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."

Comments

Investorial?

[Tackhead]

> Rojo, a venture-funded startup RSS aggregator. [ ... ]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.

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!"

Ah, good

[Neil Blender]

It's nice to see that venture capitalists are beginning to drop the ball again. A sure sign of the economy improving.

Social networking

[Skidge]

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.

A quick check of google

[madro]

Found this entry:
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 ... roll 'em all up and let's see what happens.

Sorry, I don't buy it.

[iJames]

They're my friends. That doesn't mean they share all my interests, or even most of them. That doesn't mean they'll care about any of the blogs I read, or that I even want them to know that I found that article about gerbil spanking particularly interesting. And how does Rojo handle it if I want one subset of people to know that I'm into gerbil spanking and not another group?

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.