Souyo Relaunches River-of-News Aggregator

Written by Luyi Chen on December 20, 2006
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Souyo-SofaBeijing based Souyo is one of the few independent Chinese blog search engines that we have been tracking. Several days ago, it launched a new online feeds reader, Sofa (Press Release).

We call it a relaunch, because it originally has an inline feeds aggregator and the new product is just a slightly dress-uped version.

We don’t think it can be called a feeds reader in its current state, because it doesn’t keep reading status. We would rather call it an aggregator.

What worth mention is its river-of-news style, which remixes latest posts from different feeds and reorganizes in timely order.

In case you wonder why it’s called Sofa, there’s a network culture in China that the first person to comment a blog post is called Sofa.

With a river of news style aggregator, certainly you get better chance to become a Sofa. This would be a super useful feature to online feeds readers, but not supported by any other service in China now.

The first river of news aggregator we heard of is Dave Winer’s OPML Editor. But this is a somewhat personal application.

Technorati Favorites is similar to Souyo’s personal aggregation channel. But both of them cannot be called online feeds readers as we explained above.

The best online RSS reader that supports river-of-news style is Google Reader. What makes it a real reader is that when you go though your news river, it updates your reading status in real time.

A little history of Souyo

Souyo relaunched into a blog search engine in March 2006. Read our previous coverage of Souyo for more background.

Before it started blog search business, it was a game and bittorrent search engine. Its history is dating back to 2004 or even earlier. These two services are still in operation.

After they launched blog search, they have tried several interesting ideas that really caught eyes, like 1hour and Yoooo.

In August, they rolled out a major updates. One good feature is that they have a fast view of personal aggregation channel. We think that would turn into mobile support, but they didn’t go further.

With the latest launches of blog search engine from Baidu and Netease, the chances for independent blog search engine is far smaller than before. This is not purely a search algorithm problem, but computing power and operation.

Now Souyo is still suffered from index coverage and update speed. While it’s good to see more beautiful aggregator like Sofa, improvements in search result is more important, as Souyo is still branded as a blog search engine. We wish them good luck.

And now who is going to be Sofa?

One Response to “Souyo Relaunches River-of-News Aggregator”

  1. arvind on December 22nd, 2006 7:43 pm

    can you please review Zipphy.com

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