We have in the past month or so been migrating many of our clients away from our XEFEED product to Google products. I don’t know how good this necessarily is for our product, however, Google is just simply better, and they have a few more developers working on their stuff than we do.
XEFEED was developed as a feed reading/Internet monitoring service. We used it in a number of ways to scan the Internet for stories, blog posts, new articles, even images and videos etc about particular companies. We then monitor those masses of data for our clients looking for bad news that needs to be dealt with and simultaneously we develop strategies around this (see my posts on Oz Experience bad news).
In many cases we took this data a step further and re-fed it out to our client sites in the way of comments (Base) and independent travel stories (Wayward Bus, The Park and Backpacking Queensland). We use XEFEED to receive a whole host of data and then go through accepting or denying the information based on relevancy. In this way instead of simply displaying the feeds directly on the sites we are able to remove any spam or porn site links etc.
In all cases we are still offering this service, however, we have now set all this up using Google services and in particular Google Reader. Google Reader can handle hundreds of feeds which we can quickly scan for relevancy. We then tag the information we want with relevant tags and pick up the RSS feed for those tags displaying them on the client websites. We are even doing this for random regional images from Creative Commons (Oz Experience) and Videos from You Tube, Google Video and Truveo etc (Base).
One of the other advantages of using Google Reader instead of our own XEFEED product now is that we can use multiple accounts. XEFEED was our own product and was designed to be run in-house and in this way it did not have multiple users and the interface was not the most friendly in the world. Using Google Reader however, we are able to give alot of the power of deciding what is shown on the websites back to the clients - this will be particularly relevant in multi-company sites such as Backpacking Queensland where all members will effectively be able to control their own content (we are in the process of updating all these feeds now).
So, what does this mean for our XEFEED product. Unfortunately, the end of the software - but fortunately no-more development needed. We still offer our Internet monitoring services which continue to be as popular as ever. This service is in fact even better as it is transparent with the client who can log onto the Google accounts we set them up with and actually see the data themselves there too. We have not stopped developing and we have still setup a number of feeds that go into Google Reader from sites that don’t have RSS so as we can capture the necessary data - I guess this is a big asset of our service.
At the end of the day - I guess you have to say argh Google, we do love you!