Feed search company Feedster has parted ways with its CTO and founder Scott Johnson as of this morning. Scott's final papers were faxed to Feedster from the Technorati office! I spent this morning with Scott and I can tell you this was not of his will or a pleasant process.
I've known Scott for a few years. Scott has split his time over the past year between Feedster's headquarters in San Francisco and his wife, son, and home in Indiana. I think once some dagger wounds heal Scott will be much happier on his next project.
What's next? Scott said if he'd love to start a company to sell pre-configured MythTV boxes but does not want to put his family through the legal troubles involved with shaking up a large industry. He's very interested in making complex technical problems easy for end users and I am sure his next project will involve simplifying technology in some form.
Good luck Scott!
Japanese business conglomerate Mitsui has invested an undisclosed amount of money in Feedster. Mitsui has 723 subsidiaries ranging from steel production to medical spas.
Update: It looks like Scott Rafer, former CEO of Feedster, has left the company perhaps as a contingency of the Mitsui deal or of his own will.
Feedster has a new user interface on their web pages. A definite improvement, and the redesign helps users start using the site right away in varying capacities.
The home page is not valid XHTML nor valid CSS.
Feedster announced its contest winners today. Two out of three of my picks were correct.
Feedster's contest seemed like a developer relations failure. The submission date and announcement date were moving targets, and when the winners were announced there was no explanation of the tool beyond a link to the author.
What are your thoughts? What would you like to see from a developer contest?
The Feedster developers contest is over and developers are waiting for the winners to be announced. You can view all of the entries on the Feedster submission form.
What do you think about the contest submissions automatically being posted on Feedster for all to see? Good idea or bad idea?
I went through the entire list of submitted Feedster hacks, removed the garbage entries seeking free linky love, and was able to put together my own list of winners while we wait for the official results.
Best use of Feedster in a standalone RSS aggregator
David Watanabe added Feedster search to NewsFire, a popular RSS aggregator for Mac OS X. It even searches as you type!
Best use of Feedster with a publishing engine
Timothy Appnel wrote a plugin for Movable Type to search your weblog's feed or a collection of feeds using Feedster and display the results on your Movable Type site.
Best Firefox extension using Feedster
Adrian Holovaty wrote a Firefox extension to overlay Feedster links on The New York Times and The Washington Post web pages.
David Watanabe released version 0.4 NewsFire, a slick RSS reader for Mac OS X. The new version adds support for Feedster and Yahoo! News search from within the application. A very well integrated and fast use of live web search.
Feedster announced funding from Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Network,
Scott Rafer told me on Monday that the Omidyar Network had a good understanding of his approach to life and business from reading his weblog. A good business case for blogging about more than just your startup. Omidyar Network is interested in enabling the public. Feedster seeks validation as it continues to pursue venture capital funding, but the Omidyar Network is known for investing in social ideas and non-profits (Creative Commons, voting intiatives). Feedster is currently the only live search player without venture capital funding.
I know little about the world of venture capitalists, but it is always interesting how dollar amounts or board of director placements are never announced. If someone gives you five dollars you can issue a press release and feel your business model has been validated. If you have a good enough product the VCs call you and you work out a relationship and partnerships. Pitching to VCs has been described as bend over and grease up but I think it would be interesting to gather ideas from intelligent business people even if it never resulted in immediate millions.
Feedster has many advanced search features most people are not aware exist. Since every search is deliverable as an RSS feed, you can tweak the results of the Feedster database to your content.
You can visit the Feedster advanced search page and search a particular weblog or your entire feed list if your OPML is available online. OPML search is useful for finding that entry you know you saw somewhere but you forget the details. Feedster displays its entire history for a site search while Technorati displays only the past 30 days.
Search your OPML is a lot more interesting to me than site search; you can build your own cloud. If a company wanted to track what its employees were saying about a certain topic they could create an OPML file of all the employee weblogs and subscribe to a search via e-mail.
Feedster indexes feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF) while Technorati indexes HTML. I searched within a few weblogs and found identical results for most weblogs in the past 30 days. In cases such as Scoble's link blog Technorati has the advantage since the RSS feed displays only 15 entries while the HTML page has a lot more.
I am Feedster's Feed of the Day! Very cool! I took a look at the list of past feeds of the day, and there are some pretty big names like Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette just featured in the last few weeks.
If this is your first time here, welcome! Please stay a while! Grab a RSS feed or an Atom feed to stay informed of all the latest postings.
I blame Halo 2 for keeping my post count low this week. Normally I am much more interesting.
You can now ping Feedster. No more relying on weblogs.com and blo.gs for updates and additions. Good move!
Hopefully this means more of my entries will make it into Feedster's database. In August I wrote my own Movable Type template to subscribe a search by keywords after I was unhappy with the Feedster results.
