For Twitterfeed to move in-house with the analytics provider that is the basis of so much of its value makes sense. Twitterfeed itself has steadily added features in recent months though, from geocoding published messages to publishing into LinkedIn. Is it a good idea to automate publishing of links into social networks? The jury is still out on that one.

Asked about this question, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told us: "There isn't one answer to fit all here -- most publishers/users mix auto posting with manual posting. The right answer is to pick the approach that makes most sense for you - Twitterfeed picks up thousands of users each week who find that it works great for them."

That makes sense to me and I do love a good bot, myself. Apparently other people do too. Marketing blogger Andrew Hanelly published the results of an experiment today wherein he was able to create a fully automated Twitter account using Twitterfeed that ended up with a Klout score of 43!

Twitterfeed founder Mario Menti (@Mario) has been on Twitter since December, 2006, making him one of the first 50,000 people to create an account.

SkimLinks over-writes links to products with affiliate links to any of several thousand vendors, and typically takes 25% of the affiliate revenue resulting from purchases originating on a publisher's site. Publishers retain 75% of revenue in exchange for producing the content and providing distribution.

It was exactly one year ago today that Twitterfeed added real-time feed publishing with PubSubHubbub to its platform.

Twitterfeed competes with Dlvr.it, a service of feed ad network and analytics service Pheedo.

The Spread of Affiliate Links in Social Media

On one hand, monetization for publishers makes content production economically feasible and helps open up the ranks of voices that can afford to dedicate time to publishing. On the other hand, affiliate links in particular run the risk of skewing the editorial decisions made at the helm of today's free global printing press towards content that panders to consumption of consumer products.

Either way you look at it, when considering where money changes hands in the Twitter ecosystem, add the new Twitterfeed/SkimLinks partnership to the list.

SkimLinks announced a similar opt-in partnership with white label social network Ning this week as well.

Google just announced that its FeedBurner RSS publishing service now supports automatic publishing to a Twitter account. If you're among the many people who use the service Twitterfeed (like CNN, the WhiteHouse, ReadWriteWeb, etc.) then you may very well find that startup expendable starting now. That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this and a series of related announcements over the past few days.

The Twitter/FeedBurner integration uses secure OAuth authorization, so you don't have to give Google your Twitter password. It will check the links coming through that shortened URL for malware and bad sites. Right now other apps won't be able to use Goo.gl, just Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but that might change in time.

Consider this announcement side by side with the WordPress announcement this weekend that WordPress blogs can now be posted to and read from Twitter clients, the rumor today that Facebook is experimenting with its own URL shortener, this afternoon's announcement that the ability to expose your geographic location is now live in Google Toolbar and now longer a Labs product and last week's go-live of real-time search on Google. All of this combined says one thing to us: the web is getting a whole lot faster and much more free of friction, quickly.

WordPress, Google, Twitter and Facebook will force each other to agree to common standards for reading and writing content updates, those updates will be delivered in real time and the standards will allow an ecosystem of 3rd party client software to proliferate and play along with the big guys. Authentication is being done by OAuth, real-time feeds by RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub. WordPress is the wild card because it is huge, more supportive than anyone else of Open Source and it could force everyone else to open up to interoperability.

The next step? This morning Google's Marissa Mayer said in an interview that Google is working hard on intuitive search, the ability to show users what they want before they even have time to search for it.

Publish once and your content is everywhere, immediately. Open your browser and it will show you just the kind of content you need, from all around the web, targeting your particular circumstances like clickstream, social graph and geographic location.

If that's the kind of platform that's coming - how will people innovate on top of it? The foundation is being laid right now for a whole new web in the near-term future.

That's not the only change going live, either. Publishing to Facebook? Check. An improved queue management system for greater reliability? Check. Integration with Google Analytics? Check!

Twitterfeed believes it will now be the biggest subscriber to PubSubHubbub feeds and aims to test the system's latency performance. No more 20 to 30 minute delays in publishing to Twitter if you're on a Pubsubhubbub-enabled publishing system.

Publishing to Facebook will be a huge win for many of those publishers and integration with both Bit.ly and Google Analytics through the integration of UTM tags will allow publishers to compare audience response in Facebook and Twitter (among other things).

Real-time, cross-network publishing and analytics as a service? That's pretty hot. With almost 350,000 publishers, Twitterfeed is approaching the number of publishers that FeedBurner had (430,000) when it was acquired by Google for a rumored $100 million. Like FeedBurner for the real-time web? That and more is what Twitterfeed could become if these kinds of technical developements could succeed.

As part of this year's Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out - we love them, we hate them, we wouldn't want to work without them.

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

About the Selections

These aren't all new products from 2008. They are the products in the RSS and syndication world that we think made the biggest impact or were the most useful.

To be honest, this was not a particularly good year for innovation in the RSS space. Too many of the products listed below are incumbents, several of which drove us crazy this year. They remain on the list, however, because they are incredibly useful and nothing topped them.

Some honorable mentions are deserved as well. We talked to many people who like RSS magazine-style start page Feedly, though we found it overly constrictive and don't feel that it's made a big market splash yet. We also found the Associated Press's AP Member Marketplace very interesting. Had we gotten a chance to get to know it better, it could very well have been on this list. Finally, we love African social media aggregator Afrigator - it's a great way to learn about what's happening all over the continent and it's a great use of RSS. We named it one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 but we think it deserves an honorable mention in this category as well.

And Now the RWW Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

Postrank

Formerly known as AideRSS, Postrank is simply the most useful RSS related application we've seen in a long time. Plug in any RSS feed and Postrank will rate each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, etc. You can then subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most popular items in that feed.

We use Postrank all the time, in all kinds of contexts: from monitoring break-out stories in niche markets we don't follow closely, to finding out about the bread and butter of new blogs we discover to running search feeds through Postrank to surface hot conversations on any topic.

Postrank has been around for about a year and a half, but we write about it over and over again.

This year Postrank opened an API, made a bunch of deals with other companies, improved its service, raised a round of funding and just generally rocked.

FriendFeed

Social "life streaming" service FriendFeed is making syndication a more social activity than anything else has yet. The service aggregates your activity data from all around the web, lets your friends comment on it and shows you the activities of all your friends' friends when someone you know comments on something and exposes it to their network.

If RSS readers will change your life and work through their awesome usefulness, FriendFeed is a service that makes syndication fun. It's one of the first places we go on the web every morning.

We interviewed the ex-Googlers who founded FriendFeed last February and that interview is still the best place to learn how the service works under the hood.

If you'd like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb crew on FriendFeed (and we hope you will) we've posted a tour of our FriendFeed profile pages here. Please join us also in the ReadWriteWeb FriendFeed Room.

Gnip

Gnip is a social media ping server, a service that other services ask for user data updates from all around the web. There's nothing here for users, but almost every developer we talk to these days who is aggregating content in order to add value to it (and that is the name of the game) has Gnip on its radar. The company aims to make aggregation more timely, scalable and efficient than it is today.

We wrote about Gnip at length when the service launched in July.

Snackr

Snackr is a simple little RSS ticker built in Adobe AIR. Its frenetic and unstopping delivery of news is too much for many people, but the rest of us love it. It's where our eyes wander during page loads and other down times. Many of the stories you read here at ReadWriteWeb were based on things we first caught wind of through Snackr.

Snackr was built in-house at Adobe by Flex team member Narciso Jaramillo. We reviewed it in May and have been using it ever since.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the market leader in full featured RSS readers, having pulled ahead of the troubled Bloglines in recent months. This year Google Reader has made their sharing feature much more transparent, added the ability to translate any feed into a number of different languages and recently redesigned.

It hasn't been a super exciting year for the product, and there are still basic problems like very infrequent caching of rare feeds, but Google Reader's incredible dominance in the field makes it a required part of this list.

Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script

One of the simplest little changes we've made to our browsers lately is the addition of this greasemonkey script that shows the number of readers in Google Reader that any page's RSS feed has. You can usually multiply that number by 2 to 4 times for an estimate of how many total readers a feed has across all readers, but either way it's a great little indication of a site's popularity.

The script was written by an anonymous user named "uncv" and we'd like to thank them. We love what they've done! This was one of the 7 coolest browser tweaks from the last month that we wrote about earlier this week. It's already won a permanent place in our hearts!

Dapper

Dapper.net is a point and click interface for data extraction - a nice way to say scraping an RSS feed. We continue to depend on Dapper for all kinds of research, we're always finding new ways to use it around here. We love it.

Unfortunately, some sites don't like us to have access to links back to them available in our RSS readers (like Facebook, for example) and that really upsets us. In many cases those feeds that we created ourselves are the only way we'd be drawn back to a site, so it's their loss as much as ours.

Dapper has been around since 2006, but they recently launched a semantic ad platform that we included in our list of the top 10 semantic web products of 2008.

Twitterfeed

Love it or hate it, Twitterfeed has made a big impact on the web in 2008. It's the service people use to publish an RSS feed right into Twitter.

Some people argue that twitter is all about conversation and that publishing an RSS feed there is grating and inappropriate. We like getting our local newspaper story links on Twitter, though, and everything from disaster monitoring to traffic conditions are now available via Twitterfeed.

Feedburner

Google's RSS publishing service Feedburner hurt our ability to break news first, can't be used in many corporate environments because it gets blocked in China and only made 6 posts all year to its company blog, none since May. That's compared to 28 posts in 2007. Apparently once you get your Google money there's not much point in communicating with the people who depend on you every day.

Why would we call Feedburner one of the top 10 RSS products on the year then? Because despite how frustrating it can be, the service is still so incredibly useful that we don't know what we'd do without it. Not just for publishing and analytics for ReadWriteWeb feeds - from numbers to email delivery to FeedFlare links, Feedburner will work magic easily on any feed you work with. I've got 68 different feeds in my account and I'll probably publish several more before the year is up.

Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is another RSS based service that is really frustrating, hasn't innovated substantially in the last year - but is still so powerfully useful that it deserves a spot as one of the top products in this market.

Splicing and filtering RSS feeds is the simplest thing to do with Pipes, but there's much more you can do with it as well. It's great for us pseudo-geeks, we can work all kinds of magic with it. We've used Pipes throughout the year to do things that we (ok I) don't have the technical chops to do otherwise. For that I thank the Pipes team a whole lot.

Those Were Our Favorites This Year - How About You?

Did we miss anyone you think should have been on this list? We hope you'll share your favorites in comments below. What RSS and syndication products impacted you the most in 2008?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_rsssyndication_products_of_2008.php 2008 in Review Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:30:30 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick