FLOWERING OF FLOWS
Regular readers know that I've been an avid Techmeme reader and fan from it's inception. Thus it was interesting to see Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera unveiling the Techmeme Leaderboard, which ranks the various technology blogs and websites, whose posts make it onto Techmeme every day (see Techmeme discussion).
Unlike traditional website rankings, this one is a lot more fluid. It's likely as fluid as the headlines that ebb and flow off Techmeme's front page everyday.
But seeing the sites listed in a "Top 100" list emphasized an important usability point that many of us may realize intuitively, but may not have fully registered.
I have had 95% of the Techmeme's Leaderboard list already represented in my bookmarks for some time, along with several blog feed readers that I subscribe to, including Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. And most of them have been there for a very long time.
In addition, I probably frequent every one of those sites at least once a week.
But over the last couple of years, since Techmeme started to do it's thing, I've consumed the content off most of these sites via Techmeme, rather than religiously going through my bookmarks and blog reader lists.
It's more my daily mini-feed than my Facebook mini-feed. The latter was the feature that caused Facebook adoption explode amongst non-college, mainstream users since last fall. (On a somewhat related note, see the Techmeme discussion on startup activity around "mini-feeds", catalyzed by this New York Times article on mini-feed startup FriendFeed).
For most Techmeme fans, this is re-stating the obvious, but it highlights how our consumption of web content is likely to be influenced by services like Techmeme going forward rather than services that allow us to subscribe to things en masse.
Of course, for someone who spent several decades on Wall Street, mini-feeds are nothing new (aka "river of news", as long evangelized by Dave Winer of Scripting News).
Professionals on Wall Street daily consume dozens of mini-feeds relevant to them on a handful of monitors. Mini-feeds around specialized content and tools made Bloomberg Bloomberg.
Services like Techmeme, Facebook, Twitter and Pownce are just bringing these mini-feeds to the mainstream masses, on multiple devices, fueled by advertising rather than subscription revenues.
Starting thinking mini-feeds for a lot of media we consume traditionally like newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and cable, and you start getting the idea.
This whole mini-feed thing has barely just begun.
And no, Facebook doesn't have it all sown up...yet.
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