Next week Feedster, a popular blog and RSS feeds search engine/aggregator, will unveil a new UI and its first real revenue model, CEO Scott Rafer told Micro Persuasion. The site will also enable consumers to subscribe to RSS feeds via email and bloggers to "claim" their URLs, much like they do on Technorati. More details follow in this exclusive bloggerside chat with Rafer.
MP: What are the key new features you are adding for users who read feeds on Feedster and MyFeedster? What advantages do these offer over other aggregators like Bloglines and software like FeedDemon? When are these launching?
RAFER: Feedster has been spreading quickly beyond our original hard-core blogger crowd into a broader audience. This release aims to strike that tricky balance between early adopter and mass audience. Long-time Feedster users need the flexibility and RSS tools that Scott Johnson and Francois have been providing for a year, and the newer users need a cleaner interface with fewer odd little orange and blue icons with intimidating XML pages behind them. We've gone to a search returns UI that looks more like what the larger search engines use with a few enhancements. The most obvious is the per-feed icon. Our index is now a healthy mix of blogs and traditional journalism. We're doing what we can to make it very quick and obvious which is which for the users who care and to give bloggers an ability to visually brand their postings on our return pages. The example we've been showing people is posted here.
I'm going to hold my comments on MyFeedster for the moment. The updated version of MyFeedster will go live a few weeks later than the main search engine update, which is scheduled for next week (not Monday).
MP: Feedster has always had great RSS/email alerting capabilities. But now it looks like you're adding to them by giving users the ability to subscribe to entire feeds by email. What can you share?
RAFER: Thank you. Feedster is the first site where many users who are new to RSS, online news syndication, and blogging see the incredible depth of information being created. We think that its critical that they have a quick, consistent way of receiving content updates in whatever form they prefer from whatever feed, group of feeds (i.e. reading list), or Feedster Search Feed they prefer. Of course, we restrict ourselves to sending out the excerpt and permalink as defined by the publisher of the original feed.
MP: It appears you are adding new features for bloggers - such as link tracking, claimed feeds, table of contents, blog searching backlogs and more. What can you tell us about these and when will they be live?
RAFER: "Claim your feed" is new and is the way that feed publishers can control the metadata we store on their feed including the icon I mention above. It works in a way similar to "Blog for Kerry or Bush or ABB or ..." that we put together on politics.feedster.com last winter. Most of the other features aren't new, just refined and presented in a clearer way. They are all tied into MyFeedster accounts from now on and are on the schedule to be released/updated with MyFeedster in a few weeks.
MP: What can you tell us about the Feedster API?
RAFER: All I'm qualified to say on the Feedster API is that we need to formalize it so that developers have a clearer and more predictable way to pull information from our engine. Scott Johnson will go into it further when we've got something concrete to show. It's on the schedule for September 1, 2004, release and will be call-compliant with the API of a "much larger player."
MP: Feedster's performance has been sluggish lately. You told me you just completed a significant hardware upgrade. What exactly have you done to improve performance and when/how will this be clear to users?
RAFER: "Completed" sounds like heaven, but I'm not sure any of us Feedsterites have behaved well enough to be let in to that particular venue. We are at the tail-end of moving from one colo to another and putting in a new server architecture that scales to millions of users a month. Once we're done, the user experience will be dramatically improved. By the time we release the new search UI next week, the speed will be noticeably better. There are software improvements and hardware additions planned for each month to keep getting better.
MP: How does Feedster make money and how do these new services help you drive revenue?
RAFER: Feedster's first real revenue mechanism launches with the new UI next week. We're a search engine and will be posting paid-search ads from one of the big networks. They will be clearly marked as "Sponsored Links." We're avoiding Paid Inclusion as you would expect. Paid-search ads will be our main revenue for the near future. Revenue streams #2 and #3 will show up in August and September. In none of the three cases are Feedster users being asked to pay a subscription for services. We can't guarantee that we'll never introduce subscription premiums but we're working hard to keep our services free to individual users. We hope that our audience will support Feedster by reading and responding to interesting ads and offers.
MP: Newsgator just received a round of financing. How might this bode for Feedster?
RAFER: We certainly plan to raise venture capital ourselves and grow Feedster as quickly as user demand grows. To date, we have angel funding from a half-dozen very experienced startup execs which we are using to make infrastructure improvements. There are about 5 RSS-related deals VC-funded at this point, so we are one of the few high-profile startups in this area that has not yet solicited significant funding.
MP: Anything else you would like to share with my readers (press, PR types and bloggers)?
RAFER: Feedster is on the AlwaysOn Top 100 list that was announced this week. The list showcases the top innovative private companies that demonstrate market traction and the ability to disrupt existing markets.
