Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but our assumption was that this a less than $5 million deal. Six Apart is not planning on continuing to build out the core Rojo products. In the press release (sorry no link available yet), Six Apart says “Six Apart intends to sell a majority interest in Rojo’s newsreader services in the coming months,” meaning they will become a minority stockholder of the service. Rojo founder and CEO Chris Alden and CTO Aaron Emigh will joining Six Apart’s executive team.

This deal brings to a close the long saga of the Rojo story. The company was founded in June 2003, launched in October 2004 and had a stellar team of investors including TPG Ventures, BV Capital, Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo consistently released excellent products and has a loyal core user base. Rojo had a promising start and its userbase continued to grow gradually. But the crowded and highly competitive feed reader space, dominated by Bloglines, Newsgator and others, was a tough playground to hang out in. My hope is that the Rojo product continues to iterate, it’s one of my favorite websites.

Our previous coverage of Six Apart is here, and Rojo is here. We also had a very lively discussion with executives from a number of feed readers, including Chris Alden from Rojo, in a TalkCrunch podcast a couple of months ago.

When I spoke to Rojo CEO Chris Alden about Nooz, he stressed that it is designed specifically for the Myspace crowd, whereas Rojo is aimed at the geek/early adopter crowd.

There are three key features. First, Myspace users can set up an account at Nooz and link directly to their Myspace profile. At Nooz, users can review blog and other RSS feed news items by category and rate them (this leverages the Rojo Mojo Digg-Like functionality). The more votes a news item gets, the higher it appears within a particular category. New stories can also be submitted using a bookmark function.

Second, users can view what news items their Myspace friends submitted or voted for.

Third, users can create a Flash widget to include on their Myspace page (or any web page – see widget below) that lists news stories they’ve voted for. Alternatively, the widget can show a pure RSS feed, although clicking on a news item brings up the post in Nooz, not on the original site).

http://www.nooz.com/static/widget/nooz/noozlist.swf

Myspace has certainly been consulted on the Nooz product, too. I checked out the Myspace page of Ross Levinsohn, the President of Fox Interactive (parent company to Myspace) and he has a Nooz widget displayed prominently on his page. This may or may not be an endorsement of Nooz – but it certainly indicates that the Fox team knows about the product and is testing it out. And I note that Ross doesn’t have any other third party widgets on his site.

A bevy of Myspace focused third party widgets have launched recently (see Tagworld Widgets and MyPickList, for example). I don’t see these services as a sign of over-infatuation with Myspace, but simply a realization that, with nearly 80 million members, Myspace is an entire economy unto itself. Companies are going to find a way to participate in that economy as deeply as possible, with ever-more-tailored products.

It looks like it went nearly undetected: there are no comments or trackbacks to the Rojo blog post announcing the product (although Library Clips caught it). Rojo blog search can be accessed from the search bar on the top right of the Rojo home page.

Rojo takes a stab at solving the blog search relevance problem (which I discussed in the last paragraph of this post). Results are ranked according to freshness, total subscribers to the underlying feed, total “mojo” votes (a Digg-like feature – see here for a description), whether people have tagged the story (a sign that they liked it) and total number of times the post was read. This is an algorithm approach to relevance, similar to what Sphere and Bloglines have done (although with very different data points). And it seems to work – relevance is very good.

Rojo is trading off quality with depth of the index. Unlike Technorati, Rojo is indexing just a couple of million blogs. Whether a blog is in the index is based on, first, subscribers from its feed reader product (if someone subscribes to a blog, it’s automatically in the index) and second, additional blogs that they’ve determined to be of high quality, through a spidering process.

Results are presented along with a voting and tagging feature, and the “+” symbol can be clicked to see the full blog post.

This is just a first pass at search. Chris tells me they will be relaunching with a new interface in a couple of weeks. More on this then.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart – there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)

You can now view your feeds by date or relevance, with relevance being determined according to other users votes (think diggs), total reads and total user tags. The result – a nice way to sort through your daily feeds to find the most popular posts.

Rojo has also added a number of categories – breaking news, entertainment, technology, etc., with the included feeds editorially picked and the ranking by relevance and freshness. This is a good way to find popular posts from sources that are not included in your feed list.

Rojo is ahead of the pack again in terms of features, and relevance is a hot topic right now. The question is whether this is going to be enough to drive user adoption in the extremely crowded feed reader space. Richard asks a different question: “I wonder if this will wake Bloglines out of their slumber?”

The idea is that a blog include a Google Adsense-type ad unit on the site (I’ve included this in the bottom left sidebar of TechCrunch). Two ads are served in the unit and there are vertical and horizontal ad units to choose from. For ever two ads served, the publishing blog gets an impression on another blog.

FeedShare is a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other. As a blogger participant you give exposure on your site to other blogs in the network, and in return your blog will be promoted on similar sites in the network.

You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see examples) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers.

You then create a listing for your OWN blog and for every impression you donate to the network on your blog, you will receive a listing on someone else’s blog or in Rojo.com. The goal is to help build the feed subscriber base to your blog, increasing awareness and traffic to your site.

Rojo plans to sell the second ad to third parties, first on a cost-per-impression basis. Later they may experiment with cost-per-click and cost-per-subscirber models as well.

Tags can be set by the blog publisher to control the types of ads shown on the site, as well as what types of sites your ads will be shown on.

Ads link back to Rojo and are recommended for subscription to Rojo or other feed readers. A discussion forum for Feedshare is here.

Rojo launched two new features this week: expanded tag functionality and top 100 feeds.

Top 100 Feeds:

Rojo now lists the top 100 feeds subscribed to by users. The top ten include the usual suspects, which at least shows that Rojo users are pretty mainstream v. other readers.

They call it the Rojo 100. You can also view the most read feeds for any given tag.

This second part is more interesting. The top 100 is just another list – not super interesting as a stand alone feature. However, the ability to type a tag and see the most popular feeds based on the tag is, actually, quite useful. In particular, we like the results for the tag “Web2.0“, which lists Read/Write Web and TechCrunch in the top two spots (looks perfect to us!).

Now you can see the most read feeds in Rojo at any one time. Call it the Rojo 100. This list will change all the time, as Rojo users reading habits grow and evolve. Lists are all the rage these days, but while the list of the top 100 most read feeds in Rojo might be interesting, what’s MORE interesting is seeing the most read feeds in a particular topic area. To find the most read feeds in any number of topic areas, simply search for a feed tag–that is a word used to describe an RSS feed–in our feed tag directory and sort the results by popularity. This way you will find the most read feeds in a particular subject area in Rojo. Turning attention into serendipity–that’s what we are about.

RUGFEED:

Rojo is one of the only feed readers to allows tagging of feeds and posts. They are starting to release tools to help users find new content based on other users’ tags. Check out popular feeds based on the tags you select:

This week in Rojo a cool new feature: The Rojo User Generated Feed Directory! (RUGFEED??) Can’t find the RSS feed you are looking for? Our feed directory of around 100,000 feeds has been categorized by YOU–the Rojo user. In the “Tag” section of Rojo there is now a “Feeds” sub-section where you can find the most recently and most frequently tagged feeds in Rojo. You can also scope feed lists by All Users, or just your contacts–or yourself.

The most commonly used feed tags are shown in the left sidebar, and you can search for a single feed tag to help you find the exact feed you are looking for. Want to find food blogs? Just search for feeds tagged “food” and you are on your way. You can see related tags as well. You can tag a feed when you first add it, or edit your feed tags in the Manage Feeds page.

See the Rojo Blog for more information.

Location: San Francisco, CA

Launched: Closed Beta – October 2004, Open Beta – April 20, 2005

Funding: “Rojo received seed financing from TPG Ventures and individuals such as Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo’s most recent round of funding was lead by BV Capital and TPG Ventures.”

What is it?

Rojo is a web-based RSS Reader (list of all here) that combines great “standard” RSS feader features with tagging and social networking. It is an interesting experiment that is getting a lot of buzz.

The service is completely free for users. It includes adds in the user interface.

In their own words, “Rojo means “RSS with mojo” and in this spirit our company is dedicated to providing the best RSS feed reader around so that busy people can manage and read content as efficiently as possible. Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends. We believe that analytics and community based features are what make feed reading accessible and appealing to technophiles and new consumers alike so we provide RojoBuzz, which tracks which webpages are most linked-to by the feeds you read. With Rojo’s community features you can share stories, feeds, tags, contacts, and profile information with your friends and colleagues, making it easy to find, discover, and share interesting content. This is what we are dedicated to providing. This is what we are passionate about. “

Signup was easy (with standard email confirmation), and I was able to import all of my feeds from bloglines (although this process could easily be simplified – I would much rather just tell them “bloglines” and my username, which some other web-based RSS readers do. Export of feeds via OPML is also offered.

Rojo’s magic – what makes it stand out from the crowd – is the ability to tag posts, feeds and contacts. You can use those tags to sort and find your content, but you can also use them to find other potentially useful content from others, including your contacts. Adding contacts and sharing tags and feeds is very simple. Taggin of posts and feeds also partially solves the ranking problem with blogs – it helps the cream rise to the top.

There are some other excellent reviews of Rojo out there and we’ve linked to many at the bottom of this post. See, for example, Jeff Clavier’s analysis here.

Key Features:

- Free
- Web-Based
- (relatively) easy import of feeds
- export of feeds
- Feed Reading and Discovery
- Search
- Tagging
- Sharing
- expand/collapse feeds
- COOL COOL COOL – Rojolicious (combining Rojo Tags with Delicious Tags)

Screen Shots:

Management:

Christopher J. Alden, Co-founder, CEO
Timothy J.O. Catlin, VP of Engineering
Kevin Burton, Co-founder, Lead engineer
Link

Board of Directors:

Christopher J. Alden, CEO
Dave Whorton, General Partner, TPG Ventures
Thomas Gieselmann, General Partner, BV Capital
Ron Conway, Managing Partner, Angel Investors LP funds
Link

Advisors:

Marc Andreessen
Karen Edwards
Mark Graham, Co-founder
Brewster Kahle
Susan Mernit
Artie Wu
Link

Relevant Links:

Software Only review of new rojo
Susan mernit
Steve Gillmor
Om Malik
Add chicklet
Rojolicious
Rojo wiki
FAQ
Rojo blog
About
Press
Rojo merchandise
Rojo Tag cloud
Slashdot
Team
Under the Radar on Rojo (great profile)
BlogThis on Rojo

Tags: rojo, RSS Readers, tagging, techcrunch, RSS