TailRank is Looking Good
Michael Arrington
16 comments »
Kevin Burton’s TailRank is making real gains against blog-news innovator Memeorandum, which I wrote about here and here.
Memeorandum and TailRank are both trying to aggregate blog and other edge content in near-real time and group content by topics/events. The result is a “newspaper for the blogosphere” that delivers breaking news to readers far ahead of traditional news services, or even Google news (the downside is that conversation swarms can occur around ultimately baseless stories).
Compare TailRank’s original interface from a post back in September to what they have now. In addition to a more usable interface, Tailrank has also started to group blog “conversations”, where different bloggers talk about similar topics, in a way I have not seen anywhere except Memeorandum to date.
Memeorandum is still better at breaking news - A headline on Memeorandum may not appear on TailRank until a day or more later - but TailRank is still much younger than Memeorandum and could catch up. And new companies like Australia-based Tinfinger (still pre-launch and sans content) and Blogniscient (profile) are gunning for this space as well.
The core back end difference between the services is that Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, hand picked the original “seed” blogs with subsequent sources discovered by his system (guaranteeing quality but sacrificing breadth), whereas most of TailRank’s content comes directly from users who upload their favorite blogs in OPML format (the file format that most RSS readers like Bloglines and Rojo use to store feeds). The additional breadth of coverage offered by TailRank may be the cause of its lag behind Memeorandum in breaking news.
In addition to breaking news, Memeorandum also manages to put more information on its homepage without looking as cluttered as TailRank. Maybe a re-design, or at least a new color scheme, is in order for TailRank.
Yep, agreed. I really like what Kevin’s done since the first incarnation, and the latest version of Tailrank begins to show what OPML can look and act like outside the sterile confines of a newsreader.
Kevin’s a smart guy and I expect the improvements to only get better as time goes on. Now you can say “Show me some tail” without feeling dirty about it.
Tailrank has improved significantly. A lesson to people in web 2.0: if you have a product, with limited resources, in a crowded space: keep an open and honest blog about your attempts and the industry you’re in. Kevin’s feedblog has kept me interested in a project that normally I would have overlooked.
Thanks for the feedback guys. If you think the UI is cluttered please let me know how you think it could be simplified. I’m all ears. And really quick at incorporating feedback.
WRT time to meme discovery we’re working on a robot update which should hit in another week. This should allow for deeper breadth and granularity in our recommendations.
Our current goal has been to push for a 1.0 release at the end of January so there should be some killer features landing real soon now :)..
One in particular will blow your doors off (well I think) but I just have to do a little more tuning to get the performance there. Right now it’s really fast but I want it to scale a little more.
Also take a look at our new editorial control feature. I’m hoping to push the code for this tomorrow morning so if any of you guys would like to be an editor just send me an email.
Kevin
I posted on it yesterday too, but I’m surprised you haven’t covered News Bump yet in this space. With the possible exception of memorandum, I think it’s got the cleanest interface and the content so far has been really interesting IMHO.
BigPig - I don’t think I’ve seen NewsBump before now. At first glance (10 seconds on the page) it looks like it has a digg-like interface. Is there any clustering of conversations? What I really like is to see are related discussions across different blogs.
Do you really think Memeorandum has a clean interface? It’s terrible!
That was quick!
I agree it does seem similar to Digg, although more politics than tech. Generally I surf for content rather than gimmicks (such as Digging it) though, so I can forgive it that. I’ve only been going there for about a week, but every day the content is excellent for someone interested in current affairs like me.
If they keep it up (which judging by Digg lately which seems to have been taken over by 12 year olds they may not), I think it’s going to become a very popular site. Web 2.0 is just like Web 1.0 IMHO - it will be driven by quality content.
As for memorandum - I think the interface is the best of all the news aggregators so far (except maybe NewsBump). It’s simple and not too cluttered (although a bit ugly). Tailrank and Gather are too visually confusing.
Could you elaborate on ‘visually confusing’ please?
Kevin
On tail rank I assume. I think there’s just too much “stuff” on one page. Information overload if you like. And it all seems jammed up together.
Sorry to criticise. It’s a very nice site, but I prefer the layout on NewsBump and memorandum. I just tells me what I need to know and there’s nothing else hovering around to distract me.
This is obviously just a personal opinion. Other people may love having a whole bunch of different data thrown at them from every angle.
Yeah, I’d like more specifics too.
As for meme, it has certainly grown on me, but I think that is despite its interface, not because of it. I agree, good content wins. I just wonder how many people have visited memeorandum, taken one look at the logo and bolted for good.
Full disclaimer - Gabe, the founder of meme, is staying at my house right now and I’m partially ripping on it just to gets his anxiety up.
“Yeah, I’d like more specifics too”
You mean in addition to what I just wrote?
“Gabe, the founder of meme, is staying at my house right now and I’m partially ripping on it just to gets his anxiety up”
Tell him from me his site is great. I came across it about 2 months ago and I go there at least 3 times a day. I’m curious what he thinks of News Bump actually, as meme and NB are my two main aggregators at the moment although I think the latter is newer.
I should get my company to send him a bill for all the time I spend on it.
BP - disregard the “specifics” query. Our comments crossed.
This is a ‘Hey! Me too! Me too!’ comment: why not check out http://chuquet.com - it’s a reverse attention aggregator/metafilter site which presents clusters of articles around a specific link.
It updates several times a day; again not as often as memeorandum. But then we don’t have a lot of servers. Yet.
It’s based on thousands of feeds rather than tens of thousands, and trashy feeds don’t live for long in the database before being automatically dropped. However, the feed base is gradually increasing as more quality feeds appear.
Users can submit their own feeds to be included in chuquet, but they are also subject to the internal quality processing.
Kevin, AFAICT the problem with the TailRank UI is the sidebar. As soon as I enter
.sidebox { display: none; }
everything becomes insanely clear.
Perhaps just a narrower sidebox and more whitespace between the sidebox and the main content would help.
Also, the ads are positioned in such a way that they actually obscure the functionality of the site. I realise that the ads drive your revenue, but what are the most important things you want the user to see?
Also, “Hot tags” - important? Folksonomy heatmaps are the new mullets, right?
“Recently tagged by members” - important?
Just ideas
Mike & TC readers,
I’ve been searching hard for data in growth of popular subscriber services. Something that had a graph that showed growth in members/subscribers over time for social/community services like Flickr, del.icio.us, memeorandum, etc. Even some general data points like N members over M months would be great. I posted this here because I think lots of folks are hungry for this data like me.
Thanks Mike.