Feedly, the RSS Reader I’ve been using ever since Google Reader shut down, has announced a feature called “Shared Collections“. This is something like the Google Reader shared items (much loved by its loyal users including me, but something that apparently wasn’t good enough for Google to retain), except that it is available only for premium users.
While this is in theory a great move by Feedly to start shared collections, recognising the unfulfilled demand for social reading post Google Reader, their implementation leaves a lot to be desired. And I’m writing this without having used the feature, for, in an extremely daft move, it is available only for pro users. My problem is with the pricing model, which charges content creators (or curators or aggregators, if you like to call them that) for sharing content!
There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to start. Firstly, if you charge people for creating content, that significantly increases the barrier to creating content. If there is an article I like and want to share with my (currently non-existent) followers, the fact that I have to create a premium account to do so means that the barrier to doing so is too high.
Secondly, if I’m going to be a consumer of shared collections from other people, I’ll need a certain critical mass of friends before I start using the feature. I won’t start using a feature only because one or two friends are curating content on it. The critical mass is much higher. And by putting barriers to entry to people who want to share, it makes this critical mass even more difficult to obtain.
Thirdly, Feedly doesn’t have a social network of itself so far (though I’m not aware what permissions they’ve taken from my when I used my Google account to log in to the service). And without having a ready social network for discovery (Google Reader leveraged the Google Talk network), how do they expect people to discover each other’s collections, once created? Are they relying on external networks such as Facebook or Twitter?
It is not easy to build a social network of curation. Google Reader had managed it quite well back in the day by first allowing people to share items without comment, then add external content, and then to add comments. It was an extremely powerful way for people to share blogs and other content, and discussion on that was rather active. I even remember quite a few people adding me on Google Talk for the sole reason of wanting to follow my Shared Items.
In recent times we’ve seen the news aggregator app Flipboard starting its personal collections feature. I have a collection, but don’t remember the last time I put something into it – for without any interaction on that, there’s absolutely no motivation. Flipboard, by the way, has access to your Facebook and Twitter graphs, and so has access to some sort of a social network. Yet, despite keeping the feature free, they haven’t been able to generate sufficient activity on it.
Feedly has got just about everything wrong with its Shared Collections feature. There is disincentive for content creators. There is no incentive for content consumers. They don’t have a ready social network. And there doesn’t seem to be any interaction.
If only Google were to bring back Google Reader and Shared Items, now that they’ve decided to dismantle Google+.