May 13, 2009

InFeeds the Latest Service to Calculate "Top Shared Items" Online

For more than two years, we've been talking about services that could democratically tabulate the most popular shared items on the Web, using Google Reader link blogs (like mine) as their data set. In early 2008, there was a practical explosion of such services, started by Feedheads, and rapidly followed on by ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Shared Reader and others. And while it's the earliest of days for a new service called InFeeds, developers continue to see this as a project worth tackling.


The service started gobbling up popular shared item blogs this morning (as you can see on Twitter), bills itself as a "shared items feed aggregator" and asks, "what's interesting in your feeds?"

Like the aforementioned competitors, InFeeds looks like it is going to show you items that have received the most shares from registered link blogs, sorting by 2 or more shares and 5 or more shares, for example.

If you look at its spartan "Upcoming" page, you can see that individual shared items are displayed with the original headline and author, who shared the item, and a number of tags, such as "Facebook", "iPhone" or "Google".


One Item I Shared Via InFeeds, Displaying Tags

With RSSmeme founder Ben Golub working at FriendFeed, and the ReadBurner site currently being down for repairs, there could be an opportunity for somebody like InFeeds to sneak in and be interesting. So while I may advise the ReadBurner team, I think it makes sense to hop over to InFeeds and provide your Google Reader shared links URL to give this developer a little push.

You can submit your URL here: http://infeeds.com/