The human edited blog highlight site TopTenSources will announce tomorrow that they have acquired the social shopping site Style Feeder. I really like both these companies and am excited to see how the partnership develops.
TopTenSources is lead by long time technologist Halley Suitt. The site is based on human editors selecting their favorite 10 blogs on a wide variety of topics, from food to blogging to Second Life.
Style Feeder was created by Philip Jacob, a coder with experience at several prior startups. The service uses some classic Web 2.0 tools to create a highly usable shopping experience. A javascript bookmarklet lets users tag items sold on any site and populates an image field by first asking that the product image is clicked on - very nice. URL and description are autopopulated and users apply tags. The item is then added to your Style Feed, a wishlist page that can be tracked by other user’s interested in your style and shopping proclivities. Users can join topical groups and add a box of small images from their wishlist to their personal website elsewhere.
Style Feeder is not currently monetized, but developer Phillip Jacob told me that ideas ranging from affiliate links to private label versions for large online communities are being considered. Halley Suitt told me that the degree of integration between the TopTenSources site itself and Style Feeder is yet to be determined but that TopTenSources is happy to consider itself a company with diverse offerings beyond its flagship site.
I’ve thought that TopTenSources was under appreciated for some time now and I will be excited to see where they go next.
Seems like a bizarre combination - any idea how they’re going to realize synergies here?
It sounds like there is a lot of room for clarification on what this merger means and why do we care so much? Or even better, what will result as the child of this process.
(I’m the founder of StyleFeeder)
Both StyleFeeder and Top 10 Sources have done considerable work in the area of human-assisted search and that’s the main thing that we share in common. The difference you’re seeing between, on the surface, some kind of social shopping application and a directory of blogs is mainly a question of focus. But we are together building technology to provide a set of tools to users interested in exploring large datasets in some innovative ways.
(Plus Halley promised to buy us Llamas… who could refuse that?)
Phillip, I hope you can talk Top Ten Sources out of this practice now that you’re part of the team. Many people I know had their content *fully* republished without anyone asking their consent *first* and I find that extremely troubling. Anybody from Top Ten Sources care to comment about whether you guys are actually emailing people *first* before you take their RSS content en total?
No need to talk them out of anything on that front since that kind of activity stopped some time ago. Top 10 Sources only includes full content when it’s allowed by the blog owner. There are actually 5 levels of inclusion that feed owners can specify when they submit their feeds to Top 10 Sources, so there’s a reasonably granular level of control available to those who choose to participate.
Phil’s got it right there … we’re hypercareful with your content. Meanwhile, Mike, did you sign up for Stylefeeder and try it yet?
It’s really fun. I want to see what you buy, so go do it.
BTW, you don’t have to actually buy the stuff, you can use Stylefeeder as a wishlist that RSS publishes to other cool people.
And one other thing — check out the Stylefeeder widget on my blog (below the blogroll on the left-hand column).
Did you see that beach ball you toss around — the blue thing — that makes ice cream. How cool is that?!?
I expect Mike to have it at his next party.
I think the problem Top10 may have is that their name sounds an awful lot like the “best8sites” “best4sites” pure adwords/adsense arbitrarge plays I see so often. I now avoid any URL that looks like that because it’s usually completely devoid of real content. I hate to say it, but they *might* be better off picking another name. I’m probably a little bit ahead of the curve on how annoyed I get by these things, but then I was ahead of the spam-hate curve as well…
sounds good to me