Category Archives: Feed aggregators

I just finished reading the Morgan Stanley report on news syndication from analysts Mary Meeker and Brian Pitz. The report focuses a lot on Yahoo!’s moves into supporting RSS throughout the site, and what Yahoo!’s move to syndication means for publishers. Overall a good paper with busness arguements from a business-oriented source. Some interesting snippets from the 15-page report: While Google’s search engine and advertising tools set the pace for new ways of searching information, we believe that Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information. Bold statement, but no other major player has embraced the…

Scott Johnson mentioned this morning Feedster is looking heavily at NYU’s Coral distributed content system as a possible solution to RSS bandwidth issues. Coral operates over port 8090 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls. Your domain name server must also be aware of DNAME records. Good idea but it needs some kinks worked out for widespread use. BitTorrent uses ports 6881 to 6889 and is therefore blocked by most firewalls as well. Port usage has not stopped the widespread use of BitTorrent, although BitTorrent users are highly technical. A good conversation topic for tonight’s Feedster Developer Dinner at 7…

DrunkenBlog posted an interview with developers of the leading feed aggregators for Mac OS X. Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire, David Watanabe of NewsFire, Rory Prior of NewsMac, Erik J. Barzeski of PulpFiction, and Graham Parks of Shrook answered questions about the basics of RSS, the threat of Safari RSS, auto-discovery of feeds, competing feed formats, and the business model for producing RSS feeds. Graham Parks on feed formats: Atom looks to be so much more reliable and usable than any version of RSS. Once v1.0 is published next year, I imagine there will be few new implementations of RSS. Of…

NewsGator Online Edition is now a free feature for basic features: NewsGator Web Edition and subscription synchronization. New features include: Per-post rating system. Rate each post from one to five stars. Feed recommendation for paid subscription levels. E-mail feeds. I signed up for a free NewsGator Web Edition account. The service competes with Bloglines and offers cosmos data similar to Technorati. The press release mentions the ability for users to “add the rating feature seamlessly to their own blog site” but I cannot find the code anywhere….

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…

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…

The first public beta of NetNewsWire 2.0 is now available from Ranchero Software. Searching, enclosures, persistence, smart lists, and Rendezvous subscription sharing are the new features I use the most….

RSS feeds from Moreover Technologies will be featured in FeedDemon’s default configuration. Although the press release and Nick’s entry do not mention any payments, I have to assume this was a paid inclusion. Currently FeedDemon provides preconfigured channel groups to help users get started with an application full of feeds. The first time a user launches FeedDemon he or she is presented with a list of preconfigured Channel Groups to include if they would like. The user can deselect each group if they would like to have no default feeds. The free Moreover feeds include advertising. I spoke with Nick…