Reader

Retooling after Google Reader

Martin Kelley — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 11:32:35 +0000

I must admit I’ve been thrown off my blog reading by the demise of Google Reader, closed July 1 with only a few months warning. I remember when Google’s was the newest member of the RSS reading options. Its simple interface and relatively-solid performance eventually won me over and its competitors gradually stopped innovating and finally closed.

In the last few months other services have taken up the challenge of replacing Reader, but it’s been a chaotic process and a gamble which would be rolled out in time. One of my go-to programs, Reeder, now works for the phone but not the Mac app. It runs off of the Feedly service, which I now use in the browser to access my feeds.

I rely on these blog reading services to keep track of over 100 blogs. RSS may not be sexy enough to be a mass-market service but for those of us whose temperments or hobbies run toward curation, it’s an essential tool. As the new systems mature, I hope to keep up with my Quakerquaker reading more thoroughly.

Official Google Reader Blog: New in Reader: a fresh design, and Google+ sharing

Martin Kelley — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:37:05 +0000

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-and-google.html

Google+: View post on Google+

Extending customer relationships through social media

Martin Kelley — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:12:49 +0000

Over on my O’Reilly Media blog, I’ve written “Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?,” a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here’s a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company’s interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms–status updates, calendars, videos–but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media’s evolving role.