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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."
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
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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.