Adam Kinney on .NET

Hunting Godzilla in .NET...

Regarding Feedster

You probably have already heard about Feedster, but in just in case you haven't here's a little story for you.

The best tool I use for following topics discussed in blogs is Feedster, the Google for blogs.

When Microsoft XNA was announced, I thought I'd like to "listen" to the ensuing discussion and watch for links to information on XNA.  I searched for XNA on Feedster and then subscribed to the search.  Now I get a custom aggregated RSS feed of blogs, forums and news sites discussing my topic of choice.

That's pretty powerful stuff, and one of the best uses of RSS aggregation to date.

Now you may be familiar with other sites that are similiar like PubSub.  Why Feedster over others?  There are no subscriptions, no email collecting, nothing strongly organized; just an open, easy search.

Another reason I like Feedster, they run a blog and they sign their names to each entry.  It appears that most of them have ther own blogs up and running too.  And I can look them up in Orkut and see their little faces on my computer screen.  What value does that add?  Accountability, transperancy and they're in the blogging community.

Go Feedster!

Posted: Mar 29 2004, 04:06 AM by AdamKinney | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

Tosh Meston said:

In my book, the single biggest improvement that Feedster could make is to improve those query times. Sometimes it seems to take forever to get your results.

A second improvement is to fix the script error you see when searching for something with an apostrophe.
# March 28, 2004 11:55 PM

Robert Scoble said:

Tosh, I agree, but once you subscribe in an RSS news aggregator you don't care about speed anymore.
# March 29, 2004 1:32 PM

Anatoly Lubarsky said:

imho, feedster is better than technorati, but there are some moments.
first - its rating system is so different from that of google that it is hard to get used to it,
seems that most recent posts have higher rating or something like this. seems that sorting by relevance does not work properly.
and they could improve speed, rss aggregators just do the same work asynchroniously, so you don't pay attention. If google makes search subscriptions it would be times faster.
# March 29, 2004 4:48 PM

Scott Johnson of Feedster said:

Hi All,

Let me make a few comments addressing these points.

a) I haven't seen the apostrophe error. I'll try and replicate that.

b) Speed. I hear you there. Our big issue with respect to performance is that we're unfunded (all the boxes are still billed on my credit card) and we're massively overloaded. Low level benchmarks show that a 2 second search can take as long as 15 to 20 seconds purely due to disc head seek times. We're striving hard to address that but, honestly, its a $$$ question mostly. The only saving grace, as Robert kindly noted, is that since most of our searches are to an aggregator, the aggie doesn't care. This doesn't mean we don't want to fix it though.

c) We'll look into the ranking thing. That I haven't heard.

Thanks all. I hear your comments.

Scott
# April 1, 2004 10:18 AM
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