I have been playing around with Rojo, a new Web-based aggregator from Rojo Networks. Rojo adds social networking features to the feed aggregator space. Define your friends, see what feeds they are subscribed to, and what items of interest they have flagged. They have a strong team with a lot of background in open standards and rich applications. Right now Rojo is available by invitation only and new members can invite 5 other members. I already sent out my invites, but Kevin Burton will set you up if you join #rojo on irc.freenode.net. Rojo currently indexes 700,000 weblogs and makes recommendations based on your current subscriptions. Six Log is close to TypePad News for example. When managing subscriptions the default sort is by number of users subscribed to that feed. Feeds are categorized into directories and select feeds make it into the “Rojo picks” by publisher and topic. I expect more talk about the product after Chris Alden’s workshop, “Publishing 2.0,” at Web 2.0 at 2:45 p.m. this afternoon.

Rojo unveiled its next-generation Web-based feed aggregator to an invitation only list. Chris Alden is excited. Rojo has already indexed over 700,000 feeds, some able to be sorted by topic and popularity. A recommendation engine is built-in. Friends and colleagues can connect to each other within Rojo and flag stories for each other and share what feeds they are reading. Rojo Networks also has some P2P talent in Brad Neuberg and it will be interesting to see how that technology could be utilized given Rojo’s Web interface.

As our lists of feeds grow it becomes more difficult to sort through the clutter that greets us as we fire up our news aggregators. The list of publishers of supported feeds continues to grow, as does the appetite for consumption. The next important step in the feed aggregation space will be how you tame the data available within the application. I propose sorting services that would allow developers to offer their own reclassification of a list of feeds or their content.

Pass a list of feeds in OPML and a web service will return the same OPML with an additional “sortorder” attribute for each outline element. The aggregator consumes the OPML, sorts on sortorder ascending for the group, and the user receives a different representation of their subscribed feeds.

Possible sort plug-ins include Google PageRank, Technorati source authority, degrees of separation through a social network, FOAF relations, blogroll, etc.

I sent NewsGator an e-mail asking if they would support sort plug-ins. If you develop a feed aggregator and would be interested in pursuing broad sorting solutions, let’s start building. Do you have ideas about more ways to sort your feeds? Leave a comment or send a TrackBack.