Louis Gray: “Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme”
I’m a little under the weather (southern California turned our version of “freezing cold” over the weekend, who knew?) so just want to quickly point out a fantastic bit within an interesting piece by Louis Gray titled My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close.
I’ve been ruminating lately over the brilliant possibilities of Google Reader, particularly in connection with its “shared + note” feature and its integration with services like FriendFeed. Feedback has been great and it’s very high on my list to check out Feedly, “a more social and magazine-like start page,” as a result.
Therefore, I was taken with Louis’ first prediction from 2008. Even though he claims he was “wrong” in his prediction, I see fascinating possibilities in the following:
I expected that Google would start to tabulate its shared items and most popular feeds via Google Reader, and that using this data, Google could provide a democratic version of Techmeme, or at least pull Feedheads outside of Facebook. Instead of Google doing this however, it was ReadBurner, followed by RSSMeme and others, including Feedheads, who started a site at www.feedheads.com. Later in the year, Google Blog Search did introduce the option to show hot topics in tech, but it’s largely been a stale effort. At this point, Techmeme is still more important than Google in this regard, and Google Reader has declined to show most popular feeds or shared items.
I had never considered aggregating the combined shared items on Google Reader across-the-board and doing something interesting with the data, like turning it into a Techmeme of sorts, as Louis posits. A “FriendFeed-meets-Techmeme” solution would be very intriguing realm to dive into, using “shared + note” threads as a way to seed conversations across clusters of popular stories in real time.
In a sense, FriendFeed does manage to capture some of this activity now by seeding threads, but “forces” by nature of its service “new voting” on the FriendFeed side. Looks like I’m still very much enamored of the potential for further Google Reader and FriendFeed integration!
