This past Saturday, I harped on a bit about a service called Shyftr, which recently sparked a momentary ruckus over its management of RSS feeds. In short, some bloggers, like Mathew Ingram (also a writer for Toronto’s Globe and Mail) and Tony Hung, thought it went too far in its handling of content culled from feeds across the Web, while others, like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, had more favorable views of the service.
I myself took a sort of big-picture look at the methodology employed by Shyftr, and found that, though it might provide some measure of convenience to the user in its organization of blog posts and comments, I imagined it would create a disconnect among different portions of websites’ readerships due to its creation of its own base of commentary, independent of reader discussions on the original blogs themselves.
Today it appears that Dave Stanley, co-founder of the service, has chosen to at least partially heed the calls of us loudmouth pundits and “revise the format around (its) discussions.” Stanley says his company has deep respect for content publishers, and doesn’t intend to cause “unease,” and pledges Shyftr from this point forward to “only display the title, author and date of an item where discussions occur outside the reader.” (Note: the term “discussions” here is analogous to reader commentary.)