Welcome to Rojo!

We are very pleased to announce a new company: Rojo Networks, Inc. Our mission is to make online content more accessible and useful for information consumers, and our free Internet service, Rojo, aims to do just that.

In early 2003 the founders of Rojo met for the first time in a café in San Francisco. We had come from different backgrounds—Chris Alden had been a co-founder of Red Herring Communications and so had come from a publishing perspective while Kevin Burton had developed and was soon to release an RSS reader called NewsMonster (see who else is involved in Rojo here)—but we shared a passionate belief that with the revolution in online writing, with such exciting new techniques as blogs and wikis joining myriad forms of "traditional" Internet publishing, there also needed to be a revolution in online reading. Just as the web became much more useful once the directories and search engines provided easy access to pages, new services would be needed to provide easy access to the innumerable posts, stories, articles, photos, and the like published online every day, every hour, and every minute.

So we set to work, often siphoning off the free wifi access in local cafés, to develop the ideas and technologies that eventually became Rojo. We had long discussions about the ideas of emergence, reputation, aggregation, semantics, social networking, and the like, and about what the best way to discover and manage information would be in the future. We thought a lot about a more people-centric, rather than organization-centric, Internet and what that meant for how we all find, consume, and share content.

As the number of information sources explodes online, we felt that the original model of web publishing, in which publishers struggle to constantly "pull" readers back to their home pages, would have problems adapting. Meanwhile, the solution that many publishers adopted to compensate for this shortcoming, to "push" content out over email, was also becoming more problematic—who needs more email? So a third way was needed, and a third way began to emerge: feeds. Feeds, often known as RSS or Atom feeds, solve many of the problems of publishing via web pages and emails, and so have been adopted by many of the major publishers and most bloggers already. Feeds follow a publish/subscribe model and enable readers to scan information from countless sources much more efficiently than they could by visiting multiple web-sites or wading through emails—and all spam free.

Feeds won't replace web pages or emails, but they will be an important compliment to Internet publishing. However, to make feeds truly useful, services will be needed to help people discover, search, manage, read, and share them. Rojo is one of those services. Here's how:

With a free Rojo account all you need is a browser and you can aggregate content from countless publishers, bloggers, and corporations. Rojo has already indexed over 700,000 feeds and is adding thousands more a day—but even if you find a feed before we do you can add it to Rojo with a few easy steps. And of course, users can search our database of feeds if they know what they are looking for.

For those people who may not know what a feed is or how to find one, we have worked on several ways to help you out. We have pulled together collections of feeds, sorted by topic as well as by popular publishers, to get you started. We also have a directory of feeds, and have developed some special technology once you have started subscribing to feeds to recommend other feeds that may be of interest.

Not only do we help you find feeds, but we have worked hard to make the stories in those feeds easy to find and easy to read. We have built what we call a "reputation system" which tracks the most popular feeds and stories according to your particular interests and makes recommendations as to what you might want to read. (Everything in Rojo has a "reputation," which we thought of as a kind of "mojo"—which is how we got "Rojo.")

One of our core beliefs is that our community—our friends, family, and associates—play a major role in helping us discover and understand information. It may be your grandmother sending you a clipping from the local paper, or your friend emailing you a link to a web page, or someone chatting about a story in a café—but however it happens we all tend to use each other as guides to information. Many look at the blogosphere and see open communities that help each other discover and analyze information—and we do too. Why work alone to discover what feeds and stories to read when your friends and colleagues who may share similar interests are doing the same thing?

Rojo has therefore developed community features in which friends and colleagues can connect to each other within Rojo and flag stories for each other and share what feeds they are reading.

Reading content online is the third biggest Internet application—following email and search—and we believe feeds will have a profound impact on online publishing. That being said, today perhaps less than 1% of the hundreds of millions of online information consumers across the world are using feeds… so far. This is still a technology in its infancy and we feel as excited about what lies ahead as the web pioneers must have felt a decade ago. Rojo is for us the beginning of a journey, and we hope you will join us.

Today we are announcing our invitation-only beta trials. If you'd like to participate, you can let us know and we will invite as many users as we feel we can manage. Beta users can also invite their friends and colleagues into Rojo so you may receive an invitation from a friend. We only ask two things of our users—patience and feedback. We are doing our best to build the best service possible and greatly appreciate any candid feedback you may have about how we can make Rojo better. A great way to get in touch with us is emailing feedback@rojo.com.

Onward!

The Rojo Team

Comments

[Dalibor]

I am interested for trying this things out.
Please, one invitation if possible.
thanks.

[ryan]

Can I get an invite to check this out?

Thanks,

Ryan

[David]

Would like to try out!

Would like an invite!