Scoble’s Link Blog

As Jim Winstead announced on his blog this evening, Yahoo! has purchased his blo.gs service and is now operating it — including the blo.gs FeedMesh feed. Blo.gs provided a valuable and well run service of use to the entire blogosphere and it is clear that Yahoo! expects to maintain and even exceed the standards of service the Jim Winstead established.

Yahoo!’s entry into the FeedMesh is, of course, a very significant event. Over the months that we’ve been discussing and developing the FeedMesh, I’ve had dozens of people suggest that it was impossible to imagine that any of the “large” services would see the value of the FeedMesh and agree to participate in it. I’m hoping that Yahoo!’s support for the FeedMesh will convince folk that services that might otherwise compete can see clear advantage in cooperating to ensure that the task of discovering blogs and updates to blogs is shared among all parties. We’ll still compete… It’s just that we’ll compete based on the quality of the services we provide rather than just on how many blogs we monitor.

Our users, and the users of all other blog search and matching engines expect each of the services to know about all of the blog updates as they happen. Thus, the only thing we can accomplish by not cooperating is to teach our users how much we don’t satisfy their expectations. For a blog search and discovery service, the systems for collecting updates represent pure cost. These systems can’t really lead to a sustainable advantage even though they consume a great deal of resource. The sustainable advantage that we’re able to build will only come from doing something interesting and useful with the updates once we’ve discovered them. FeedMesh thus enables us to share the unavoidable costs and focus on building advantage by better serving our users’ needs. This is a good thing.

Now, let’s see how long it is before even more services join the FeedMesh! Who will be next?

bob wyman