular on the web. Today, ReadBurner announced a partnership with the personalized homepage service Netvibes.

The new partnership will allow ReadBurner to analyze and aggregate the activity streams of Netvibes users to incorporate their shared items into ReadBurner. To get started, Netvibes users can head to ReadBurner's "Add A Feed" page and insert their Netvibes username.

Netvibes users can expect their shared items to start appearing in ReadBurner approximately 30 minutes after adding their account. Only the 10 most recent shared items will be immediately pulled in. However, there are plans to expand this to include the latest 30 items. While there will be no counter to display how many times an item was shared via Google Reader versus Netvibes, Netvibes users will be listed in the "Shared by" section in green to better separate the services.

Partnership Responses

It seems that to be the first service to publicly utilize the new APIs for the Netvibes Ginger platform. With the partnership being made possible through the upcoming APIs, ReadBurner's CEO Adam Ostrow has only positive words about working with Netvibes:

Netvibes Ginger is a revolutionary product that truly makes the start page a social experience. We are thrilled to be working with Netvibes to allow their millions of users to help us determine the most important content on the Web in a completely transparent and opt-in way.

VP Product Development of Netvibes, Franck Mahon, was also enthusiastic about partnering with ReadBurner:

We are very focused on making it easy for our users to share their favorite content with their friends or the public. It has really been a pleasure to partner with ReadBurner in testing our APIs and we're really excited about opening Netvibes Ginger activities streams to external applications.

What's in the Future?

There are other services that allow users to share items that have yet to be included in RSS aggregation. Are talks brewing? We sure hope so. We'd love to see shared items from RSS readers such as FeedDemon and the controversial Shftyr included in the aggregation for more accurate statistics and web analysis. For now, users can look forward to more accurate statistics about an item's popularity via ReadBurner's homepage.

The site has links to the same categories you would find on the main ReadBurner homepage, including "Popular Stories," "Upcoming Stories," and "Most Recent Stories."

The category you want to view can be selected by entering the corresponding number on your mobile phone's keypad. Also available are links to the ReadBurner blog and the mobilized version of Google Reader, so you can continue your mobile RSS consumption.

After selecting which category of stories you want to read, you are presented with a list of stories, which are also selected by entering a number on your keypad.

When reading the story, there are links to the originating blog, the people who shared the story, and, at the bottom, links to take to you the next post or previous post, back a page, or back to the main ReadBurner mobile homepage.

The posts are formatted well for the small screens, so reading through the news is easy to do.

In addition the standard mobile page (preview it here), there is also a version of the site designed specifically for iPhone users available from http://m.readburner.com/iphone. (Preview here)

ReadBurner mobile may even become your preferred mobile RSS source over Google Reader for two reasons: One, there is no sign-in process like with Google Reader, which requires the necessary step of entering in your Google account credentials in order to view your feeds. And two, you're guaranteed to only see the top news stories instead of whatever random selection is at the top of your hundreds of feeds at the moment.

ReadBurner mobile is a great new site, and its launch shows that the ReadBurner team isn't doing anything halfway when it comes to their new service. Clearly, they're here to compete and are aiming to become your preferred RSS aggregator.

The first thing you may notice when visiting the new ReadBurner web site is its new interface, designed by Gary Bacon of PixelTalent. Although they kept the same color scheme of blue and orange, the new site is brighter, and, as they said on their blog (where you can also view before and afters), it's "shinier", too.

Categories & Stats

The old site had categories at the top that included "Popular," "Upcoming," "Most Recent," "Popular this Week," and "Popular All time,", but the new site is aiming to be less cluttered. This version of ReadBurner is sticking to just "Popular," "Upcoming," and "Most Recent."

Beneath these main categories, stories are also analyzed and sorted into sub-categories, each with their own RSS feed. Currently, these sub-categories include "Web," "Desktop," "Mobile," and "Apple," as well as "All," which will revert you to seeing all the shared items in whichever main category you are viewing.

ReadBurner

For viewing items that have been popular over the past week, there is a box on the right called "Popular This Week." Above the box, you'll notice a link to the "Stats" page, which is sort of like a cross between AllTop and the Techmeme Leaderboard, but focused on sharing data. Also on this page are the top 50 sources for shares.

This Week's Popular Items

Changes to the Shared Items

A feature called "Related Items" groups similar stories together, displaying the related content both on the main page as well as on the individual story's page itself, something which can be accessed by clicking on the button displaying the number of shares for that story.

What's even more exciting is that ReadBurner is working on a way to allow comments on the feeds without removing that conversation from the blogosphere, a hot button issue as of late. To do so, ReadBurner is working with Disqus, a new blog commenting system that many people are using on their blogs today. While the feature is not fully live yet, they are hoping to post ReadBurner comments on the originating source (the blog), in addition to their site. They believe this feature will be functional within a few weeks, but that will depend on Disqus. Although non-Disqus enabled blogs won't benefit, it's a good first step to limiting the conversation fragmentation issues while also adding a feature many have wanted.

The Disqus integration will also be tweaked in the future so that all related stories will share one set of comments - an interesting plan which will make blog reading and commenting a more conversational and intertwined experience.

Google Reader Integration

To make ReadBurner even more useful, they've integrated Google Reader within the web site. By clicking on the Google Reader tab, your Google Reader will appear right in the ReadBurner interface, something which makes feed reading and sharing even more enjoyable than before.

Other New Features

Another useful feature is ReadBurner's descriptive URLs. This allows you to view all the shared items by a particular author or a favorite sources from one easy-to-remember URL. For example, all stories from Read Write Web can be viewed at readburner.com/source/readwriteweb. To view stories by a particular author, the format is readburner.com/author/author. For example, all stories by Marshall are available at readburner.com/author/Marshall+Kirkpatrick.

Future Plans

Besides getting the Disqus integration perfected, the ReadBurner team will also be working on continually improving their algorithm as well as offering new ways for developers to utilize their data.

For users, the focus will be on data portability - that is, letting users take their ReadBurner data with them to other services (perhaps FriendFeed, we hope?) Additionally, users will be able to share more information about themselves, something that points to, perhaps, the creation of user profiles on the site.

Where Does This Leave RSSMeme?

ReadBurner's launch and extensive features list definitely brings some new competition to the other Google Reader Shared Items aggregator, RSSMeme. However, that site, which served us well in ReadBurner's absence, does offer one big feature that ReadBurner currently lacks: search. The search box on RSSMeme lets you search both stories and users, and seems a critical omission from the new ReadBurner.

RSSMeme also allows you to click "Read More of this Story," which expands the selection to show you more of the blog post while staying on the RSSMeme web site. A similar feature on ReadBurner actually takes you to the blog's web site instead. While this may not be a favorite feature for ReadBurner users, the bloggers who rely on pageviews will be sure to appreciate it.

Like ReadBurner, RSSMeme also gathers similar stories which can be accessed by a link from the main item. As far as whose algorithm for related items is better, only time will tell, but this could be a real source of competition between the two very similar sites. Another point of contention will certainly involve the speed of each site's algorithm in calculating the number of shares from Google Reader.

RSSMeme offers commenting via Disqus and, for its users, although it does not push comments back to the blogs like ReadBurner plans to do. RSSMeme also has a blog widget which shows the number of shares for each post, a small feature that many bloggers currently enjoy using.

Get Involved

If your Google Reader Shared Items feed was previously registered with the old ReadBurner, you don't need to add it again. They've also included the feeds of the people that requested to be added from the "Coming Soon" page that they had up for a while.

However, if you aren't sure, or if you never added your feed to begin with, you can easily do so from the "Add Feed" page.

We're very excited for ReadBurner's launch. It looks like they've done a good job overhauling the prior site while also offering many features that will offer RSSMeme some good competition. We're looking forward to what they will have in store for us in the future, too.