Earthlink learned a valuable lesson about this here Internet thingy: if you have a new product you don’t want people to know about yet, keep it off the Web and the hell away from Steve Rubel. The ISP best known for being ancient and for quirky cross-eyed girl commercials “quietly” launched an RSS reader and social bookmarking site.
Rubel discovered the Web 2.0 additions via his referrer logs yesterday and blew the whistle on a very unsuspecting Earthlink. A little help from Michael Arrington and Dave Winer and the cat bag was sufficiently perforated.
Earthlink’s Dave Coustan let out a shrill eek:
Steve Rubel and Dave Winer (update: and Mike Arrington) showed up at the door a few hours early for the prom. Our hair’s still in curlers, our dress is full of wrinkles, our complexion is a mess.
MyReader and MyFavorites are still partly under construction as bugs are exterminated. Rubel reveals the “core selling point” of the RSS reader is that it shows only new articles since a user’s last visit, rather than unread feeds.
“The social bookmarking site is similar to del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb,” writes Rubel. “You can tag and share favorites and see all of the other bookmarks in the community that share the same tags.”
Mikey likes it:
What excites me most about these launches is that a large new audience will be exposed to newish Web 2.0 ideas. About 12 million people visit Earthlink properties each month, generating nearly a billion page views (MyEarthlink alone has about 2 million uniques and 115 million page views)
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