Geodog

Want to know what a web service is? Ask Mark Fletcher

Mark Fletcher has just built one of the more innovative web services I have seen in a while, and one that I suspect will be a money maker in the short-term. Remember how during the Web 1.0 boom, people talked a lot about making money by disintermediation? Mark has figured out how to (potentially) make money by creating an intermediary between content publisher and content consumer. His web services will enable users to have both the better UI and customizability of their favorite desktop RSS aggregator and all the advantages of server based RSS aggregation, such as only seeing each item once. The service could also potentially alleviate the much ballyhooed content provider RSS bandwidth explosion problem, if it ever appears. Yahoo just opened the beta of its makeover of MyYahoo to an RSS based portal, and Jeremy Zawodny says that he "fully expect folks to compare [the new My]Yahoo to Bloglines." With the release of the new web services, Mark has taken the competition to a whole new level, one which Yahoo, as a content aggregator itself that has yet to roll out any significant web services other than RSS support, will have to work to catch up to.

Mark is one of the people to watch in this space. He doesn't toot his own horn nearly as much as many others, but over the past year Bloglines has consistently and steadily added new features like search and hosted weblogs, while growing the number of subscribers rapidly at the same time. All this without visibly suffering from the scalability and speed problems that have afflicted other high visibility players in the Weblogging / Search / RSS / Social Software space. In the best bootstrapping tradition, so far Mark Fletcher has underpromised and overdelivered. I hope he manages to continue to do so.