Slashdot Mirror
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,
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.
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.
Am I addicted if I reload /. every five minutes? Does Betty Ford have a program for me?
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.
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...)
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?