Is Orkut killing RSS Readers ? «

Is Orkut killing RSS Readers ?

May 31, 2007 at 11:28 am | In Internet Marketing, Strategy | 8 Comments

Popular social networking site “Orkut” has integrated a powerful feature which could actually kill RSS Readers. This new feature allows users to add feeds from their favorite websites thereby eliminating the need of an additional feed reader. Users can now use “edit feeds” button to add feeds from blogs, sites etc.

What does this mean

Any user who visits your profile can see your feed channels or more appropriately your subscribed feeds.
Users can now read the feeds from the Orkut page itself and can read full feeds if the content owner has opted to do so.
This also contains images and hyperlink to original site.

This new feature includes the support for popular blogging platforms like blogger, wordpress, livejournal etc.

The growth of Orkut in India has been phenomenal and this new feature means
- Existing users have got more reasons to stick to Orkut.
- A possible new user base for whom Orkut could be more of a web-based feed reader.

Will Orkut eat pie of feed readers? Early days yet but this could definitely influence orkut members who use feed readers.

On the contrary, Vikas Patial’s PHP script could be a life saver for Feed Reading companies. Barely a week ago, I had read an interesting newsitem about “Orkut Scrapbook entries via RSS Feed” according to which users can read their scraps in Feed Reader. Visit techbuzz for more on that.

Diff. to stay what could be Orkut’s Strategy but one thing is clear this is win-win situation for Orkut users.

More thoughts on this please!

Thanks Mita as you sparked me to write this post

8 Comments »

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Rajesh : Thank you for your kind comment

Sushaantu & Vinay: Thanks for dropping by.

Darnell – Yeah, limitation of five feeds is pretty interesting! This new feature is perhaps aimed to make Orkut more flexible, without actually providing the full features of a RSS Reader.

Comment by themarketingblog — June 6, 2007 #

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I doubt it would “kill” RSS readers as it only limits you to five reads, not to mention that it lacks labels/folders (Google Reader on the other hand may kill its competition).

Also, if you want to know about getting RSS feeds for Orkut forums, visit this post for details.

Comment by Darnell Clayton — June 6, 2007 #

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Thats a good one. I hope one of my 4000 subscribers enabled my Feed on their profile

Daksh, you put my feed first

Comment by Vinay — June 5, 2007 #

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these google guys are damn fast and smart.
i dont use rss but as its on orkut now i will.

Comment by sushaantu — June 4, 2007 #

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Shaping up good Daksh. Keep writing…

Cheers.

Rajesh

Comment by Rajesh — June 2, 2007 #

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Well it’s not going to Kill RSS readers…but it’s going to promote RSS usage in India to a great level.

We just covered this on WATblog too…Cheers

Comment by Ekalavya — June 1, 2007 #

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Is it that its only Orkut whoz a threat to the RSS Readers???Guess not, though its the most popular site with over millions of user being online at any instance. We have onsite / in built RSS aggregators in various browsers itself like Firefox Mozilla Opera etc…..also in the free emails such as Rediff, yahoo….. Wht needs to be thought over is how can a desktop RSS (software) beat these online (especially) or inbuilt RSS feeders???? Reach is wht I think matters in this case….
any thoughts????

Comment by schwetak — June 1, 2007 #

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Yeah ! You are correct… win win situation for orkut users. This is very handy specially for people like me who are sticking to orkut day and night. Plus its a good way to let people know what are ur intrests and what u are really lookig for. Good post!! Daksh….. Keeep looking!

Comment by mita — May 31, 2007 #

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