Teach42

Have you heard about Rojo yet? If you haven’t, you probably will. It’s basically an aggregator with social networking features built into it. From a marketing standpoint though, they’re taking advantage of the model GMail set up. It’s in beta, and it’s by invite only. There’s a Slashdot article discussing it right now and about half the posts are people who are begging for an invite. It doesn’t really matter if the system is good or bad, if it’s by invitation only people want to be in.

I put my name on the list awhile ago (I completely forgot all about it to be honest) but today got an email from them with an invite. So I surfed over there and got myself registered. To be honest, so far I’m not hugely impressed, but I haven’t been able to take advantage of the social networking features yet.

here’s my first impressions so far though. It’s essentially a web based aggregator, like bloglines. You can import and export OPML files, so I grabbed my entire bloglines account and imported it right now. Worked fine, kept my categories, looked swell initially.

First thing I noticed though was that it didn’t tell me how many unread posts I have for a feed. That’s no good, one of the whole points to an aggregator is that I don’t want to have to click on each feed to see if there’s something new. This could just be a beta bug, because there is a button labeled “Mark channel as read”, bu it doesn’t seem to do anything. I guess it’s possible that it considers all the feeds I imported to be already read and it’s waiting for new posts, but I’ll believe it when I see some evidence of that. So that’s strike one against it. Update: Ok, last scenario is actually fact. It does correctly say how many posts are left unread. When you add a new feed, it assumes that all posts are read instead of unread. So it won’t show new messages when you first get started.

As I looked a little closer at my channel list (they have chosen to use the word “Channel” instead of feed *shrug*), I noticed that several of them didn’t resolve to the appropriate names. Turns out sites like Incsub.org and David Warlick’s blog don’t work. Click on the feed and it’s empty. Why? I have no idea. But that’s not cool. Strike two.

Moving right along, I click on Engadget’s feed. Guess what? No pictures. That’s a killer when reading something like engadget. If you can’t see the pretty pictures, it’s a pretty dull feed. I mean, these are gadgets and the pictures provide the WOW factor. That’s strike three. There’s no way I can use Rojo on a daily basis as it is right now.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good things about it or that I don’t see any potential for it. One thing that it does allow you to do is to tag posts your reading. That’s right, you can tag other people’s stories. So as you’re reading a post, you can tag it yourself so you can find it later by tags. Additionally, when you tag a post, other people can find it by that tag as well. I tagged a couple posts with podcasting. When I clicked on the podcasting tag, it pulled up a bunch of articles written that other people had tagged with the same word. Very cool, I can get into that one.

It also has two interesting buttons that didn’t seem to work for me but sound like they could be winners. If you click on the “Related Links” button, it’s supposed to pull up a list of other posts that have links to the one you’re reading or sites that the story links to. Sort of like seeing trackbacks, but accessible to anyone from the aggregator. Neat concept, but didn’t work for most posts and the ones that it worked for were kind of flaky.

One other feature that sounded fantastic but didn’t seem to work too well was the published sources button. It was sort of hidden, you had to go into the Channel Properties to find it. And when you click on it, you just get an error. In the help menu though, they describe what it should do. It’s supposed to provide you with a list of sites that the feed has linked to in their posts. I kind of like that. Would I use it all the time? Probably not, but that’s a neat feature.

Rojo does have a nice layout and the social network features that it advertises may have some real implications. You’re supposed to find or invite friends to Rojo. When you do, you add them to your network as contacts. As you’re reading your blogs, you can ‘flag’ entries by clicking on a little button. When your contacts click on you in their sidebar, they will also see your subscription list and what stories you have flagged. You can also view their contacts and subscription lists, which is appearantly the social network that they’re talking about. This idea is neat. So if I create a network of like minded people, let’s say other teachers at my school, I can just flag stories as I’m looking through. They can see immediately what I’ve found interesting lately.

There is also a Reccomended Stories link, that’s supposed to find stories that you might like. In theory though, it’s influenced by your channels and your contacts. That could be kind of interesting, in that it could be a weighting system that takes advantage of your interests as well as your contacts. If you create a network of your colleagues, then it’s possible that it could have some real merit. I like the idea of it sorting through sites like Slashdot and weighting articles just based on a group of my peers.

However, now we get to my biggest problem with the social network of Rojo. I have no contacts. Nor can I find any. In Bloglines, I can click on a feed I subscribe to and see who else is subscribing to it. Then I can check out their subscription list and see if they have anything interesting for me. There’s no way to do that so far as I can see. These are NOT open networks. Rojo seems to be by invite all around. It will only create closed networks. There’s currently no way for you to see the feeds I read, like you can do in bloglines. There’s no way for me to find out who else subscribes to a feed, no way for me to add a contact unless I invite someone in or know somebody who also uses it. In other words, you gotta know someone specific. That’s decidedly anti-social in my mind. I like the fact that Furl, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Bloglines all connect me with total strangers that I may or may not have something in common with. Rojo doesn’t seem to do that.

Anyway, like I’ve said, I haven’t had a chance to try out the social networking features of it, so it may be that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I’m missing the boat. Want to give it a shot? I currently have 5 invites for Rojo. If you’re interested in giving it a try, drop me a comment or send me an email. The only thing I ask in return is that we actively give the ’social networking’ piece of it a try. Who knows? Maybe it makes up for the other issues I have with it.

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