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Filtering RSS Through Your Social Web
museumpeace writes "Cory Lok assesses the methods, competition and prospects of Rojo, a venture-funded startup RSS aggregator. The brief article is interesting to me because it tries to explain how this and similar uses of a social network harnessed by web search techniques can perform relevance-tuning that will save me from drowning in the tidal wave of blogged newsbits that I find so addicting. They are using a viral marketing approach of spreading membership by invitations from existing members."
They are using a viral marketing approach of spreading membership by invitations from existing members.
I wouldn't call that "viral", it's controlled growth very much like gmail. These people want inclusion, the membership is not being forced on them.
Trolling is a art,
You insensitive clod!
that I find so addictive
I'm inviting everyone to join my social network... except for YOU GUYS! Nah nah nah nah nah nah!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
My buzzword parser is on overload!
I am addicted to the web if I need rss to manage my daily browsing.
I am addicted to the web if I need rss to manage my daily browsing.
I am addicted to the web if I need rss to manage my daily browsing.
I would respectfully disagree with that. It's both controlled growth AND a form of viral marketing; I don't think half as many people would have checked out Gmail if they wouldn't have been excluded from doing so. As long as this Rojo thing is even faintly interesting, people will be talking about it and the exclusionary membership will simply serve to whet the interests of those who are (however temporarily) excluded. Granted, a lot of those people will probably check it out and never go back again - but then, a lot of people I know have done that with Gmail as well.
:-)
It's a bit like setting up a giant bag-o-toys on a playground and telling kids that they can only dip their hand in the bag if some other kid invites them. Something about human nature makes you want to participate dammit! You don't want to be the only one left out, even if the toys suck.
Just my $0.02
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Venture-funded (ding!)
RSS (ding!)
aggregator (ding!)
social network (ding!)
so addicting (ding!)
viral marketing (ding!)
Damn. All I need is "I find Rojo intriguing and I wish to invest in its newsletter to get a Free iPod", and I can yell "BINGO!"
It's nice to see that venture capitalists are beginning to drop the ball again. A sure sign of the economy improving.
I've tried out a number of social networking sites and I've wondered: how many people actually are visiting the site a month after they sign up? In my experience (and that of my friends), we would sign up, play around with whatever gimmick that site had and then forget about it. Maybe something like this that provides what could be a pretty useful service might be something that could keep us coming back.
Found this entry:
... roll 'em all up and let's see what happens.
The Semantic Social Network
I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm not sold on the concept of belonging to a social network site. There was a time when people registered their web sites on directories like Yahoo, until Google figured out a way to spider the web and present relevant stuff to you without requiring pre-registration. I'm not sure requiring membership with a site is going to work, without some sort of protocol to let different sites work with each other.
Eventually, everyone will have their own blogs, and will embed some identity info into them. We're seeing the semantic web emerging from what people want to do on the web instead of from people trying to classify everything.
Now an interesting issue is balancing anonymity with community. What would be neat to see would be ways of embedding different types of content in your blog and giving each type different accessibility levels. You'd have your deep thoughts available to the public, but still be able to share stories about your kids with your inner circle.
RSS, Friend-of-a-friend, cryptography, semantics
When I get together with friends and family, having an idea about what's on their mind and what interests them would help make conversation more enriching. We'd both have had time to comtemplate and form opinions on similar topics. If this overcame the bad vibes of a spam-based marketing scheme (hence me refusing the social network invite), it could really augment the mutual intuition two human beings have of each others' thoughts.
The problem with these compound (e.g. RSS + social networking) technologies is that it's quite a task to develop one great technology, let alone two great technologies that work seamlessly together. IMHO, Rojo is in a tough spot because their differentiator, namely RSS aggregation, is a walk in the park compared to developing a robust social network.
As the article notes at the end, Rojo's best gamble is to provide RSS services for already established social networking companies before Friendster et. al. figure out that adding friend-weighted RSS feeds really isn't that hard.
So, this means that somebody invites all his friends, and they invite all their friends, and so on, and if every invited person joins up, just about everyone will be included after the 6th iteration. How does that differ from the original vast number of blogs to look through? :)
In Korea RSS is only for old people. Except in Nebraska.
If I want people to know about something, I'll send them a link or put it on my own blog. Making it happen automatically would only incline me to be very self-conscious about my casual browsing habits on this "social" network. I don't always want to be that social.
...is not a technology problem, its a personal psychology problem.
;)
slashdot addition is perfectly normal, though.
Really, how many users have to filter RSS blogs through social networks (peer review)??? As it stands no one has explained how to keep these social networks going past the "gee whiz" phase - see Friendster that has turned into a classic bitrot site. Furthermore what motivation is there for me to spend time assessing the viability of these feeds and performing the scoring?
Sorry, just another bunch of chancers trying to do the IPO-as-business model by way of zeitgeist overload thing redux.
This idea that you can set up a server, pull people into a "network", make said network "indispensible", and then extract vast quantities of money for membership in this network sounds good, too good in fact. Its a great model for VCs but meaningless to most users. Besides dirty chat and file sharing, there is very little to bring people back to these sites again and again, and there are already better tools for achieving the aforementioned tasks.
the Eric Cartman theme park marketing strategy.
"We've got this cool new software and YOU CAN'T USE IT, unless we let you!"
These seems logical. I've actually used almost every RSS reader on the market and come to a simple answer. There is no great RSS aggreatator on the market. There are some okay ones, but I think many of them miss the social interaction at the heart of most RSS feeds. Your reading a PERSON's report, not some company's new feed. There is no easy way to "add a feed" to your aggreator. Most aggreator's are really just lists of feeds. Only a few allow you to mix and filter. The company that puts out the first great RSS aggreator will probably make a million. Now I can't comment on Rojo, cause I don't have a invite... (Do I sound like I'm begging, maybe I am...)
If an item is perceived as "cool", limiting supply can increase demand. By not allowing everybody to sign up at once, they are obviously limiting supply.
;-)
This method also turns its current members into sales reps for the company. People with accounts are viewed as being part of "in" crowd, and gives them reason to share the product with others. (They'll feel cool.) Seriously, I know people who were just "okay" on GMail, but were very excited about handing out invitations.
It gives geeks like us the feeling we missed out on in high school... of being cool and part of the "in" crowd.
And the winner is.......
save me from drowning in the tidal wave
APPLAUSE!
I use Bloglines to subscribe to a bunch of blogs, but I only find about 20% of the posts interesting. RSS aggregators should have some way for you to mod individual posts, then use that info to intelligently rank posts in the future.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
What difference is there between sites like slashdot that have the RSS icon (in FF) and other sites that have an RSS page that is xml? ie: http://www.packetstormsecurity.org/whatsnew20.xml
Has any actually used Rojo? I have. I know its beta but the interface is horrible and the site is sloooowwww. Rather than trying to meld two buzzwords together, just give me an rss aggregator that tells me the posts in my feeds list that are generating the most "buzz". Really, I don't care if someone three degress away is recommending a feed. If its good, I'll find it. Most likely because it's linked to in a feed I like. speaking of buzzwords, when is someone going to come out with the wikiweb?
the aggregator RSSOwl also comes with an optional (and free) service called "AmphetaRate" where you can announce your favorite news and get advised from other, supposedly similar discoveries
Web Security RSS feed
The problem and conflict with Rojo, I find, is that it requires users' _active_ participation, while one of the major advantages of RSS/Atom is that you can subscribe to the feed and _passively_ gather information. People need information to come _to_them_, not yet another site they'll have to check daily or weekly.
Hence Simpy (URL below) - you don't need to maintain anything there, just save a page when you like it, and find it when you need it. The social/relational stuff is a nice side-effect of tagging/labelling saved links, but doesn't require active work.
Simpy
There's a company that already does this in pretty dramatic fasion -- multiply.com. Take the social networking from Orkut (only make the site actually work), add blogging like blogger or livejournal, social bookmarks like delicious, e-mail like gmail and photo-hosting like flikr -- what do you get? Multiply.com.
Try it. You won't be disappointed.
This is silly. A peer review website that you run your list of weblogs through?? Come on, I don't have time for that. I use a simple Bash shell based aggregator script to collect my feeds (audio, tech-related shows, not blogs), and drop the folder the script creates into my iPod. Who needs this app? Sounds like a monumental waste of time. And someone got venture capital for this? Geez...
I found out about Rojo by looking at my website logs. Went to take a look at the site and found another "you gotta be cool" (ie invited) to login.
I'm almost tempted to restrict them from accessing my blog until they give me an invite, damnit!
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Odds are, you do not have a "Social Web".
Trying to filter things the way PageRank filters them isn't always the best method. Explicit links between nodes in a network sometimes build a graph structure that is helpful and insightful when analyzed in a certain way (see Google's success with PageRank). However, researchers at HP's Information Dynamics Lab have shown that, for example, in the context of blogs other links than explicit hyperlinks can create structures that are even more insightful and helpful. Basically, by creating links expressing "What are the chances of blog A copying some bit of information from blog B?", they have come up with a graph structure that when analyzed with the PageRank algorithm yields much better results in searches over blogs (they call it iRank).
The idea is that the blog that is likely to be first to break out a story is probably the one you want to be reading (since blogs/blogging tends to be about the 'in-the-first-to-know crowd').
Check out their results and paper here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/blogs/
This bit of "viral marketing" was OK with everyone.
There is absolutely no justification for ignoring my robots.txt. And to add insult to injury, they deny people like me, who apparently drive the content on their site, from getting an account without knowing someone who knows someone who has an account.
Looks like somebody has done the smart thing and built a social network application that actually runs on your machine. This should be a lot more scalable than all the other sites that seem to throw tons of hardware at the problem.
Unless your friends are all clones of you, friendships probably aren't the best predictor of your interests. Your friends are different than you. That's what makes them interesting.
What might work better is reaching out to the entire community -- beyond just your friends -- finding the people like you, and having them recommend interesting articles.