The shifting Shyftr debate
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.
Recent Entries
- The Butterfly Effect and social media
- “There’s a complete disconnect between the two worlds”
- Blogging 2.0 and the microblogging/social media revolution
- She’s fantastic, made of plastic
- The post-election edition
- Charting a course in post-web 2.0 waters
- Twitter, politics (of change), and social media revolutions
- Google Reader’s “shared with note” + FriendFeed = whole new way to microblog
- Streamy is hott
- On social media “micro-apps,” Twitter, and business models
April 14th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Right on, Eric! See my comments at Blog Herald about this. Basically, Shyftr is still displaying my full feed items — their policy change didn’t affect my content one bit. That means they’re still getting a DMCA take-down notice. And I still consider them content thieves.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
We both used the term “smoke and mirrors,” great minds (or something), eh ? It’s very interesting that they’re holding firm on showing full feeds in “the reader,” as Louis Gray calls it.
April 14th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I still don’t get all the fuss. I have read all the comments all over the internet this weekend and you are still upset even though Shyftr has done right. I have my own issues with the site, but clearly they are not the same issues you have.
My guess is you probably have downloaded music files for free. You were probably all for the use of free trade on the internet. What about the blogs such as Engadget who use info from other blogs and still make money from advertisers. Why are you not upset with them?
I saw what Shyftr is doing and it seems to me that you are more jealous then upset. If you are publishing your blog to rss feeds, you are esentially allowing people to use it for free. If you don’t like where it is headed, then turn off the rss feeds on your blog!
April 14th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Hi Saul —
I do laud Shyftr for making strives toward protecting publisher rights; I’m simply saying that I’m still uncomfortable with what they’re doing even with those further changes made.
I’m not sure what illegal music downloads and “free trade” on the Internet has to do with this issue. And I hadn’t heard about Engadget “using info from other blogs” to make money — what’s that about?
I don’t think what when you offer an RSS feed that the publisher is “essentially allowing people to use it for free.” It’s a service that lets people pull the content of a site into an RSS reader.
The expectation is that this is a private or semi-private experience. Publishers can count the number of RSS subscribers they have and advertise to those readers if they wish (I don’t do this at the moment, by the way). This readership can be counted as a core subscriber base for a website.
Further, the expectation is that when readers of the RSS feed wish to comment on the story, that they will click back to the original source to do so, interacting with the publisher and other commenters.
Shyftr’s current model, even with the changes they’ve made, doesn’t go far enough in my view in allaying these concerns.
Others will surely disagree with this opinion but I reserve the right (still) to voice it on my own web publication.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:27 am
[…] The shifting Shyftr debate […]