StartupCafe

I’m always amazed to see the number of people who still do not use a feed aggregator (also knows under other names). Those are usually people who have not tried one, or do not know what they are. Maybe we should call that the “Twitter Effect”, that being when there is a service available which has been proven successful (and sometimes useful), but still a majority of the population does not understand it. Or maybe it is what Geoffrey Moore already described as the Chasm.

Aggregators have been around for quite some time now, and we were even lucky to have one of the early adopters talk at the Edinburgh University Business School E-Club a few months ago: Mark Fletcher who founded Bloglines. I personally recommend Google Reader, not because it is Google, but because it simply does the job. All you need is to sign up using your Google account, and then start importing your RSS feed.

Ok – lets break that down a little more. Chances are that most of the websites you visit on a regular basis have a RSS or Atom feed. More often than not, you’ll find a small icon such as the one attached to this article. Simply click on it. It will either offer you to subscribe to that feed in your favourite aggregator (Google Reader), or will give you the address of the feed itself which you can import directly in Google Reader. Simple.

What the point? Well instead of having to go round all those sites you visit on a regular basis, typing their URLs, or digging for them in your favourites; all you need to do now is go to your Google Reader page, and all the new things published since your last visit will be there, in one single page. Another advantage is you don’t need to keep checking your favourite websites to see if there is something new, as the aggregator will do that for you.