AideRSS Promises to Unclutter your Feeds
It’s hard to describe what AideRSS is and what is does. On their about page, they describe themselves as:
AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.
Essentially, they want to scan the RSS landscape for the best stories and bring them to you in an easy to use way. To get an idea of what they offer, let’s take a look at their report for my blog:
They offer a few basic statistics based off of their analysis of my feed. First, they give you some information about my recent updates and how often I write on the blog:
6 posts per month • 13 posts since Jul 05, 07 • Last update: about 7 hours ago
This information is incorrect only because they’ve only been monitoring my blog for two months in which I’ve been quite busy. It’s likely that in the future the number of posts per month and total number of posts will increase. Still, there’s no easy way for them to get this information from a “plain old” rss file. They’d have to look at my sitemap, or gosh, even manually crawl the page.
The second useful feature AideRSS provides is a list of your posts and the conversations around them. For example, that my post about a tank riot got 22 mentions on DIGG. It also counts comments and uses them to compute a combined “PostRank” which they graph for you over time. My postrank over time 
is also shown as a sparkline graph, and a pretty cool one at that!
Finally, the give your readers the option to subscribe to your good posts rather than just your plain old feed, thus reducing the noise readers have to deal with to get good news. Here are the feed URLs for my blog, courtesy of their widget:
As you can see, I’ve replaced the large Yahoo advertisement in my sidebar with the AideRSS feeds for you to follow. All in all I like the idea of it, but there are still some issues that it has. It will definitely have trouble scaling, with 100,000 feeds added already. It takes a while to pick up your updates. Also, it creates a multiplicity of feeds so that tracking subscribers becomes impossible. Obviously, the only clear way for AideRSS to really succeed in the long run is to build something great enough that Feedburner feels compelled to buy them out and merge their services. Otherwise, AideRSS will create more confusion in the world of RSS than it claims to solve.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 12:09 pm and is tagged with grunt work, intelligent assistant, basic statistics, digg, cool one, yaho, widget, recent updates, good stuff, riot, graph, conversations, mentions, urls, landscape, tank, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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