Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

After nearly two months of hard work I’m proud to announce that TailRank is now in public beta.

The key word here is beta. This isn’t a Google-style beta. This isn’t a Web 2.0-style beta. This is the old school definition of beta where we need feedback from the community to make a better product. Constructive criticism only please!

That said, I expect a formal 1.0 release in about a month. I don’t want to be in beta for too long but we’re not yet feature complete for what I want for a real 1.0.

If you didn’t get into our private beta I apologize. We had a number of people request an account and I’m not sure I was able to manually invite everyone.

I wanted to get this out the door sooner so that I can get feedback from the community to help prioritize features. I think rapid prototyping with community feedback can be amazingly powerful. That said, I have some ideas of what I plan to implement in the coming weeks:

• Better clustering support. I’ll probably implement this in the next 24 hours.
• Better realtime and mobile delivery. This will allow you to subscribe to events and have them delivered via SMS or email. I’m also going to write some cool OS plugins so you can get TailRank directly on your desktop.
• APIs - Right now our APIs aren’t documented (we’ll fix this soon). I’d like to have aggregator developers build TailRank directly into their products. If you’re an aggregator developer and want to play with TailRank’s APIs just send me an email.
• Better tag support. We need to be able to pivot on tag so that you can show recommended stories for ‘politics’ or ‘technology’ for example.

I also hopeful that the community will come up with some cool ideas for functionality I haven’t thought of yet. We’ll see…

More Blogs

We really need to index more blogs. Right now we only have 6500. If you have a second please import your OPML into TailRank. The more we know about the feeds you find interesting the better we can do with recommendations.

In the next week or so we’re going to deploy some automated blog discovery code but until then the only way we index new blogs is if people add them. We’re also going to add a mechanism so that users can manually add blogs by URL. This should make it easier for people to use TailRank who don’t use aggregators (or don’t have OPML) and want to get started quickly.

Advertising

You’ll notice that TailRank is running our own ads within the site (we also run AdSense). This is a little experiment in blogosphere-only ads (influenced by Kuro5hin’s ads from a few years ago).

The idea here is to allow bloggers to advertise their feed directly within the site and to make it easy for people to subscribe to their feed. If there’s a lot of uptake here I’m going to add more functionality.

Put TailRank on your Site

TailRank has a cool javascript include mechanism so you can add TailRank content on your site.

Here’s a link to an example. Notice the sidebar on the right. This is what will appear on your site.

I also want to build a small ‘add to tailrank’ button for your blog so you can easily have people subscribe to your feed.

Donations

We’re still accepting donations in our fund drive if you’re eager to give me an early xmas present! :)

Feedback

We’re really interested in your feedback. We have both a wiki and a forum. We also have an IRC channel on freenode.net (#tailrank).

Update:

We had a slight glitch today. It turns out that some of our meme discovery code failed to run and was getting caught an an error and not promoting anything to the site.

That’s fixed now and it actually just promoted three pages worth os stories.