“RSS is Dead“, tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that’s not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.
If you’re not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) – it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you’ve subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.
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There are a lot of repeat appearances from 2009 and 2008, but there are some new tools, too. Did we miss any thing important or exciting? Any power user tips you’d add?
Selected coverage: Flipboard, New “Social” iPad Magazine will be Powered by Semantic Data
Flipboard is a well-funded iPad app that turns Twitter and other streams of content into a beautiful “customized magazine.” Many people have tried to go deep on the visual impact of feed reading on the iPad, but none have embraced the possibilities as gracefully as Flipboard.
You know how I use Flipboard? I read my usual Twitter and Facebook streams through it sometimes, but it’s the curated topical Twitter lists that work best on this service. I’ve got a Twitter list of hundreds of geotechnology pros that serve up incredible topical links. The Twitter list of anthropologists I grabbed from Tlists? What a great magazine they make every Sunday morning!
Web page pre-loading in the background, integrated social media sharing and commenting, video, image collages – the user experience is really hard to beat and it’s only getting better. OPML import is the only thing that the 15 of us in the world that like to play with OPML files could ask for more.
Not Dead Yet Factor: Some people have the audacity to complain that this magical creature that turns links to their website into shining, seductive, glossy magazine pages for iPad using readers to slide right down into their websites… is violating their copyrights! That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard since someone told me that the tens of thousands of readers a Huffington Post link to our site sends are somehow a case of that site stealing from us, too.
Postrank
Selected coverage: How to Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet on Any Topic
RSS overload getting you down? Give Postrank a feed and it will give you back a brighter day. This service, which has been on our best of list every year we’ve written one about feeds, is invaluable. You plug in a feed and Postrank will score every item in it based on the relative social media engagement that item has seen (comments, inbound links, mentions on Twitter and a lot more). Then, you can subscribe to a filtered feed of just the most-discussed items on any feed.
We use Postrank about 15 different ways here at ReadWriteWeb. It’s awesomeness cannot be surpassed. Watch this space, you’ll see us use it some more ways in the coming weeks and months.
Not Dead Yet Factor: Postrank’s main home page is now a publisher analytics fancy service. If you want to run other peoples’ feeds through it, like a sophisticated strategic thinker able to defer immediate gratification for one technology step in exchange for far greater opportunities, then visit http://postrank.com/main.
Notify.me
Selected coverage: Real Time as a Service? Check Out What Notify.me Is Working On
The battlefield of RSS to IM/SMS/email delivery and alert services is littered with bodies – the field of battle between those services and the cold reality of monetization, that is. There are a small number of people who appreciate the delivery of a substantial number of RSS feeds within minutes of their publication, but it’s not an insignificant number. It’s services like this that keep all the tech blogs you read feeling fresh, readers. Other people in other fields are learning to appreciate them as well.
Notify.me remains alive, despite its own determination to die this summer. The company is now focused on selling advanced services to large, paying customers; it’s expensive shooting RSS feeds all over the web by IM and SMS for free.
In July, 2010, the Notify.me team threw up its hands and said it was shutting down its free consumer service. A minor cry for help arose and thankfully, the company changed its mind. It said it was going to start charging people a small amount of money. It doesn’t appear to have done so and the messages are still coming.
Let me tell you what a service like this is good for, outside a journalist’s immediate interest: I once led a workshop for non-profit organizations where one participant worked in communications at a local women’s advocacy organization. In that workshop, we grabbed the RSS feed for the New York Times and we ran it through a filter, filtering for keywords related to the field she worked in. We then took that filtered feed and we put it through Notify.me, setting it for multiple forms of delivery.
The plan, then, was for her to get an SMS whenever the New York Times wrote a story related to women’s issues. She could take a look at it, and if appropriate, could call the local newspaper people she knew. “I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she could say (they probably hadn’t, so soon), “but there’s this story breaking on a national level. If you’re interested in a local angle, our Executive Director is an excellent source and would be happy to get on the phone with you if you like.” The reporter has been looking for something to write about all day and you lay a timely, high-quality interviewee in their lap. Boom! Now repeat a few times and what have you got? You’ve got an organization that people in your area associate with the issue because you’re regularly cited as a source in the local media – because you were the first to know.
Not Dead Yet Factor: It’s not dead yet. Someday it probably will be. Another service will have to take its place, or we’ll all have to learn how to roll our own.
SuperFeedr
Selected coverage: The Dream Team Quietly Gathering Behind Real-Time Service SuperFeedr
You’ve got online content and you want it in real time. You want it in different formats. You want it marked up with geolocation data that corresponds to place names occurring in free text. You want it all and you want it for a fair price. What does it mean? Maybe you want SuperFeedr. It’s like FeedBurner was for bloggers, but much more developer-focused. The company adds features all the time and founder Julien Genestoux is one of the most agile technologists you’ll find online.
Not Dead Yet Factor: Barely born yet, but backed by BetaWorks and Mark Cuban, that’s good for something. Plus Genestoux builds features so fast that he’ll likely fit whatever need real-time feed geeks find they have, well into the future.
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