October 25, 2010

Who says RSS is dead? Ask.com does

Death of Bloglines masthead
Just over a month ago, I logged into my Bloglines account to read my RSS feeds just as I do on a daily basis. I found a red statement before me that said, “The Bloglines service will officially close October 1, 2010.” The date was later extended to November 1st.

I understand that businesses have to shift focus as the Internet changes from one technology platform to the other, funding is lost and hard decisions have to be made. But proclaiming the death of RSS? Is this true?

In a statement issued by Ask.com (who owned Bloglines, a fact I didn’t know), said, “…Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year, being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.”

In other words, social experiences such as Twitter and Facebook have replaced the RSS aggregator? I disagree. Social media has enhanced the experience of getting to the best stuff in a crowded online world, but the RSS feed is the “subscription” to a constant flow my favorite stuff. There’s a difference there for me. Maybe that makes me old-fashioned?

I’ve already ported over my feeds to the Google reader which seems to be the leading next best thing, which is hard to say considering their terrible interface (I tell people with a scowl on my face, “it sucks!”). Perhaps Steve Gillmor (quoted in the Ask.com statement) is just upset because he was using Google reader.

I will miss Bloglines and thank the folks that ran it for providing me a daily feed to my favorite places online.

Links:
Bloglines: www.bloglines.com (at least for a few more days)
Ask.com’s Statement: Bloglines Update
TechCrunch Article: Rest in Peace, RSS

July 31, 2008

Cuil? A search engine that’s just as odd as its name

In the blogs that I read, email newsletters I subscribe to, and info that comes across my desk, the new search engine Cuil (pronounced like “cool”) seems to have been mentioned quite a few times times. So in typical fashion, I did a vanity search for my own name (and my company’s primary product name for that matter) to see what results it would come up with compared to other searches in Google or Yahoo.

What I found, is Cuil seems to have liked my LinkedIn page best. So I did a search for my friend, and illustrator Jonathan Hull (who continually competes for search engine attention from an author with the same name.) The author guy (that “other” Jonathan Hull) seemed to control the first three pages, and then… well then… nothing else (Nope, no more results at all). So the first thing I found is the fact that Jonathan Hull’s website is named www.jonathan-hull.com or my website is www.bradmccall.com seemed to have no effect on its relevancy for the same terms searched for in Cuil. In fact, even 10 pages into Cuil’s results and I didn’t find bradmccall.com listed as any part of its results when searching for “Brad McCall”.

So I followed up with my typical rounds of search to see what showed up by typing Brad McCall Utah and while links showed up from other sites that directed to mine, the direct link didn’t show up until page 5. Seems odd, right?

So I tried another brand company. Glaceau (They make the Vitamin Water that I’ve been drinking of late – so it was a quick grab.) and voila! Their brand name appears first thing. (glaceau.com) Okay, so they got that right. So I tried “Dell”, and the search engine errored out. A search engine erroring out? More oddness. (I tried this again later and whatever didn’t work was fixed)

So at last, I tried Omniture, the company that has garnered my full-time employ, and a random bunch of links came up, many of which were a part of the Omniture website, but its corporate website was nowhere to be found in the results. If you ARE patient enough to wait, you will notice on an “Omniture” search will create a menu that has some awesome links to the corporate site as well as product links – pages that ARE MISSING from the search results.

Does anyone get how this works? What gives? And is this REALLY supposed to compete with Google?

July 23, 2008

Losing the top spot on Google

I meant to mention this the other day when I Googled myself and found I had lost the top spot on Google’s search engine to a blog. (I question Google’s mixed relationship there, because it owns the blogging tool.), but today when I checked, I’ve even moved further down the line to be 5th. I’m talking about when you do a quote-less search for brad mccall. I’m number 4 when you add back in the quotes.

Yahoo’s still got me on top, so I’m good there, and so does MSN.

Perhaps it’s because of my lack of frequency of added material to the Daily Brad? Or my lack of mentioning my name – Brad McCall in my posts with relevant content? I’m number 2 when searching for “Daily Bread”, just beneath a site that I think has been using that phrase a lot longer than me, so that can’t be it. I’m still highly suspicious about Google’s blogs appearing on top, and then not in any of the other search engines. Conspiracy theories aside, I think Google may have it’s hands in too many pots to be unbiased any of them.