Shiftyr Takes Full RSS Feeds Then Says Oops

Fri, 04/18/2008 - 15:56

Shiftyr, which stands for 'Share Your Feeds Together" is a service that attempts to mix a feed reader and a social networking site all in one place, where you can share your feeds with your friends and find similar feeds. This all sounds great, except for one crucial error: they started re-publishing the feeds of sites without the publishers' permission. This allowed search engines to index the feeds -- similar to what "splogs" do -- and essentially take traffic away from the original site and diverting it to Shiftyr.

Bloggers were not very pleased.