When we started fav.or.it (Company and Website) we had a range of ideas that we thought would improve the way consumers read the latest news. This focused initially on aggregation of blogs and the unique (at the time) feature of blog comment aggregation. The business behind this was to bring together filtered content (from blogs) and deliver an engaging platform to brands. But with some sadness I am announcing that we have taken down fav.or.it and it will not be returning, the site will hence forth be used as our company website.
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
The site went through a number of iterations, from RSS Reader to the final news portal iteration in which we attempted to centralize news and commenting for the mainstream market. This failed for a number of reasons,
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).
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.
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.
TweetMeme
Although we continued to develop fav.or.it behind the scenes up until the end of February 2009 – the changes have never been deployed. The reason for this was that a very large chunk of technologies in aggregation, filtering and API’s all got moved over to a another project ‘TweetMeme‘ and in fact a lot of the ‘unseen’ developments in fav.or.it will only start to see the light of day in the coming months through TweetMeme.
TweetMeme became our focus for several reasons, firstly the trend towards status messages (micro-blogging) meant that access to real-time news was becoming a reality and that our aggregation + filtering technologies could be very quickly leveraged to take advantage of it. Secondly, our simple approach to delivering what websites desired in the form of a retweet button very quickly got traction (our thanks to Mashable for getting the ball rolling).
The team is now working 110% on keeping TweetMeme at the very forefront of real-time news, we have already made a mark in real-time search and you will see a whole new set of important innovations to bring real engagement for the mainstream consumer market, and most importantly to the deliver enterprise solutions to businesses and brands.
Lastly let me thank the Team for their continued hard work, and my investors for continuing to believe in our vision.
Thanks for the update, Nick. This last week, while presenting to a class of students at San Francisco State, I brought up fav.or.it to show a good example of why you should be nice to developers (after my review that was not so nice), and was surprised to see it down. I told them that after you made Fav.or.it, that you created Tweetmeme, which is the market leader in its space, so it makes sense not to create enemies online.
Not every great idea works, and when there are clear holes, it just makes the process harder.
Hi Louis,
Criticism is never easy to take, but not all criticism is laid at your door for the right reasons, you have only ever been completely open/fair with us and therefore we (and many others) respect your opinion.
I certainly have learnt to grow a thicker skin with the trolls, and to also listen to those I know and or respect.
Most important is to innovate, listen, adapt, repeat.
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Nick, sorry to see it go (not least cos you were sort of a rival, back in the Blog Friends days).
BUT I am (and have always been) very bullish about tweetmeme and you are absolutely without a shadow of a doubt doing the right thing to focus on it! In fact, I’ve got a couple of quid on a tweetmeme exit so you’d better continue to do well!
I look forward to sharing a beer with you over this one day soon
TweetMeme is a wonderful service which has helped my blog out a lot! And its only been live since July 13th, 2009. You guys are really on to something there and I’m glad to see you’re focusing your efforts to stay on the front line.
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