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."

How does it work?

"The copygator service aggregates data from over two million blog feeds, and parses over a half million new blog posts a day. Our servers then crunch all of this data and evaluates every post against each other to determine if any two are roughly, nearly, or exactly alike."

Once you've set CopyGator up, you can continue to monitor your content via email, RSS, or by returning to the site and running another query.

The service is simple, fast, and accurate. Within a few seconds, I was able to find any number of sites that were repurposing ReadWriteWeb content in one form or another.

At the very least, it's interesting to see where the content turns up. But it can also provide details on the types of sites that find your content valuable - and which readers are interested in what you're writing.

To try the service for yourself, visit CopyGator and enter your URL. Or, if you're looking to get caught by CopyGator, feel free to copy and paste this entire article into a blog post.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.

The AP Marketplace interface looks like a sophisticated, multi-media RSS reader but with limited sources. Publishers set up a workflow that lets editors send selected media items directly from the reader out onto the paper's website.

Below, the AP newsreader, click to view full screen image.

It's very reminiscent of of the CMS built by the Crowd Fusion team, which we profiled last week. There's one huge difference though between the AP's project and things like the Crowd Fusion project, the red-hot world of cool-hunting aggregation and even the new publishing strategy of web giants like Yahoo and AOL. The AP service finds and publishes AP stories, not content from around the whole web.

There was a time when it must have been hard to imagine getting more news to choose from than what the wires brought publishers each day. That time has passed and while the small Midwestern US newspapers that the AP highlights as happy users of the Marketplace may be on board - it's hard to say how for how long readers will remain excited about AP fueled news websites. Especially once they discover a little more about how the internet works. (We don't mean to be critical of Mid Westerners, they were just the demographic of several AP demo sites.)

The online research tools used by financial professionals, for example, could probably slap this service both ways to Sunday before it knew which way was up. The AP says, though, that many local papers find their readers overjoyed with the breadth of topical AP content published to content sections or niche websites.

Left: The North West Arkansas biker scene had nothing like this news site before the AP Exchange came to town, the AP says. This kind of site does look like a good idea for everyone.

Training Component

One very interesting part of the AP Marketplace is that it's very search-centric and the wire service offers weekly 30 minute-long classes in online search skills. The AP Exchange School of Search is a great idea.

Not all parts of the program are working well, admittedly. The Exchange "blog" and community on Ning are dead, for example. Perhaps early participants learned enough to escape out into the web at large.

News Publishing Around the Web

A year ago media analyst Jeff Jarvis wrote an excellent post about what Editor 2.0 jobs are shaping up to look like. Two years ago we wrote here about some of the exciting things that AP competitor Reuters is doing. [Disclosure, the Reuters semantic web project Calais is now an RWW sponsor.] The media business blog PaidContent says that the AP Marketplace/Exchange service is pitted against new aggregation services explicitely aimed at replacing the AP, like Politico.

It's a time of deep change in the news media world and though we love the feel of a good local paper and its website - their ongoing success cannot be taken for granted. Tools like the AP Exchange look like a great step to take and we enjoy getting to see what the RSS reader equivalent is inside hundreds of local newsrooms.

This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.

Along with ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times will also syndicate content from our friends at VentureBeat and GigaOm. The New York Times re-design is now live, although syndicated content won't go live until October.

Andy Plesser from Beet.TV had the scoop on this story, along with a video interview with Vindu Goel, deputy technology editor at The New York Times.

I want to especially thank Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb's Business Development Manager, for getting this deal. We at ReadWriteWeb are proud to have our growing brand associated with the prestigious New York Times - maybe now our families and friends will understand what we do for a living ;-)