Google acquisition of PostRank is a good news for RSSMicro and its FeedRank® offering. We briefly discussed about the PostRank in 2009 here. Although PostRank targeting social media such as Twitter and Facebook has become very valuable for Google but RSSMicro FeedRank® goes beyond social media analytics and has a far more reaching capabilities that targets the entire web.


Congrats to PostRank team.

RSSMicro feed submission service has been a phenomenon which has certainly exceeded our expectations. In recent weeks we have seen a growing demand for RSSMicro feed submission and FeedRank calculation. Below is a quick look at the feed submission stats on RSSMicro website for the week starting May 2 to May 9 2011:

Sources submitted to RSSMicro: 1470 unique sources.

Following top 30 sources account for 85.32% of all the submissions:


1....webs.com.................%8.08333
2....wikispaces.com...........%7.14327
3....wetpaint.com.............%6.85153
4....diigo.com................%6.17669
5....delicious.com............%5.55195
6....insanejournal.com........%5.02445
7....thoughts.com.............%4.72092
8....blog.com.................%4.21111
9....xanga.com................%3.62468
10...blurpalicious.com........%3.61289
11...ordpress.com.............%3.14139
12...gather.com...............%3.11192
13...livejournal.com..........%2.59326
14...bravejournal.com.........%2.53433
15...onsugar.com..............%2.46065
16...url.org..................%2.4135
17...wikidot.com..............%1.96263
18...blogspot.com.............%1.79466
19...hubpages.com.............%1.40566
20...links2rss.com............%1.25832
21...shutterfly.com...........%1.23474
22...oyax.com.................%1.10508
23...rankbuilder.com..........%1.10213
24...bukmark.net..............%0.8045
25...feedburner.com...........%0.78092
26...sosblog.com..............%0.7102
27...html2rss.com.............%0.5216
28...rssmix.com...............%0.49213
29...foxfire-security.com.....%0.46266
30...experienceproject.com....%0.4273
31...OTHER....................%14.68

Have a nice submission...


RSSMicro Team.

We published articles here before that talks about AJAX programming and the impact it has on search engines. AJAX allows applications on the web to provide a better and more interactive user experience; it does not require a user to refresh a page or follow a link to see more content, yet the content seamlessly become available by the actions user take on the site. This has a huge impact on the search engine. Although there are some controversial fixes the content seems mainly to remain inaccessible to the search engine crawlers.

Although AJAX adds interactive features to a site, it still follows the traditional response/request architecture of the web. For the content to become available an action by the user is required, this action such as a “mouse click” sends an HTTPRequest and receives an HTTPResponse from the server. In addition to the user action, continues polling or frequent and timely requests can make this possible but the technique is not efficient and consumes a lot of bandwidth and resource on the server.

To fix the problems with the application responsiveness and interactivity, HTML5 offers Server-Sent event and Worker Processes. The Server-Sent event has a profound effect on the web and changes the way we access information on the web. This truly makes the web upside-down with no request/response architecture to follow. To learn more about the HTML Server-Sent event click here. HTML5 Worker Process likewise employs user’s computer power instead of the consuming resources on the server to calculate complex mathematical operations or performs data analysis; the results of these processes would not be available to search engines too.

AJAX programming along HTML5 Server-Sent and Worker Process are search engines nightmares, as we noted before search engines have to use other ways to crawl and index content on the web, it will become increasingly more difficult for search engines to crawl next generation apps that are comprised of AJAX or HTML5 components.

Feed in its RSS or Atom format more likely to become the preferred method for site content distribution and increasingly being crawled by search engines to find new content on the web.


FeedRank Team

FeedRank^® is now a registered trademark by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), here is the trademark description that we are very excited about:

Providing online non-downloadable search engine computer software for search of XML-based feeds in the nature of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and ATOM feeds; Providing online non-downloadable computer software utilizing algorithms for ranking XML-based feeds in the nature of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and ATOM feeds, based on importance, relevance, quality, and update frequency.


For more information search USPTO website here:
http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp

Visit RSSMicro to calculate your site FeedRank^®
http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web

RSSMicro trending topics is a service that has been available to users since 2006. Here we compare RSSMicro trending topics to other providers in a little bit more details:

Google Trends, Twitter Trending Topics, Yahoo Buzz, and Bing xRank are popular sites that provide information on top search keywords and hot topics. Among those Twitter proved to be particularly significant in terms of providing trending topics in real-time.

Google Trends:
http://www.google.com/trends

Twitter Trending Topics:
http://search.twitter.com/

Yahoo Buzz:
http://buzz.yahoo.com/

Bing xRank:
http://www.bing.com/xrank/

Despite various data analysis performed on those sites, one major algorithm seems dominant and that is the fact that the basis of trending topics among all of them is their site users' activities including search traffic. The accuracy of such algorithm is tight to the rate and volume in which those search activities occur. Obviously the search volume on Twitter or Google is big enough to support accurate results.

A closer look at trending topics on Twitter and Google reveals one important aspect of their functionality, trending topics are provided as they occur and seems they make little interference in identifying those keywords. Below you will find some of the keywords exactly as they were found on Google Trends and Twitter Trending Topics websites:

Google Trends	Twitter Trending Topics
chicago bears 2010 schedule	Re-Tweet This If
i believe i can fly lyrics	Eleven
doorman strike nyc 2010	Woo-hoo
what is 420 day	RESPECT IS EARNED
gang starr guru dead	Google Escalates The
marvel vs capcom 3	AYOOOOO RT
dirty thunderstorm	Kylie
sly stone	Eeeh
Timothy mcveigh execution video	Parliament
april 19th in history	Apple Wants Its
high stakes poker season 6 episode 10	I Hate My Face

Thinking about trending keywords on Twitter, it is obvious those listed above (which appear very often on Twitter) do not have any particular meaning or point to any specific content or story. The algorithm behind Twitter Trending Topics in many cases is a total failure; those keywords may point to some specific content or stories on Twitter but are less likely to be applicable to the entire web as a real-time hot topic. They seem to be generated based on the way people interact with Twitter and consume its services. In fact, considering the volume of traffic and search on Twitter, those topics should represent a tiny portion of the content on Twitter. Surprisingly, our estimates show half of Twitter trending topics either are irrelevant or not representing a hot topic at all. For a social networking site like Twitter those results are disappointing and provide little useful information that could be applicable to the entire web.

Despite the lack of relevancy on Twitter Trending Topics, Google seems to provide better results; many trending topics provided by Google are in fact related to either popular stories or current events as they happen and most importantly the topics can be traced back to the web as a hot topic and not necessarily a hot topic that solely works on Google.

Looking closely into Google Trends and the way trending topics are generated, one thing is striking and that is when you realize the volume of the search on the site and how relevant these keywords are comparing to its size and traffic. The Google trending topics listed above are selected particularly to show how users can manipulate Google quickly so that it displays trending topics that are in fact very specific to a certain group of people. Google Trends like other trending topics providers are limited to how people interact with their services regardless of their size or traffic.

In fact, the big difference in trending topics between various providers shows the dependency of those site to their own users and how users interact differently from site to site. A trending system that does not rely on users activities but make calculations based on availability of the content generates more consistence results. RSSMicro Trending gives more priority to content publishers rather than users.

Also graphs on various trending topics on Google in most cases show a short life cycle, they pick up in popularity and die quickly, create a doubtful scenario in which question the reliability of the topic in the first place. RSSMicro trending topics have a longer life cycle, they may stay around for a while giving the user the notion that those topics in fact have a better and much reliable source backing them up.

The idea of decentralizing the web is the main focus of many new services that currently running on the web, they tend to stay longer and more likely to be implemented globally. Trending topics and keywords in real-time web is no exception they should have basis that applies to the entire web not a specific site or group of users. Trending topics on Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and Live are all  site specific, represent their users activities and how they consume, interact with, or use their services, while the focus of trending topics on RSSMicro has roots on the availability of the content in real-time and gives more priority to content publishers rather than users, generate more consistent results.

RSSMicro offers two different set of hot topics: trending topics and popular topics and they are identified using an algorithm developed by RSSMicro team. RSSMicro breaking news, which has basis in its trending topics, can identify topics that are growing in popularity not because of users activities but the fact that more relevant content is being available in real-time.

You can enjoy RSSMicro popular topics and trending topic on RSSMicro news or FeedCamp.com:

RSSMicro Trending Topics and News:
http://www.rssmicro.com/news.web

FeedCamp:
http://www.feedcamp.com

Last month some important news came out which were related to feeds, real-time web publishing and indexing. The first news was about a controversial patent that was awarded to Facebook for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network”. The patent is huge for many reasons, but most importantly signifies the role of feed as the preferred publishing method on social networks and once again shows how feed is turning into the very fabrics of the web and how businesses are rushing to have more footprints on this very fabric.

In terms of real-time data distribution, PubSubHubBub protocol is now more streamlined with Wordpress and Google itself and more likely others will join this frenzy by implementing PSHB hubs. It seems likely that this trend will change the web and how we publish and consume the data, and as far as apps running on the web, feed will play an increasingly important role for us.

And finally it seems likely that publishers, subscribers, apps, search engines will work more off of RSS and Atom feeds rather than HTML pages and our mission is more demanding and critical at the time while providing a mechanism for ranking RSS and Atom feeds.


Links:

Facebook News Feed Patent:
http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/02/facebook-feed-patent/

Wordpress PubSubHubBub Support:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

Google Real-Time Indexing:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_developing_real_time_index.php

FeedRank role in real-time search
It has been over 3 years since RSSMicro started to analyze the content published on RSS feeds, our primary goal was to identify top publishers and measure the quality of the content as well as their update frequency. The significance of working with RSS or Atom feeds is the access to the most fresh content on the web with some acceptable latency. Today the same concept is being adopted by Google and others to distribute real-time data on the web using RSS and Atom feeds available on content publishers.

RSSMicro quickly took advantage of PubSubHubBub and rssCloud protocols and merged the existing ranking system it developed over the years known as FeedRank with real-time data by implementing these two real-time protocols on millions of RSS and Atom feeds already in its index. The result was significant and promising, for the first time RSSMicro achieved a high level of relevancy on real-time data published on RSS feeds.

FeedRank which is the RSSMicro technology behind ranking RSS and Atom feeds is now taking real-time data to a new level offering a solution to the noisy and irrelevant content published in real-time.

Twitter and Real-Time Protocols
Twitter is known as the leader of the real-time search, it has real-time distribution deals with Google and Microsoft. So many other companies like OneRiot basically follow Twitter to create their own real-time search engines. Unlike others RSSMicro offers a global solution which does not only rely on one or two sources and instead follows the recent developments in real-time technologies and solutions first offered by Google. RSSMicro offers relevant and rich content along images and videos as they are being published in real-time. Currently identified many Twitter and FriendFeeds accounts, news publishers, blogs and many other sources on millions of RSS feeds which have been closely monitored over the years. In theory, any system which relies on real-time protocols should surpass Twitter in volume and FeedRank will be able to help to add relevancy and accuracy to the equation. The trend in which people implement these protocols is going up as we see this on WordPress and some other blog platforms and here we need to scale up the FeedRank processes so that we can follow the growth we anticipate in the near future.

Twitter: Real-Time Content vs Public Opinion
As we see the growing trend in using real-time data distribution technologies by many news publishers, blog platforms and businesses, one question remains unanswered and that is what would be the role of Twitter in maybe 2 or 3 years from now?

Twitter is a 140 characters messaging service which has limitation in posting images, videos, HTML content and more, it seems likely that if people stay loyal and use Twitter and enjoy tweeting about their status and some other stories that find interesting, Twitter will become the source of public opinions and trends on the web rather than real-time content unless it takes a sharp turn and re-defines its messaging and posting service and creates a full-featured content publishing tool, at that point it would be more like another blog or messaging platform that compete with other tools already available on the market. However the role of being the source of public opinions and trends will remain the greatest asset of Twitter as millions of loyal users tweet on regular basis about current events and stories.

Find featured RSS feeds on RSSMicro here:
http://www.rssmicro.com/featured_rss_feeds.web

FeedRank on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/FeedRank

About FeedRank:
http://www.rssmicro.com/FeedRank.web


FeedRank Team.

One of my friends pointed out to the recent news from OneRiot, saying that their business is gaining ground and that they are becoming a big player in real-time search market, here is the original news on TechCrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/oneriots-new-realtime-search-api-served-up-with-a-side-of-revenue/

Here are some thoughts on this story:

It may seem strange to some people but I do not see any momentum on the OneRiot side, 97% of their search (momentum) coming from API, and here is the problem: free API search alone is not a good indication of a healthy business model, OneRiot is making high volume free API search calls as the last resort because:

• Consumers don't see much value to their search comparing to Twitter search results.
  

• OneRiot traffic for the past 6 months is downward, despite a good coverage by TechCrunch and venture funding.

• Lack of innovation, sticking to very limited sources, I am assuming 90% are Tweets, 8% are Diggs, 2% other posts, no real-time protocols available for Twitter and many more...
  

• Businesses use free API when they see lack of consumer demand for their product in an attempt to win some traffic and some market share. OneRiot lack of consumer demand shows that they are basically an unsuccessful business model using the last shot in an attempt to make their product appealing to some market leaders. A successful business first creates a unique and competitive product, builds solid consumer demand on top of it and as the demand goes up and to address the exponential growth creates the API for the partners not VISE VERSA.
  

OneRiot is mostly a duplicate work of Twitter trying to pretend a large/important real-time player ready to be bought. Frankly, I do not see OneRiot (as its current state) to be a real-time search engine. Their real-time search functionality is Twitter based without any chance to expose recent developments in real-time search technology simply because Twitter doesn't support PubSubHubBub or rssCloud protocols. Despite all that RSSMicro is a working example of recent developments in real-time search first introduced by Google and other marker leaders using PubSubHubBub and rssCloud, RSSMicro opens completely new possibilities to a decentralized real-time search, showcasing relevancy and accuracy of the search results by using its proprietary FeedRank algorithm.


Cheers!

All RSSMicro internal feeds are PubSubHubBub enabled, subscribers can take advantage of RSSMicro hub and receive RSSMicro feed updates in real-time. Checking the server logs we have noticed a relatively new PubSubHubBub subscription service started at https://pshb-service.appspot.com/ we couldn't find any information on the web regarding the nature or the source of this new service, however we have all the reasons to believe that this is in fact Google subscription service to PubSubHubBub enabled feeds. The service has implemented HTTPS protocol using Hub.secret parameter for secure server to server connection.

RSSMicro hub has been able to verify all the secure subscription requests coming from the source and pushing content to the subscriber's address above.

I will update this post once I find more information about this particular subscriber.

Google announced a new feature on Google Reader, this time website owners without a feed can use Google to generate a feed for their sites. They can add the feed to the site and let users enjoy updates by subscribing to the feed. This work can be done in a couple of minutes.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/01/follow-changes-to-any-website.html

It is important to note that the significance of this work is not the reader ability to notify you with the site updates but is the ability to create a feed using Google infrastructure. The feed can be added to the site and being updated outside of Google reader. You can see a sample Google generated feed for a site without a feed here:

http://www.google.com/notificationservice/webchanges/webfeeds/1451785850960242912

This would expand FeedRank to potentially all content on the web. More and more content would be FeedRank enabled as feed become the standard mechanism for distributing site updates on the web. In other words, if someone wants to deal with updates on the web they better use a feed. This has a huge impact on the web as we know it.

For real-time search players this could also be a turning point, feed will have the most recent updates on any website and it is the best candidate for real-time search engines, there is no better mechanism that can support real-time data distribution while keeping the decentralized nature of the web.
 
This means more work for us to do here in RSSMicro, and if RSSMicro can show how FeedRank works on 4 Million feeds, it sure can do it for 400 Million feeds and more.


Cheers!