FeadEachOther.com = Facebook + Bloglines

Ben just pointed me to FeedEachOther.com another entry in the social feed space.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to know which feeds your friends subscribe to? Shouldn’t you be able to find new feeds by topic? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse feeds related to your subscriptions? Shouldn’t you be able to share things that you find in your reader without clogging up your friend’s email? How great would it be if your reader could automatically point you towards other interesting, like-minded people?”

Also, reading comments inline is nice.

As you can tell from the above intro from founder, Udi, this is the closest I’ve seen to the project I’m working on ¹, so I’m real happy to see forward progress made elsewhere in feed land.

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Analysis:

“The only shortcomings I’ve seen so far are the absence of offline and mobile modes, weaker analytics than Google Reader offers and a limit of 500 feeds by OPML import. Those problems are big enough that I’m not likely to use FeedEachOther.”

Those aren’t showstoppers for me – and hey, this is day 1. I just don’t think FeedEachOther is intended me, Marshall, or anyone with a serious feed problem. Walking through the intro screencasts it definitely feels like a Facebook + Bloglines (or Google Reader + Orkut if you believe the rumors), with corresponding RSS Feed 101 language and tone.

I do have 1,223,948,234,981 invites remaining, so you can expect one soon.

UPDATE:
Based on the further comments @ ReadWriteWeb, it looks like FEO has been having some issues supporting the number of people that want to check out the service. I think that hurts everyone – the service provider and the people that want to use the site. For free services, there are only a few ways to minimize the bad experience. Unfortunately, throwing up a 500 is probably the easiest way to do it.

1. While my perspective may be skewed – 10 minutes from now feeds will be ubiquitious and we need more and better tools than we have today to help us stop drinking from the firehose. That’s just one reporters opinion.

7 comments

I think companies focusing on how to discover new feeds are going to fail. The battle is going to be over how to make it easy for people to consume the content they already know they like.

Ed, you’ve got a great point. There’s a certain point where the recommendation is just more noise (the new definition of advertising?)

I’m still not convinced daily reading is a social experience. I like my discovery separate from my consumption.

for the record, sharing and discovery are different things to me.

isn’t there a power law argument to have here? all these apps to tell you what everyone else is reading and to push you toward new content and whatnot… seems like all it’ll do is single out the [perceived] ‘good things’ at the expense of the fringe.

seriously, what’s wrong with a firehose when everyone gets a drink? and they bring their own cups, sized to their liking.

i get your points, obvs, i’m just bringing this up because i never see anyone talk about it. maybe i missed the memo and power laws aren’t cool anymore. fair enough.

dav3, that’s the issue I’ve seen w/ all these existing systems. The Power Laws they bias aren’t ones that increase relevance.

Hey Garrick,

This service is only a couple of days old and we were not expecting all the traffic that Read/Write Web through at us. There was only a few minutes of downtime last night and things are working fine now.

Thanks!
Udi

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