Library clips

I’ve posted on a few RSS Readers that are in a social network environment, but just didn’t go that extra social network mile, these are; Rojo, NEooWS , Newgie, ozmozr, and Rootly.

FeedEachOther (currently invite-only) reminds me of Genwi in that it is a social network RSS Reader where you can add friends, leave comments, and share stuff with your friends.

A similar service is HypeIt (formerly Spokeo), here you can subscribe to feeds, and you can even subscribe to a users HypeIt RSS Reader, when you vote for an item, this will get sent to your friends user space.

Not long ago I posted about attention, and Udi from FeedEachOther (FEO) felt I hit onto something, actually it was mentioned I hit on their new startup without knowing, here’s what I said:

“To an extent you can say with an RSS Reader information comes to you, but where’s the filter, how can I use one of these things so I only see stuff I need to know…we have personalisation (particls, attensa), we have memetrackers (megite, techmeme), blog carnivals, etc…but even better is networks, that is people.
Your network know what you like, and you know what they like…there’s more chance of seeing the stuff you need to know without putting in the time digging for it yourself.”

Features

- RSS Reader
- sections for clipped, shared, and archived items
(clip is to read later, and archive is to keep…lacks tagging, and shared is items you have shared/described with your friends in FEO)
- others can comment on your shared items
- a section for items your contacts have shared with you (filter to co-workers, friends or family)
- your user space displays like minded people and related feeds (coming soon)
- add friends
- see your fans (people who have added you as a friend)
- visit other peoples user space (see your mutual friends)
…instead of mentioning what you can see on another users space, I’ll mention only what you can’t see, that is, their clipped, archived items and shared items from the users contacts (you can still see shared items from that user), more to the point is that you can nearly see everything.
- send a message to another user (coming soon)
- view all users (it would be good if you could tag yourself)
- seems to be a feed tag cloud (not sure if tags come from user folders used to organise feeds, or they are just a inhouse feed offering)

The strength of this service is they have made RSS reading as a social network (view a user space, add friends, send a message, share links and reply comments to these links).

This is really where it’s at when it comes to the networking individual, attention, and discovery…this type of environment allows you to achieve your individual needs like RSS reading, and within the same service be recommended stuff from your network.

This is quite the service I was pondering about, where in one place you can reduce your RSS Reading, as you know friends in your network read those feeds you have dropped, and they will share with you not only stuff from those feeds you have dropped, but filtered to stuff they have learned you like (naturally this increases as you build your friendship). So now you can feel confident to drop feeds, as you can have faith in your network, they will make sure you don’t miss out on the gems that they think you will like from those dropped feeds.

Instead of reading 500 feeds, grab another 4 friends and read 100 feeds each in FEO, whilst sharing with each other stuff from feeds you aren’t reading…the power of networks, solving RSS attention and overload, whilst adding filtering and recommendation.

You could say you don’t need a network in one space for this, friends can email you links as they always have done, but having this in the one place like FEO makes it a one click affair, plus all the networking user space benefits…plus information is not in silo’s.

What I’d like to see is tagging for shared items, that way I can see a tag cloud of shared items from my network of friends.

Only thing missing is a way to share items that have not come from your FEO RSS Reader, see ShareThis below.

Another service just on the share aspect is ShareThis, this is basically a web space for a contact list and an archive of links you sent people…I’m sure this service will grow into bigger things, as for now it’s more of a feature, actually it’s one feature achieves what FEO does, sharing links, but to outside friends as it doesn’t have it’s own social network.

Actually on this point, I’m not inclined to use FeedEachOther as I already use Google Reader (even though I think FEO is the best innovation in RSS reading/networking in a long time), but I am inclined to use ShareThis for it’s simple handy offering, ie. until Google Reader gets this feature, I hear they have a plugin in the works.

To close if Google Reader could be a social network like FeedEachOther this would be the ultimate (at the moment it only has a Shared Items public stream)…I hear they are back in the social network game with SocialStream.
Or the other way around, everyone drops Google Reader for FEO…this just ain’t gonna happen, the RSS Reader market is too hard to crack even when you have got something really different to offer like FEO, which is bound to be copied very soon I bet.

Maybe if Google Reader allowed you to see a public version of another users space and it teamed up with del.icio.us (which is bookmarking stuff you like) it could achieve something similar…but then again Google Reader has it’s own public shared items stream, but unlike del.icio.us “links for you”, you can’t share an item right into someone else’s Google Reader (Bluedot extends the friend network idea even further than del.icio.us).

I think FeedEachOther has tied together many excellent isolated experiences…and in a way where collaborative filtering and attention can be achieved from the individuals network perspective.

[ADDED 27/09/07: Feed Each Other : the Facebook of RSS Readers]