Feedonomics

One application for the new stream feature in Grazr is the ability to create ad-hoc networks. Social networks like Facebook or Twitter require people to explicitly join and pick their friends. An ad-hoc network can be assembled spontaneously from any group of people, and followed only when needed. Here are some simple examples I built today. I attended the Boston Media Makers meeting in Boston today, and decided that it would be an interesting group to follow. I don’t need to keep track of their postings every day, so subscribing to their feeds in a feed reader or friending them in a system like Facebook doesn’t make sense, but I would like to be able to catch up on their activities before going to the next meeting. I passed around a signup list and asked everyone to write down their blog URL and Twitter names. It only took a few minutes to assemble the reading lists in Grazr and merge the results.

OpenNetworkers.info author Ray van den Bel puts his entrepreneurial spirit to work to help job hunters and head hunters hook up. OpenNetworkers is “all about decentralized online strategies,” van den Bel writes. “Our idealism is about sharing and helping not just ‘connecting’, in a professional and personal way.”

To make OpenNetworkers as easy as possible to use, van den Bel collects job postings from the ON forums, plus information on the latest site activity, and keeps them in a Grazr widget on the front page. That way, visitors can quickly find out what they’ve missed since the last time on this busy site.

“As an online strategist I am always on the lookout for new developments in Web 2.0,” van den Bel says. “Widgets are at the forefront of online development as are the Open Networkers who use them in their decentralized strategy across more than 50 portals and 25,000 members.” He’s optimistic about the technology.  ”Widgets will change the Internet landscape for everyone. Grazr is making a unique widget which has integrated many more functionalities than just adding RSS feeds. It allows you to use it as a browser anywhere on any device. We can expect next generation mobile devices such as the Google phone to fully make use of such widgets in combination with thin-client solutions or even online desktops.”

van der Bel likes Grazr widgets better than others. “Before I knew Grazr, I just used Widgetbox and other simple feedreaders which do the job on a very basic level, but nothing more.” He’d like to see Grazr add chat functionality similar to Meebo rooms, so as to “enable news gathering and direct interaction amongst professionals with same interests.”

He likes the recent improvements to Grazr. “[It] was a bit technical for the average user,” van der Bel says. “Now the interface has improved and it is clearer, for instance, how to get back to the previous feed. Also it can open your selection in a new screen.”

van der Bel is looking forward to even more new developments on the Grazr front. “Concentrate on direct interaction, instant messaging and rich content streaming. Go from informing to interaction.”