Richard MacManus: “Perhaps Google should take a leaf from Yahoo and Microsoft’s book and start immersing itself in RSS, instead of trying to harness it.”

John Battelle wrote a great post yesterday comparing the rise and fall of Microsoft in the late nineties to Google today. Dave Winer responds, saying the more appropriate comparison is to Netscape. He goes on to suggest that Google think harder about its long term role in the search world:

I think Google misunderstands that their platform is advertising, that’s a temporary transitional thing, the real platform is (doh) Search.

Dave is so dead on correct here. Google has to open up their search API or, in the long run, someone else will. The internet is the ultimate destroyer of the tragedy of the commons - and those who continue to remove friction are the only ones that can possibly win.

And I also note this: While Google seems to struggle finding its product direction, Yahoo (and increasingly Microsoft) continues to roll out success after success. Yahoo is now my default map and email service (and they weren’t last month). And there is a good chance Yahoo will also become my default RSS reader.

Discussion is evolving on Memeorandum.

Tom Raftery interviewed me last week about TechCrunch and posted it today on his excellent blog. It’s worth a listen just to hear Tom’s cool accent (he’s Irish).

Thanks Tom!

J Wynia has done something interesting with our Web 2.0 Workgroup OPML file: He’s taken the individual feeds and is running feed posts through Yahoo’s search API to find the most interesting stuff. The end result is here. His overview of what he’s created is here:

So, what’s exactly going on? We’ll take an OPML file, load a snapshot of each feed’s current contents. Then, we’ll loop through each feed item and ask Yahoo how many pages link to it. For each feed, we’ll extract the one item that is most linked to (aka the equiv of Google’s pagerank for choosing the top page for a search). That “top” post will be put on our sampler page as the example of of the feed’s content. The sample page will then contain one item from each feed as well as some information about the feed itself.

I like seeing innovation like this, and since he is linking back to the original post I don’t personally (as a writer of some of the content that appears there) have any copyright issues with what he’s doing.

This is clearly not generating real time data on par with Memeorandum, though. The Yahoo API isn’t able to track links fast enough to understand what’s important just a few minutes after a post appears. But it is a good way to find interesting content that is a week or so old. If you don’t mind being that far behind the cutting edge, its cool.

I’ll be interested in seeing if there are other ways to bring this to more real time.

We’ve added J’s mashup to our web 2.0 workgroup page (link at end of first paragraph).

bmindful is a tagging site for affirmations (positive thoughts). It needs an RSS feed for each tag.

I love people’s enthusiasm, but what in the world are they doing putting their heart and soul into building sites like these? Maybe someone should build a platform to allow people to build tagging applications quickly and easily (and get it out of their system).

This list really hit home and is funny if you are familiar with all the web 2.0 companies out there. I actually do go through a sort of checklist in my head before I post at TechCrunch to make sure I’ve noticed all the features (”did I miss the RSS?”). And I’m a sucker for the landing page with nothing but a logo and an email box. Thanks, Robert.

Rojo has a great weekly summary of “most read stories”. If you are a Rojo user they email it (I get it 3x because I’ve tested them so many times and set up extra accounts), and they also put it on their blog. Good weekly summary. Here’s this week.