RSS

Facebook Takes on Google Reader: Who Said RSS is Dead?

On February 1, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I’ve been playing around with Facebook. Both how to promote brands on Facebook as well as how users consume content within the walled garden (hint: there’s a direct correlation between the two).

As blogs and media networks extend their reach using Facebook Pages, I noticed something interesting:

Facebook can be used as an RSS reader.

Most people don’t use the groups feature enough but it’s just like using Twitter lists, except you can’t share them. I’ve set up one just for the blogs I follow on Facebook.

It’s like a more graphical version of Google Reader with the shared and comments view shown in the collapsed mode.From here users can like or comment on any post or click through to the expanded “notes” view.

Facebook is a growing source of news for most people. While the geeks among us may still prefer RSS or Twitter your average user will follow a fan page before they subscribe to an RSS feed. I’ve written about a study showing that Facebook members use the social network as a growing source of tech news.

(BTW, feel free to join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page.)

Over on the Facebook blog, Malorie Lucich, has a post about how she’s seeing the rise of Facebook as a news source Creating Your Personalized News Channel.

When the earthquake hit Haiti, victims in the area, news affiliates and people around the world used Facebook to learn what was happening, connect with loved ones and quickly disseminate information. ABCNews.com and France 24 added Facebook live stream boxes to their sites to enable people to share their feelings on the disaster and relief efforts, and publish it back to their Facebook status. Meanwhile, The New York Times created a special Facebook Page dedicated to Haiti coverage, resources and updates from their reporters on the ground.

Malorie then recommends building a group of just the news sources you follow to clear the clutter. The next step in Facebook’s twitterfication will be to make these lists shareable. Facebook could also further this adoption by mimicking Twitter’s now dead, Suggested User List and have a recommended group that people could follow or even recommended groups by category. Companies would pay millions for that kind of reach.

As this kind of use on Facebook grows your Facebook fan numbers could easily eclipse your RSS subscriber numbers. This also poses an interesting challenge for publishers hiding their content behind pay wall or a unique partnership opportunity, depending on how they approach it.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick just posted a very similar post on ReadWriteWeb:

Facebook Could Become World’s Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Pandora Makes Music Sharing on Twitter and Facebook Easier but not Music Blogging

On October 28, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

: Image by SqueegyX via Flickr

I’ve had a music blog (kind of) for a while now – Wall-Notes. I say kind of because it’s a pretty effortless blog. And honestly it’s more like a link blog.

When I listen to music in Pandora I figured out that there’s an RSS feed for the songs and bands you bookmark (not thumb up). For a long time I was pulling that RSS feed through FriendFeed and then into Twitter. Then I decided to pull that feed into Tumblr, which is the platform Wall-Notes is on. I love how the RSS feed pulls the album cover and info through. It’s very cool.

Yes, I know there are lots of music bloggers on Tumblr and there’s a “better” way to do it. I just don’t want to go through the manual steps. I want to automate the work flow of it.

I then feed that into Twitter and Facebook. Well last night Pandora rolled out a new feature to make posting to Twitter and Facebook much easier. The Facebook feature is especially cool because it lets your friends listen to the song you posted right there on your wall (this feature isn’t working for me right now but it’s new).

Share Pandora with Your Friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Beyond

When I think about my connection with music, I think about three impulses: the impulse to discover, the impulse to buy, and the impulse to share. Here at Pandora we’ve had the discover and buy bits covered for some time, but it’s been frustrating to use Pandora to share the music you’re encountering with your friends. You could send an email or embed a widget on MySpace, but in the age of Twitter and Facebook our offering has been pretty spartan. That all changed tonight.

via blog.pandora.com

Now this is all well and good but it doesn’t help my blogging efforts. My process is a little clunky.

What I’d really love: A Blog This feature like many other services have with the functionality they have in Facebook that allows readers to listen to the song I post right on the blog. Or if Posterous could work their magic with links from Pandora like they do with Video links and import RSS feeds and add the player, I’d switch Wall-Notes to Posterous.

This really seems like a big opportunity for Pandora or someone else to enable thousands of music blogs all with links and affiliate links.

For now I’ll tinker with Bookmarks and RSS feeds, unless one of you has a better idea for me.

Facebook Fan Pages are the New Microsite (newcommbiz.com)
Why Would You NOT Blog? (newcommbiz.com)
What the Heck is a Lifestream? (newcommbiz.com)
Posterous and Ping.fm: please use wisely (biztipsblog.com)
Microsoft’s MSN in talks with MySpace about music tie-up (news.cnet.com)
Evolution of Blogging (blogs.netedu.info)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Facebook • Pandora • RSS • Tumblr • Twitter

FriendFeed as Group RSS Reader [All Things M]

On September 15, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

: Image via CrunchBase

One of the things I love about FriendFeed is it’s versatility. Yes I know FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook and some are dooming it to extinction and I also realize thatsome people believe “RSS is dead.” Whatevs. I love FriendFeed and I love RSS even more. If I were kip I’d write a song about how much I love them. I’ll give them up when Web 5.0 pulls them from my cold dead hands. Anyway…

Have you ever wanted a way to share hundreds of feeds or even just a few feeds all in one place where everyone can view them? Sounds a lot like one the several dozen start pages out there doesn’t it? But what if you want people to be able to comment on a particular story there on the feed reader or export all of those feeds as one RSS feed?

This is where FriendFeed shines. I know several people that use FriendFeed as their only feed reader because of it’s many features. Today I wanted to create a massive RSS feed of hundreds of Marketing, Advertising and PR blogs. Why? I’m not really sure, I just did. j/k It’s a shared feed I created for an internal group as a resource but there’s no reason everyone can’t use it.

Introducing All Things M. (Apologies to Walt and Kara) Right now I have just added the top 150 AdAge Power 150 blogs, but plan on expanding that list as time goes on. Just for fun I also set up a TwitterFeed to feed it’s own All Things M Twitter account. I’m only sending 5 links every half hour to Twitter so it would be the best place for a sampling of the uber feed.(I’m also still working out some bugs in the RSS to FriendFeed to RSS to TwitterFeed to Twitter integration.)

If you’re on FriendFeed feel free to subscribe to the All Things M group. If you’re not on FriendFeed feel free to bookmark the page and check back often. If you’re feeling daring you could even subscribe to the all up RSS feed in your favorite feed reader but that’s a lot. Or if you prefer, follow the All Things M Twitter account.

Hope you find this useful. Let me know.

FriendFeed is Reaching Critical Mass (newcommbiz.com)
On Being a Human Filter (newcommbiz.com)
I Don’t Care What Google Thinks I Should do with My Content (newcommbiz.com)
Is Twitter Shopping for a Business Model? (newcommbiz.com)
Aggregation spices up Twitter conversation (lansner.freedomblogging.com)
FriendFeed: Still Great At Social Search (philbaumann.com)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Aggregator • Blog • FriendFeed • RSS • Twitter

Why Would You NOT Blog?

On August 20, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

: Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

Following yesterday’s post (and months of posts really) about how easy Posterous makes blogging, why would you NOT blog? Seriously it’s so freaking easy?

If sending an email is too tough, check out Tumblr. Pulling an RSS feed doesn’t get any easier. Check out my music blog http://tacanderson.tumblr.com/. The only thing I have to do is use the bookmark song feature for songs I like in Pandora or tags certain bookmarks in my Diigo as ‘music’.

It doesn’t get any easier than that!!!

I know, you think you have to have something really important to say. That’s just plain stupid. Start writing and posting and you’ll come up with good stuff to say. You’re not going for a book deal you’re learning and engaging with people. It’s the online version of what you do every day.

You don’t even need a blog to blog. Flickr, FriendFeed, Delicious, StumbleUpon and even Google Reader shared items have “blogs”.

If for some reason you still don’t have a blog start with Delicious. Start bookmarking and curating interesting content. We can work with you from there.

Google RSS Reader finally allows social bookmarking (sociallyminded.co.uk)
The web as platform: The distributed self (mndoci.com)
Anatomy of a Blog Post Well Received (readwriteweb.com)
Blogs Aren’t Dead, They’re Just Fragmenting (newcommbiz.com)
Marketers as Aggregators Creators and Distributors (newcommbiz.com)
I Don’t Care What Google Thinks I Should do with My Content (newcommbiz.com)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Blogging • Delicious • Flickr • FriendFeed • Google Reader • Posterous • RSS • Tumblr

FriendFeed is Reaching Critical Mass

On May 20, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

: Image via CrunchBase

Three months ago, while some were proclaiming that the Twitter shark had been jumped, I made the statement that Microblogging was about to go Supernova. Three months ago doesn’t seem like that long ago but in the real-time Web that was eons ago.

Real-time content is all the rage right now and you are going to get as sick of hearing about it as you were of Twitter 3 months ago (and probably still are).

You are also going to start hearing a lot more about FriendFeed. Most of you are familiar with it and more and more of you are joining (I can tell by the steady rise of follow notifications over the last couple months). It’s not just the number of people that are joining but the types of people that are joining. The other significant thing that is happening is people who are already on the service (like those that signed up but didn’t do much) are starting to make stronger connections across the service.

Even as more people join and connet most of you still don’t know what to do with it. Because a lot of you are asking, here’s how I use FriendFeed:

It’s a personal search engine: I hook up all my social services to it and dump everything in it. Then the next time I’m looking for that link I shared, or bookmarked or tweeted or something I go to FriendFeed and search for it.
It’s a work flow tool. Since I’m sharing everything into FriendFeed already I use it to push some things to Twitter for me. (More on this in later posts.)
It’s a social network/stalking tool. While most people follow each other’s activity on Twitter if you follow a lot of people it becomes cumbersome to find out what they were doing while you were away from Twitter (if you’re ever away). By adding all the people you want to keep tabs on into one room on FriendFeed you can occasioanly check their status their. You can even add people who aren’t on FriendFeed by pulling their Twitter RSS stream into that room.

There a a lot of FriendFeed tutorials written by people on how to get the most out of the service but instead of linking to them I want you to go to FriendFeed and search for them. The best part is that you don’t even have to sign up to search the wealth of content their.

Why is FriendFeed going top rise to the top now? Because it has the best functionality of any service out there. It not only aggregates all of your content it makes it searchable and manageable. FriendFeed will prove to be a powerful tool for managing the growing onslaught of content not just add to it like most services.

Update: I made some changes in the second and third paragraphs to argue my point a little stronger about why I see FriendFeed as reaching critical mass. No hard data, just my observations.

Conversations as Data: We need new UI (newcommbiz.com)
Jump Into The Stream (techcrunch.com)
Exploring the 2010 Web (scobleizer.com)
FriendFeed : Some Thoughts On The Service (jeffisageek.net)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Facebook • FriendFeed • RSS • search • Social network • Twitter

Enterprise 2.0 Needs a FriendFeed

On May 19, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

: Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

We have dozens of Twitter-like, microblogging applications for inside the enterprise but where’s the LifeStreaming applications? If there is one already, I’m not aware of it.

Where is the Enterprise 2.0 version of FriendFeed? Where is the app that captures my work progress? Every time I create a document, edit a wiki, have a conference call or client meeting that activity should be captured in my work-LifeStream. All the pieces are there. In the enterprise Microsoft Office is the predominant OS and Vista and Office 07 have RSS built into the entire system (disclaimer: Microsoft is a client). There is no reason*Â that all of my work activity (probably excluding emails) couldn’t be captured in one activity stream.Â Details about the activity could be limited to little more than something like a document title and possibly a summary or snippet. (*By ‘no reason’ I do not mean to minimize the difficulty of building this type of app.)

Then all of those streams could be connected by work teams, projects and any other various ‘net-work’ connection.

IMO, project management would reach new levels of efficiency. I’m sure (I hope) there are several smart companies working on this (send me an email if you are). I also think that this type of activity would do more to break down company silo’s than anything else.

What do you think? Am I crazy? Would this type of activity overwhelm the average worker (initially yes). Is that a bad thing?

You may be wondering what the picture in this post has to do with the article. This is the office where 3 years ago Rich Breton and I tried to make a product similar to this idea. You can read about that effort here.

[NCB Best Of] Giving your employees a square peg and a round hole (newcommbiz.com)
CIO.com tries to explain Twitter to your Boss’s Boss’s Boss (newcommbiz.com)
Using Social Networking Sites For Internal Communications (newcommbiz.com)
How I Address the Question of Enterprise 2.0 ROI (bhc3.wordpress.com)
Think Companies Can Do More with Ideas? Me Too – I’m Joining Spigit (bhc3.wordpress.com)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Company • E2.0 • Enterprise • FriendFeed • Microsoft Office • Project management • RSS

What Makes for a Well Balanced Media Diet?

On May 11, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

: Image via Wikipedia

What Makes for a Well Balanced Media Diet?

Farhad Manjoo over at Slate really kicked up a storm in a tea cup 2 weeks ago (wow, that was a really bad mixed metaphor) with his Kill Your RSS Reader post.

Mashable covered it and did a poll of their users use of RSS. I covered the Mashable post. WebWorkerDaily included my post in their post about RSS and social media.

I have no doubt Farhad’s post generated hundreds of other reactions.Â As I went back and reread Farhad’s post and got beyond the obvious link baiting headline I realized that:
A- He has some useful advice about navigating news sites.
B- His post represents 1/3 of the new madia consumption equation.

What are the 3 parts of modern day media consumption?

RSS Readers
Social Networks
Aggregation Sites

Drowning in RSS

Farhad’s problem was that RSS became overwhelming and he couldn’t keep up. Former HP colleague Eric Herberholz mentioned in a comment to my post how he likes RSS just has a hard time managing it.

The problem is that people treat their RSS feeds like email. RSS and blogs are NOT email. You do not have to read them all. RSS feeds arfe like a news paper.

For those of you who read the paper everyday, do you read the whole thing? There are some people who say they read the *whole* paper “front to back”. These people are liars. No one reads every word of any newspaper. I doubt the editors of the papers even do. People really just scan the articles that interest them as they go. RSS is no different. Scan, read what strikes your interest and then move on.

Social Networks and Discovery

One of the arguments old media defenders use against a blog only media diet is there is no chance for discovery. You only consume media from a narrow niche and are not “surprised” by the discovery of an unexpected story. These people argue that physical papers and magazines provide this better than blogs. For once, I mostly agree with them.

Discovery is the fiber in a healthy media diet.

I follow 300 blogs. I rarely see interesting yet “off topic” items. I read 200 posts a day just to stay on top of my industry. Not to discover new things.

While blogs don’t provide discovery, Twitter is better at providing discovery than the newspaper or magazines. Other than talking about food conecting with interesting people, link sharing is the most important Twitter activity. The third most important activity is retweeting (RT).

This is why the latest wave in Twitter apps are link aggregation sites. The current leader and best implementaion of this so far is Tweetmeme. See the bubble and retweet button at the bottom of this post. Click it. It’ll send a ‘RT @tacanderson’ for this post to twitter. The most popular RT’s surface to the top of Tweetmeme. The obvious analogy is that it’s the Digg of RT’s, just without the snarky commentary.

This is how I discover great ‘off topic’ content. FriendFeed would be a better tool for discovery if it wasn’t too much ‘off topic’ content. I realize I could eliminate most of this with filters but that’s too much work.

Aggregation and the Portal Page

So going back to Farhad, he had some great points and suggestions about how to navigate news sites. I’m pretty good with using keyboard shortcuts but he totally schooled me with his mouse tips.

If you think of the wheel only as a tool to scroll with, dear friend, you’re missing out; the middle mouse button does so much more. For example, it’s the best way to open a link in a background tab. You can use the same button to quickly close unwanted tabs, tooâ€”click and release a tab you just opened, and voila, it disappears. In Firefox, the middle button has one extra power: Click an empty space in the tab bar and you’ll open up the last tab you closed, which is a godsend if you accidentally sent away something important.

Very cool.

I am going to create a bit of heresy here with my next statement: There is some news that is better consumed on page. There I said it. Many news sites and portal pages have a great UI that lends itself to on page consumption. Most ruin this with pop-ups and flash ads that roam all over the page. There are also several mega aggregators that don’t allow for RSS consumption and even if they did they would flood your RSS reader with nothing else. I like the WatrCoolr sites. Techmeme is a long time geek favorite. Alltop and up-and-comers PostRank also provide better onsite consumption.

(I also find it ironic that newspapers are really just news aggregators anymore. What percentage of news in your average paper was actually written by the paper? Now take out press releases that are repurposed exactly or with minimal re-writing.)

Rest in Peace, RSS (techcrunchit.com)
You: DailyRT Ranks Twitter Retweets (mashable.com)
RSS Is Not Dead, It Has A Usability Problem (regulargeek.com)
Want new Twitter features? Build them yourself. (newcommbiz.com)
What can Alltop learn from PostRank? (newcommbiz.com)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Aggregator • Blog • Farhad Manjoo • FriendFeed • Newspaper • PostRank • RSS • Social media • Twitter

Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?

On May 4, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson

: Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream?

One of my proudest moments at Highway 12 Ventures was when Mark Solon was demonstrating how he subscribed to RSS feeds in his feed reader to his partners.

But even as new people adopt RSS I keep hearing rumblings that some people are abandoning their feeds. Mashable even posed a poll to ask their readers if the were still using feed readers. It’s no surprise that their readers still overwhelming do.

Do You Use an RSS Reader?

Is RSS the best way to read news and blogs?

With the rise of social media technologies that provide alternatives to RSS , we have to wonder: what is the future of RSS? Is social media a better alternative?

I know many of you have expressed that thanks to Twitter and other social networks pushing content to you that you read far fewer, or at least don’t pay as much attention to, your RSS feeds. For me I know that initially this was the case for me, but now I find myself reading even more than before. In fact I find myself searching for, not just more, but more original content.

I think social networks and status style sharing accentuates the head but tends to bury the long tail. For some people RSS may not be important but I think for early adopters, trend watchers and anyone who wants to be at the front of their industry still has to actively subscribe to feeds.

Another case for RSS is this article by LifeHacker on 2 different ways to manage all your social networks. The problem is that the RSS solution would never be adopted by the mainstream worker. It’s just too much work for the average person. Messing with settings, filters and 3rd party applications is akin to low level programming. It will always be relegated to the hypo-g33k.

What about you. Do you find yourself using RSS more or less?

Diigo Demo Video: Posting to Twitter (newcommbiz.com)
Conversations as Data: We need new UI (newcommbiz.com)
Turn Your Commenters into Connections (slyvisions.com)
Toluu – A Positive Experience with RSS Feeds (imjustcreative.com)
Feedmil.com – A Search Engine For Feeds (killerstartups.com)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: Mark Solon • RSS • Social media • Social network • Syndication and Feeds • Twitter

Why You Should Use Favorites in Twitter

On April 14, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I’m a big fan of using the favorite feature in Twitter. (Here’s my favorite’s page. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed) Why? Well to be honest I mostly use it like a bookmarking feature. I do the same thing with Google Reader’s Star feature.

If I like something and want to share it I either retweet it or *share* it Google Reader. But what if I want to come back to something later?

I access both services a lot on my mobile phone and I find I don’t want to, or have time to, click through a link to read a full article (this is often true of my Online, non-mobile behavior) so I add a star. (I find it interesting that both Twitter and Google Reader use a star the same way but Twitter calls it “favorite”.) I may also favorite something because I want to come back later and blog about it.

I even go as far to pull a feed of those favorited items into iGoogle so I remember to go back to them later.

My good friend, fellow Boisean and fellow ADHD‘er Steve Nipper @nipper blogged about an idea he’s had that started off as a tweet (BTW he’s a user of the favorite feature).

My Thoughts on how Twitter could be Improved | The Invent Blog

What percent of your followers do you think sees every tweet you make? 5%? 10%?

That, in my opinion, is the biggest defect Twitter has.

What if #1: What if you could anchor a tweet in the river (so the threaded conversation I mentioned above could take place)?

What if #2: What if you could tag some of your own tweets as something the REALLY want your followers to read AND it was really easy for users to see them. Sure, you could mark it as a favorites, but most people use that function to tag their personal favorites (of other people). Mine: http://twitter.com/nipper/favorites. Additionally, most Twitter users don’t even know that favorites exist (or that they have RSS feeds). Addressing this what if would instantaneously convert Twitter into an actual microblogging platform instead of a stream of consciousness.

My thouhgts is that if you really want #1 – that’s what FriendFeed is. My thoughts on #2 and how it ties to this post is that’s what favorites and retweets are for. There are already many services being built on retweets it seems like favorites could be the next Twitter API opportunity. What tweets are getting the most favorites or maybe building a widget that displays your favorited tweets on your blog like you can do with your Google Reader shared items.

I did some poking around to see if some of my other favorite tweeple were favorite feature users:

Forrester analyst Jeremiaha Owyang @Jowyang obviously does (no surprise there).
Uber user Robert Scoble @Scobleizer does but not very actively. Probably because he spends most of his time likeing items on FriendFeed.
Twitter founder and CEO @ev seems to favorite more than he actually tweets.
E2.0 visionary and all around good guy Hutch Carpenter @bhc3 does.
VC/entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki @guykawasaki does not (no surprise there since most of his tweets aren’t even him).
Former Idahoan turned Portlandian, Silicon Florist founder and ReadWrite/Web author Rick Turoczy @turoczy does.
And on a random note, Ashton Kutcher only has one favorite and it’s a saved link to an assasin, uh…..ok.

To Steve’s point I think if someone started building tools around the favorite feature that may drive more wide adoption of it. Do you use it? Do you see any value in it?

P.S. Completely random side note the favorite feature apparently throws some props to the British/Canadians since their spelling works as well http://twitter.com/tacanderson/favourites or http://twitter.com/tacanderson/favorites. Go figure

Social Media in 2009: Our Predictions and Desires (readwriteweb.com)
The FriendFeed Team Discusses The FriendFeed Beta (jeffisageek.net)
I Am Afraid Of Ghosts: Guy Kawasaki And The Dilution Of Social (stoweboyd.com)
What Twitter Can Learn from Google Reader (labnol.org)
Feedly Mini Updated: Now with More Twitter and FriendFeed Interaction (readwriteweb.com)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: Add new tag • FriendFeed • Google Reader • guykawasaki • Robert Scoble • RSS • Twitter

New Comm Biz

Social Media and the Future of Business

Pandora Makes Music Sharing on Twitter and Facebook Easier but not Music Blogging

Share Pandora with Your Friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Beyond

FriendFeed as Group RSS Reader [All Things M]

Why Would You NOT Blog?

Enterprise 2.0 Needs a FriendFeed

Why You Should Use Favorites in Twitter

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