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Seven days into my experiment on Friendfeed, I have begun to see some results. Some are good, some are bad. This post is highlighting just one of the negative effects of the experiment. I recently visited rssmeme.com leaderboard, and was shocked to see I am number 4. The experiment has 48 Google Reader shared feeds. Since I am the administrator of the room, it ties all the feeds shared in the room to me. At the time of writing this post, rssmeme shows me as sharing 2172 stories. In actuality I share about 15-20 stories from Google Reader a day. In no way was I intending to “game the system.”
This got me thinking about the other 4 people on the leader-board. It took a combined 48 Google Reader feeds to put me on the board. What about the other 4? There is no way one person alone can share all those stories in a 24 hour period without some sort of assistance. So the question is, how are they doing it?
The rest of the data from the experiment will be detailed and published soon.
Mike Fruchter Friendfeed, Google Reader, rssmeme
I’m running a little ongoing experiment using the rooms feature on Friendfeed. Friendfeed recently added the ability to add RSS feeds into rooms. Being a big RSS and Google Reader junkie, I decided to start a room dedicated only to an individual’s Google Reader feed. I posted on Friendfeed asking for people’s Google Shared URL, there was close to 40 replies with feeds for the room. I created this room on Friendfeed and unloaded the 38 various Google Reader shared feeds.
The room has 38 members, or better yet editors. Thirty eight editors handpicking the best content that they deem worthy of sharing. Most of the editors share the same interests as myself, which in turn enhances the value of the feed for the individuals in this test group.
Here is some feedback on this experiment:
This is a pretty cool idea, a whole set of hand picked stories – and you can’t even directly tell who they are coming from, so no biased clicking. –
I’m adding this rooms feed to my Google Reader. Nice to meet you.-
With that being said, here are some of my thoughts on this early ongoing experiment:
Positives
- Excellent pool of feeds from some of the brightest minds & bloggers in the social media blogosphere.
- Approx 35 of the feeds are technology/social networking/media oriented.
- Has potential to be a replacement for Google Reader.
- Can be highly customized with feeds from select editors.
- The room has an RSS feed that can be added into any RSS reader.
- No need to subscribe to multiple websites feeds. Let the room editors do it for you.
Negatives
- Duplication of content
- Stories with a note, get imported into the room as a comment. On Friendfeed it shows me as the person who left the comment, not the actual person who noted it in their Google Reader.
This will only work with a large pool of Google Shared feeds. The pool has 38 feeds currently. Want to participate? Post your Google Shared URL on the comments on this blog, or on the Freindfeed thread.
Mike Fruchter Friendfeed, Google Reader, rss
