…then you should check out FeedEachOther. That’s what Marshall Kilpatrick of R/WW says. If you were let down with Streamy, on the other hand, it looks like you will also be let down by FeedEachOther.
What’s the bummer? These “feature-rich super-social RSS readers” just aren’t that feature-rich or social. They’re just not so different from Google Reader. They’re still RSS readers.
But first the good news. The thing pulls comments from the original blog into the reader. That’s awesome. Multiple kinds of relationship are good too.
I don’t want to subscribe to “similar” feeds according to some recommendation that’s a huge black box. In fact, it doesn’t really even work, and its black-boxiness prevents me from knowing why. Why, for instance, does FeedEachOther only give me recommendation based on the whole feed? Why not on each post? Whole feeds contains posts way too diverse to derive sufficiently sufficient semantic patterns from them.
It’s not okay to look at all of Jeff Jarvis’s feed and offer me this string of banal tags: “advertizing – buzz – internet – news – technology – blogs – daily – marketing – politics – web – blog – commentary – jarvis – online – trends – business – imported – media – tech – web2.0 – blogging – culture – journalism – opinion – tv.” Setting aside the problem of blogs-blog-blogging, it’s not okay because they’re so generic and because I can’t stack them up and take their intersections. I can’s use these tags the way the people who created them use them. When someone in delicious tags something “journalism,” they might also tag it “trends.” Neither topic is interesting alone; only together are they interesting. (Indeed, ‘trends in journalism’ is very interesting.)
Plus! On top of reading each post’s comments with a feed, I can share notes and items within the system. But wait! “The only thing better” would be to post comments from the web app to the original post? Actually, that’s a lot better. That’s worlds and worlds better. A web app is still just a basic RSS reader until it can weave itself into the same cloth of which the many, many thousands of blogs with their comments are made.
So, no, “the absence of offline and mobile modes, weaker analytics than Google Reader offers and a limit of 500 feeds by OPML import” are not the “only shortcomings.” Someone’s seriously drinking the RSS Reader Kool-Aid. And that’s too bad—because RSS itself is so many times greater and more magnificent.
In the end, Google Reader, Streamy, and FeedEachOther are bastions of only ONE component of networked news. They allow readers to network the news by publisher. Sure, they do more than dabble in allowing readers to network by fellow readers. There’s got to be more though—comments from reader to blog would be a big step. Lastly, both Streamy and FeedEachOther just don’t have the necessary kind of semantic (or “Semantic”) insight into their content yet. The three components of networked news must be as one for any to be truly worthwhile.
When will my news platform serve me up content that’s from my favorite author and recommended by my good buddy and about my favorite subject or story or beat? When that happens, we’ll not only all be reading our own really interesting stuff—we’ll care enough about it to get into even more interesting conversations.
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