Techmeme Adds Firehose Feeds
Duncan Riley
10 comments »
The last time I was in the Valley I spent a decent 90 minutes catching up with Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on Michael’s lounge (sorry, couch). As I do every time I catch up with Gabe, I endeavored to get him to spill the secrets of Techmeme’s algorithm, then shortly there after I offered him money to license the script (having failed on three previous attempts to get someone on Scriptlance to design me a clone). As usual I failed on both accounts, but there was a third request and Gabe was listening.
Like many I’m addicted to Techmeme and more recently Twitter, and to date Techmeme + Twitter hasn’t met my expectations. Techmeme’s feed, which is then fed into Twitter, only offers “important” stories, and hence the only way to see breaking stories on Techmeme has been to visit the page itself and constantly refresh it. As of today, Gabe is now offering “Firehose” feeds that provide any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which excludes “Discussion” links) within 5 minutes, either by RSS and/ or Twitter. RSS feed here and Twitter account here.
The down side is that the page view number for Techmeme is about to take a hit, but conversely Techmeme fans will welcome this additional functionality. Thanks Gabe.
that’s a clever move, I wonder if in the long run it wouldn’t hurt techmeme page views. Gabe still have to watch out : competition is growing out there. Another way of finding news : http://www.myaboo.com .
I understand that bringing new features is great for faithfull users, but if it doesn’t bring new users and reduces pageviews (which I think are a basic rev model for services like techmeme) it can mean lower overall revenue. This in turn may spell trouble for all users, if the service doesn’t have money to innovate any further.
It is a constant problem for developer, especially in AJAX driven pages, the tradeoff between usability and revenue. I wonder if anyone has a clever solution to that already.
It’s true that there is mounting competition, but Techmeme still has an algorithm that stands out from the crowd…
It’s also important to note that the feeds do not have the ‘discussion’ links; a large part of why I use techmeme.com
I added the twitter account and also I decided to go crazy and activate SMS notifications, which would translate to over 100 messages per day…. I doubt that I can survive one day with this.
Being a news junkie has its limits after all
For what its worth, when I created the TechWatching RSS feed back in December, I called it “the Firehose” due to the fact that it includes every article that makes it onto the page.
Its still called the firehose, actually - check it out:
http://techwatching.com/rss.php
I’m glad to see that I’ve got a good eye for names!
If more than a few people sign up, this will absolutely kill twitter.
Twitter: killed by love. RIP.
Hi Duncan. I tried the firehose version in Twitter, and found it’s too much. I want something between the slow version and the firehose version. I also subscribed to the FH feed in my aggregator, haven’t formed an opinion about that yet.
Techmeme has been my go to source of information since I heard about it, but having constant twitter updates is probably too much. We’ll see how many people take advantage of the service.
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