RSS Day: Interview with RSSmeme Creator Ben Golub

All hail Twitter Local which clued me in that RSSmeme creator Ben Golub actually lives in my own backyard. I planned on waiting until the next Open Coffee Club to grill him, but in honor of RSS Day, I bumped up my plan of attack and he agreed to an interview in honor of the day.

Cyndy: So what prompted you to come up with RSSmeme?

Ben: It's really all thanks to Louis Gray, who hyped Readburner, which is a great service. I just didn't think it was as revolutionary as Louis thought it was. So [like any developer] I found the domain, wrote it, and launched in 24 hours. It's cool but it's not that hard.

What do you see as the biggest differences between RSSmeme and Readburner?

Readburner has a better related items algorithm, which may be based on article title or some other factors. RSSmeme does it by subscribers of Google Reader and what they have shared. On the other hand, RSSmeme also does tagging and search, which you don't find in Readburner. It doesn't give you a feed for a tag or an author or a source. RSSmeme gives something back to the community; it's not just taking everything in. The search feeds are exportable, and I've gotten feedback that they are being used by technology writers to see what people are reading about and interested in.

What about Techmeme? How do you think the RSSmeme and Techmeme compare?

They are very different. Techmeme has some sort of bot, since it does hit RSSmeme and crawls the site. RSSmeme will have stories bubble up, but they are slower to hit than Techmeme, and usually only one story hits, since most people link to same single story about a topic. RSSmeme does get some of the same echo chamber effect, but it's democratic, and based on user voting via the shared items. It adds no weight based on source, so a smaller blog has the same chance to hit the front page as TechCrunch.

Do you think there is any value to some of these "reverse" aggregators that try to shift some of the emphasis to the smaller blogs?

Absolutely. In my own feeds, I removed TechCrunch from Google Reader and focused on some of the "smaller" blogs like Louis Gray. It means I have fewer stories to read which are more personally relevant, and don't cover every single thing that's happening.

Have you had any feedback on how RSSmeme is doing at driving traffic to sites? (I like how the most noticeable link takes you to the original blog and not to the full article in the feed.)

At the beginning, someone said it was sending nothing. We are now getting about 150,000 page views a month with about 50,000 uniques, so odds are traffic is going out, but not much feedback has come in.

The linking is intentional. You can still read the full article on RSSmeme, but it's important to give traffic back to the sites.

What about sites like I Can Has Cheezburger that I see on the front page? Have you thought about blocking sites like this which probably aren't that relevant?

I don't want to block any of these sites because it's a slippery slope once you start deciding what to block. So at this point, I have no plans for any kind of block list.

I do remove any story or user who emails and requests it. I use FriendFeed's API to increase users (crawled). There isn't anything in the code that limits it to Google Reader for shared items, but that is the limit. Future plans for RSSmeme would be for it to include any type of shared feed.

RSSmeme also has comments, which have been pretty controversial in the blogosphere, but hopefully at some point, Disqus will enable functionality to allow input from sites like RSSmeme to bring the conversation back to the publishers.

What else are you working on?

Pop-secrets is a small celebrity gossip RSS aggregator for six gossip blogs that I did for my fiancee a while back just to learn Python. I also have a personal lifestream pulled from FriendFeed-ish things.

There's also FriendFeedStats [Ed: cited this morning by Alexander van Elsas that I retweeted with glee]. It's Open Source. All Django, and maybe 500 lines of code.

And finally, there is one other - dearlazyweb - an autobot on Twitter that people can use to question other users. By using a direct message, they can use it to poll others anonymously as well, and get feedback from the Twitterverse.

I noticed you are a Django developer. Have you tried out Google App Engine yet?

I actually ported FriendFeedStats over to AppEngine; it was very easy to do with only a few small changes. The problem is that it's very limiting, and FriendFeedStats actually won't work, because you can only pull 1000 database entries at a time which means it's impossible do the counts. RSSmeme could probably be ported, if I removed the counter. It's going to change things, but it will always have those limits.

You are a developer who just likes to solve problems, and don't seem to be looking to make it rich. What are your feelings about the current Web 2.0 climate?

I added ads to RSSmeme just to help defray the cost. My fiancee is in medical school, which means I have a lot of free time when she's studying, so I like creating these apps just for fun.

As far as free apps go, if VCs are willing to give the money, then thing will continue to be free. I know it's been controversial, but as long as the money is there, it's going to happen. Personally, I'm more than willing to pay for things I like using, and I have a Flickr Pro account as well as a Remember the Milk Pro account.

Thanks Ben for talking to me today! I'm looking forward to actually meeting in person at this month's Rochester Open Coffee Club.

Edited to correct name and URL of @dearlazyweb.