Online Media Cultist

I expressed some pretty strong concerns about Shyftr over the weekend, a site that (until Sunday, at least!) creates community around full text RSS feeds.

There are pretty strong opinions on both sides of the debate. One of the best counter-arguments to my stance came from Scott Karp, who believes strongly in “information disintermediation” (a let your comments go free and they will return to you kind of philosophy), and serving the user’s needs over the content publisher’s. However, Scott couches this argument in the belief that disintermediation works – comments on a story appearing on the likes of Digg, Friendfeed, and Shyftr – only if you can read those very comments collected in one place, back on the original site where the story was published.

I’d be happy to buy into this but unfortunately we’re not quite there yet. Therefore, I’d counter- (counter-?) argue that what Shyftr does is a disservice to both the content publisher and to users, who are still forced to follow the conversation through a byzantine network of aggregators and aggregators of aggregators.

Now, while we’re digesting this lets remember that Shyftr did just change the way its platform works… in part. Shyftr announced the following on Sunday: “We will only display the title, author, and date of an item where discussions occur outside of the reader. We deeply respect content publishers, and it is not our intention to cause unease.”

It took me some time to wrangle with what this change meant, and I’m still chewing my brain on it. But while I admire that Shyftr is trying to better respect the rights of publishers, I still feel that this is a little bit of a smoke-and-mirrors move.

In essence, it’s saying: you can still read the full text here (without having gotten permission from the publisher to republish the full text RSS feed on the Internet) and, what’s more, if you want to comment, follow us behind Door Number Two where you can comment away on a page where we don’t provide the full text of the story.

Beyond being an awkward user experience, I don’t see how this fundamentally changes my original arguments.

Louis Gray continues to defend Shyftr gamely, writing:

Unlike some have speculated, Shyftr is not on the dark side of the Web, a content scraper or a splogger (spam blogger). Instead, the service is trying to grow and find a niche where friends can share and comment on feeds, and over the last few months, I’ve grown to like the service and respect the individuals behind it, so I hope they can overcome this blip and work with the blogosphere.

I have to say that for where we are right now, Shyftr needs to stop publishing full text feeds. Doing that will place it back within a range where publisher rights are protected and user needs are being met.