The services we talk about today are from a category called social reading. This is not a formal name yet, as sometimes they are also branded as RSS reader, blog search engine, blog community, etc. Like David Weinberger noted in 2004, we can briefly define it as a niche market between RSS reader and mainstream news sites.
It makes sense for RSS readers to become more social and let users to recommend articles to each other. Google Reader hasn’t such features yet, but the request was already in the wild. The popular Chinese RSS reader Zhuaxia provides social feature from its beginning. Recently they rolled out a startpage like service to aggregate hot posts in various topics. Some Zhuaxia reader admits popular post is the main reason to use the service. Huolat, we introduced back in last year as an RSS reader, also puts more emphasis on its social part. Blog search engine Souyo rolled out a new RSS reader by the end of last year.
Some products are designed specifically for this market. They are weak in feeds reading, but strong as a filter. Douban 9 is the best among such kind of services. It’s also the only one that I am really using. FunP is a Taiwan based startup. Besides slick design, its potential global expansion worth to watch out, as its local market is too small. Other players in this field include Yimudi, Blop, 365bloglink and Bolaa.
Douban 9
Douban 9 is released as a new beta service in the last day of January. We also covered it when it expanded into blog reading market last year and its continuous improving of the service.
Today it has about 100k daily page views. Compared with 50k daily page views when it launched, the traffic is doubled in about four months. Alexa shows Douban 9 contributes 6% of the traffic to Douban, while their internal measure shows it actually is less than that number.
Everyday there’re 13k unique IP addresses are visiting the service, half of which are registered users. About 7% regular Douban users visited Douban 9 in the last week.
The service now includes about 80k blogs. Everyday the number grows with 200-300. There’re about 4000 blogs have the chance to be promoted in one of the channels. This is based on users’ reading and subscription. The number is still growing.
To give you a sense of how Douban 9 is contributing to the long tail of the blog reading market. Everyday there’re 600-800 blogs are subscribed by users. During the last month, 12k blogs are subscribed in total.
Three features greatly promoted the traffic of the service: 1) Statistics for bloggers to check reading and voting of their articles and blog widget showing who subscribed your blog; 2) User profile page, which shows your favorite posts and recommendation from the system; 3) Aggregation of voting from your friends.
From these data, I can tell Douban 9 is growing quite healthily. I have the confidence to be a happy user continually. It also worth noting that the UI of the service is also greatly improved. I like the feature to show full articles almost everywhere.
FunP
Taiwan based FunP is formally launched in March. It’s a Netvibes plus Digg sort of thing. The homepage is highly customizable. You can add RSS feeds as well as lots of available mashup modules of other popular services like Flickr.
The main area of the homepage shows hot articles from different channels in tabs. You can vote, add as favorite, and discuss right in the services.
You can not only vote blog posts from your subscriptions, but also submit individual articles, just like Digg. There’s an archive for all hot articles.
Several days ago, they rolled out bunch of tools such as blog subscription button, individual article submitting button, widgets showing awareness of your own blog and other popular posts from the community.
Also read Mr6’s more detailed introduction of FunP. You can find a slides they used when they launched on Happyweb, regular web2.0 event in Taiwan, in March.
collaborative filtering,
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