Feedster: the Friendster of Blog Search?

Well, I guess I’m betting against both you and Jeremy on this one. Who’s the bookie?

Clay Loveless
Senior Software Engineer
Feedster.com

I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball myself, and I wasn’t a huge fan of Feedster even when the Scotts were there, but the tasteless and tacky way that Chris Redlitz has publicly denigrated founder J Scott’s work has left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.

While tossing the founders overboard from the lifeboat is often part of companies’ growth, it isn’t always a successful move, and stopping to cannibalism and eating the founder in public never is.

for stopping, read stooping

Ug… I’ve decided not to blog about Feedster anymore…

If you can’t say anything nice…

Seems like if you have a company which matches the regexp

f.*e.*ster you’re going to have trouble.

You’ve been warned frellster

Kevin

Hi Michael, Clay, Kevin, Tim,

Dang. Good crowd here. Cool. Anyway I officially responded here:
http://fuzzyblog.com/archives/.....echcrunch/

Thank you for the endorsement. That means a lot to me.

Clay — adam kalsey called you on IM Clay … “writes some of the best PHP code I’ve ever seen”. Wow. Awesome. Congrats. Glad you got the site up (I’m guessing it was you).

Tim — thank you for the support. Tremendously appreciated. I feel similarly but Feedster has the right to do whatever they want and Chris Redlitz remains one of the best sales guys I was ever lucky enough to hire.

Kevin — that’s probably best. Although you made me laugh like hell this morning on this topic.

Scott

I’m betting heavily against your off-the-wall comparisons as well. Friendster raised too much funding at too high a valuation relative to their revenue potential. You just compared Friendster to the only blog search startup that hasn’t fallen into that trap.

All your Alexa graph shows is how much more business Feedster generates per web page served than its competition. As ScottJ notes, Chris is a sales machine, not a hypester. What it lacks in press releases and slashdotting, Feedster more than makes up for in contracts and invoices.

Here’s my take on this…

Tech blogging has begun on many levels to degenerate into an enormous gossip-fest of opinions and innuendo. Everybody not only has an opinion…but everyone is suddenly an expert on everything. Don’t bother calling me…or emailing…or asking for a comment…just go ahead and print whatever you feel like.

While the Zawodny post got a TON of coverage…only a handful of people commented that it was suspicious that those comments came from an employee of one of our competitors (with billions in assets), who works in search. Nope…no story there. No story that when I do a search on Yahoo for RSS search…they don’t come up at all…but there we are. No story that of many of the Web 2.0 companies out there…we actually have revenue. No story to the fact that while most companies are interested in zeitgeist, we are interested in building a business.

So let’s take a look at your Alexis graph up there as if it actually means anything. Wow…looks like Technorati is kicking our butts…while our traffic is steady but with very little growth. Folks…let’s talk about traffic. Two ways that people use our site include…searching…and subscribing. We don’t run an aggregator. We don’t make you come back to our site again and again…and yet we process a startling amount of searches each day. How is that possible?

Those searches are people who have subscribed to our search results and are pulling those results directly to their newsreaders. So guess what…they don’t show up on an Alexis graph. Yep…that’s right…people who may never come back to our site use us EVERY SINGLE DAY to deliver search results.

As for too high of a mountain to climb…if you go by Alexa…yeah. But if you look from where I stand, the summit isn’t that far off.

This topic is old and boring…it makes for sensational reading and gets some juice…but that’s all it is good for.

Kosmix is an interesting idea, but I think their politics search engine is missing something important: It’s apparently not time-sensitive. For example, a search for “cartoons” gives a bunch of political cartoon websites. Whereas, right now, I would expect a result related to information about the Danish newspaper’s cartoons to be much more relevant.

Gah, scrolled up a little too far, that comment was meant for the DEMO post.

I’ve written a lot of positive stuff on Feedster in the past (easily found on the techcrunch index above left).

I agree that a lot of the action on feedster is off-site and on RSS. That doesn’t change my opinion. Like Friendster, I believe Feedster is among the walking dead. I’m not saying they won’t have a liquidity event (Feedster has value), but I am saying that it can’t win.

If we’re talking about ‘winning’, it’s tough when you look at it currently, because technorati keeps making progress, making their site a destination, and innovating.

However, remember that no one yet knows where this is all going. Both feedster and technorati, as websites, only appeal to a fairly hardcore demographic.

As services, it may end up depending on business adoption, and I don’t see anything in this post about business users, and the future of these types of services.

Feedster could very well evolve into something powerful but niche, but actually profitable… which no blog search is right now.

“Those searches are people who have subscribed to our search results and are pulling those results directly to their newsreaders. So guess what…they don’t show up on an Alexis graph. Yep…that’s right…people who may never come back to our site use us EVERY SINGLE DAY to deliver search results.”

Alan… Technorati has the same effect…

Kevin

Michael,
Let’s put the conversation back on a business footing. I have a couple questions per your comment #12.

The VC jargon “walking dead” has a very specific implication that might not be what you meant. The “walking dead” never enjoy a significant liquidity event.

More interestingly, what contest is it that you believe Feedster can’t win? Feedster certainly won’t beat Technorati at the game as DaveS has defined it, but do you find that to be an attractive game? I don’t. I think we’ve set up Feedster to play according to very different rules and definitions of strategic success. From what I know, it is largely uncontested in those areas.

ScottR

full disclosure: i’m an angel investor in Feedster, and i’m friends with both current and former employees.

caveat aside — there’s a BIG difference between the Friendster & Feedster stories.

to wit:

Friendster took 2 significant rounds of financing (well over $10M i believe), turned down a $30M acquisition offer from Google, held clear top dog position in a big market and managed to squander it away. They are now doing a recap and down round to salvage something, and 2 other players (MySpace, Facebook) are worth large sums having come way later.

Feedster has taken 1 (or 1.5) very modest rounds of financing (

Does anyone else think Sphere is crap? Sure, it is PRETTY but the results are really, really bad.

I know they have the hype working for them but I’m just not seeing what everyone is excited about (and yes, I’m on the beta).

They don’t have the reach or immeadiate indexing of Google Blog Search (or Technorati), nor do they have the relevence of things like the Topix or Findory search engines.

They don’t do URL tracking (as far as I can see), so you can’t see who is linking to you.

Their “related blogs” feature just doesn’t work. It simply returns blgos with the search term in the title in who-knows-what order. Look at the related blogs for the search “Google” for instance.

Blog profiles is nice gimmick, but thay is all.

Oh, and exactly how long has RSS subscriptions been “Coming Soon”?

I would like to help diffuse this conversation and extend the appropriate apologies for any perceived abrupt reaction. We have a passionate team and they are working very hard to improve our core assets and build our syndication business. I posted this on my blog after the update of the Feedster site was released:

http://newmediaspin.com/

Hopefully this will help delineate our business from others in a similar space. We are working on improving our messaging as it relates to our general business and our growing business units. We have several partner announcements that will be released in the next several months. Michael, I would be happy to give you some insight into some of the things we are building. It’s pretty exciting.

Chris Redlitz
President
Feedster Inc.

Chris, I look forward to it. Thank you for extending the invitation.

Scott Rafer - Let’s talk off blog.

Michael it seems that one flaw you have is to judge things by features rather then by core competencies and business acumen. By some standards (as Scott puts it, by DaveS standards, but really his are pretty in line with a certain slice of the personal publishing world) technorati have an insurmountable lead.

But by other metrics defined by relationships, core ability, and potential to actually MAKE MONEY, feedster has a lot of advantages.

To me, they are like Inktomi rather then Friendster. And, in my mind, Inktomi was a huge success.

Why can’t Feedster, Technorati or someone simply provide blog/feed search?

PWB — Both startups are of the opinion that the provide exactly that. What do you mean they should do instead?

Blogs are a big source of informations, that good for business