byTagg.com is the latest RSS-reader-come-Twitter-tracker-come-web-crawler to hit the market. Keep track of your trackables in one central place.
Blogs, tweets and news, Oh My! With so much content that we follow daily, it makes sense to manage it all from one simple platform. Also, blog owners will be interested in byTagg’s alluring affiliate program on offer.
Although byTagg has definite room for improvement, it ticks all the right boxes with an simple RSS reader, (some) Twitter following capability and - overall - a fairly user friendly interface.
In the world of cloud computing, it’s an interesting choice for byTagg’s services to be provided by a downloaded application. With a non-browser based interface and ad-supported delivery, will byTagg offer enough to the user to keep coming back?
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Only a short few years ago, the Internet much like a calm, smooth and peaceful ocean. Much like sailing the ocean, you’d simply set a navigation course for your intended destination and you would find yourself peacefully transported (excepting the accompanying 56.6Kbps modem shriek) to your desired port, be it ‘The sea of AOL’, ‘Hotmail Bay’ or the nefarious ‘Pornography Harbour’. The internet was - if not safe - predictable. Now a tidal wave brews daily. A massive tsunami of information constantly bears down on us all, with an estimated 125,000 tweets per hour and a never-ending stream of blog entries and news stories. We all love the ‘nowness’ of the Internet, but come on… how can you possibly keep track of it all?
byTagg.com gives a good try at tackling this problem. A small application is loaded onto your desktop and from it you can add Twitter accounts, RSS feeds and tagged keywords. Once set up, byTagg dutifully checks each feed, account or keyword and automatically updates you with the ability to view new content titles as well as previewing the said content in an inbuilt web browser.
byTagg.com is not a unique concept — there are plenty of content aggregators out there already — but byTagg is one of the few startups brave enough to do it in a non-browser based environment. The service works in much the way that you would expect, with a fairly intuitive interface and a clean, bold display. Adding RSS feeds is easy and byTagg features some nice additions such as keyword filtering and some options to customize your view and theme. The set up process was painless enough - I was using the application in under five minutes.
With that said, there’s something half-baked about the whole package. I don’t want to rain too much on their parade, especially while byTagg is in beta release, but byTagg doesn’t hit all the right notes. In a similar way as listening to me butcher out Paint it Black on the guitar, you can tell what is being played, but the simple fact remains: it ain’t no Keith Richards. The preview window is glitchy and most previewed pages require you to scroll around as the image is condensed into a smaller frame. When you do follow a link, byTagg hosts the page under a framed google adwords display (see screenshots below) which is at best bold, at worst obtrusive. In addition, you can preview tweets, but cannot click through to links or preview the Twitter interface. Whether or not this is a beta bug that needs to be squashed, I was left thinking “what’s the point?” as I ended up loading Twitter anyway to find the link that I had just previewed on byTagg.
I was left feeling underwhelmed by byTagg, despite an interesting execution. I also wonder if byTagg is setting itself up to be a legacy product as RSS begins its inevitable slide to sleep in Davy Jones’s locker as the all powerful Twitter titan continues its all encompassing monopoly of ‘now’. What is great to see is a startup with a way of monetizing its services from the outset. While the delivery of the adsense advertisements needs to be finnessed, there is no doubt that byTagg affiliates will be intrigued at least by an attractive revenue-sharing proposal.
The solution offered by byTagg still needs to be massaged vigourosly, but the concept remains sound. While some will be put off by the non-browser based application and the subtle-as-a-jackhammer advertising support, many will love the fact that a very complex world of information is being made much more simple, centralized and accessible.
You can visit the site here, or you can download byTagg here:
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July 29th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
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