January 21, 2008

Popular Shared Items in Google Reader

The idea of aggregating the posts shared by Google Reader users to create a memetracker somewhere between TechMeme and Digg is not new. Mario Romero created a Facebook app called Feedheads that shows the most popular items shared by your friends, your groups and by all those who use the application.

ReadBurner doesn't focus on aggregating shared items from your friends and it's not restricted to Facebook: the application gets data from any shared items page. "In order to filter out the best stuff ReadBurner counts whenever an item is shared by multiple persons. Since Google Reader users can generally be described as very tech-aware, I think that over time lots of good stuff can come out of ReadBurner," explains the author of this project, Alexander Marktl. For now, most of the popular items are related to technology and a post can get at the top of the list if 20-30 people share it.


Louis Gray, who found this site in the referrer logs, thinks "there is a market for people looking for most popular shared items, and finding new people sharing what they read on Google Reader." It's not clear why Google Reader doesn't experiment with this idea, at least by de-duplicating the reading list and showing only once the posts shared by more people.
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6 comments:

  1. UnknownJanuary 21, 2008 at 4:24 AM

    I think a rating of posts would be more interesting than just the number of referrals. This way could easily filter out the feeds with the highest median post ratings. Aide RSS has begun with something like this, although they create new filtered feeds. http://www.aiderss.com/

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  2. TOMHTMLJanuary 21, 2008 at 4:37 AM

    There is better than that website : Shared reader

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  3. Alex ChituJanuary 21, 2008 at 4:47 AM

    @kh:
    AideRSS doesn't use ratings, it uses signals like the number of comments, how many times a post was bookmarked at del.icio.us, the number of backlinks as seen on Technorati etc.

    @Tom:
    It's just a blank page.

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  4. louisgrayJanuary 21, 2008 at 7:30 AM

    @Tom: Shared Reader has been down for a few days now. ReadBurner not only launched first, but has been consistently updating its features and interface.

    ... We found that one too...

    Aide RSS is interesting, but it's individual blog focused, not in aggregate.

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  5. Dennes B AbingJanuary 22, 2008 at 6:57 AM

    SharedReader is back online... :)

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  6. BenjaminFebruary 9, 2008 at 4:56 AM

    Consider RSSmeme. It takes ReadBurner and adds:

    Tags (pages/feeds), Author (pages/feeds), Source (pages/feeds), Search (pages and yes, searches have feeds too!).

    It also finds similar items...so similar users are users who have recently shared the same stories. Similar stories are stories that have recently been shared by the same users.

    Lastly; there is no submission page. It crawls the web looking for new accounts to add.

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