fav.or.it | fav.or.it is Dead, Long live favorit.

I remember when fav.or.it was just getting started, and thinking about the ways that it would make my life easier. I didn’t hear this until today, but it’s being shut down, and their efforts are going towards TweetMeme.

Particularly interesting are the reasons Nick Halstead (CEO) list for having not succeeded in their endeavor. I love learning from people’s successes and in this case, failures.

1) The commenting market shifted to what I call ’surface comments’ – these are comments that appear inside other networks, i.e. Facebook, Google Connect, Twitter, FriendFeed (to name just a few) and although some of these have open platforms from which to aggregate from, the problems of context and also a rapidly shifting market soon made it extremely difficult for a small team to continue to compete (for which whole companies have dedicated their resources to notably backtype + ubervue).

I’m not all that knowledgeable on the subject of handling comments across multiple platforms, but I do know that Backtype is awesome. I’m using it right now for the blog.

As a sidenote, what I believe to be much more interesting are the comments made privately. Private and exportable comments are what I feel like is missing. I guess you could email or IM or Direct Message a link to someone with some commentary, but it seems like there would be a better way to do it. And if you do share a link that way, a lot of metadata is lost.

And I love me some metadata.

2) RSS is DEAD – back in early 2008 I presented at thenextweb conference in Amsterdam, and said that RSS was dead for the mainstream market. It was clear to me that as a technology it worked, but that adoption was never going to go mainstream. We attempted with fav.or.it to remove the need to know what feeds you needed to read (you created ’slices’ of content), but it became clear this intention was ahead of it’s time but also poorly implemented, and I doff my hat to the people at lazyfeed for getting it right.

Maybe for the mainstream, “RSS” is dead. (And I hope he meant “feeds”, unless he’s saying that Atom is alive and well. Oh dear, I think I just played into the “correcting Internet geek” stereotype. [Cue Conan O'Brien adjusting his fake glasses]) But since I’m mainly focusing on the power feed users who know what’s going on with feeds in general, I think I have a better chance. This is also why I can get away with not caring about IE 6… and maybe even 7 or 8.

I do agree that feeds are dirty. The implementation is a hack. You know what else is a huge hack? The Internet. When did the ARPANET become a tool for commerce and entertainment? Okay, did I just stretch it a bit there? Ahem.

In any case, I personally use feeds nonstop, even in the midst of this world of Twitter/FriendFeed… uh… yeah, in the midst of the world of Twitter. As long as I’m designing an experience for people like me, I’m sure I’ll be okay.

3) The site has also not been without controversy for re-use of content (through public RSS feeds), and although we put massive effort into support of licensing models (such as auto-detection of creative commons) our approach to aggregation of content for which we could not detect a license, and that required the publisher to opt-out (rather than opt-in) was in hindsight misguided.

Was it for the money? I don’t know… but it’s a bit shady, in any case.I stopped tinkering with fav.or.it when the site became more of a public aggregator, which is why the news of their closing got to me a couple days after the fact. How could I become a supporter of your dream if you take some very interesting routes to becoming awesome?

What Have We Learned Here

It’s hard, starting a company. And knowing when to quit is probably harder. Well, easier in my case, because it’ll be when I run out of money and have to find a job.

Oh, to be young and foolish… maybe I’ll eat these words later.