Courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Blog I found out about a site called Shyfter today. And evidently this has been making some waves as it works as a feedreader but also as a community so you essentially do all your interaction with the feed in one place.
As to the service itself… I can’t comment to thouroughly, it froze up a number of times and I couldn’t see any way to import an OPML file (no way I was going to manually copy and paste 200+ feeds!) It is in beta, however - so keep that in mind if you care to play with it. The interface does seem nice, and smooth but I want my RSS “ToGo” which means NewsGator or GoogleReader as far as I’m concerned - so it’s not a viable option for me regardless.
So, that being said… the issue is essentially that it takes the communal part of blogs and puts it on their site. Now from one perspective, this is very handy for the end user as it keeps them from bouncing around and in some ways probably will help create a broader, interactive community. From another perspective it keeps visitors from ever actually visiting a bloggers website - essentially turning bloggers into content generators with no further control or interest (economic or otherwise) in the content they produce. This also means that Shyfter gets to profit from their work.
The Chronicle asks how this is different from something like Slashdot, but Slashdot is, essentially, a blog! It creates content and doesn’t just siphon it. What Shyfter is doing is essentially the same thing feed-stealers (though in a much grander way!) do - they copy your content, put it on their site, and get to benefit from your content without benefiting you! The difference is that “all” content ends up there, so again… for the consumer it’s a pretty nice deal.
What do I think? I’m not sure. I want to see interaction and activity on my site (helps one feel you’re not working in a vacuum) but I’m also very pro “big community.” We’ll just have to see what happens.
You can register with Shyfter for free.
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