AideRSS, the marvelous service that filters items in any RSS feed for popularity with readers, has spun out its core technology PostRank as an Application Programing Interface (API) for integration into any other application. We love a good API here at RWW and hope to see some really interesting uses of this one.
PostRank looks at every item that comes through an RSS feed and scores it on a scale of 1 through 10 based on the number of comments it’s received, inbound links, saves to del.cio.us, times it’s been Tweeted and Dugg. The excitement comes in when the service delivers a filtered feed of just the 15% “most popular” items in that feed. It’s a great way to pay casual attention to prolific feeds when you just want to see its own highlights.
Smaller blogs can still score high by getting an unusually high number of comments, etc. relative to the other posts in their feed.
Today the company is rolling out a slew of performance enhancements and new metrics including clickthroughs from its extensions, bookmarks in Ma.gnolia and mentions on microblogging service Pownce.
The company also rolled out a dedicated page for its very handy Google Reader extension – GReader users should check this one out.
We use AideRSS here at RWW every day and can’t say enough about this simple but powerfully useful tool. We’ve written about it numerous times, including in the following particularly popular posts:
- Want That Post to Go Popular? Here’s the Best and Worst Times to Post It
- What’s Next on the Web: A ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008
- How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet
- Comparing Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche
- Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond
- Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your Feed Reader
- Why Gen Y is Going to Change the Web
- Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again
- An Ode to RSS On RSS Appreciation Day
- Why Online “Noise” is Good for You
It’s true, we love AideRSS. It’s just so incredibly useful we can’t get over it. We wish the algorithm for determining popularity was more transparent and we hope that today’s performance enhancements make a big difference – but we love it none the less. We’d love to see the folks at AideRSS connect with the good people at Gnip, a social media pinging service plus that we wrote about here.
The prospect of AideRSS’s PostRank being rolled into other applications around the web is an exciting one. In what contexts would you like to see just the most popular items in an RSS feed?
