PostRank

Since our launch last week, I’ve gotten versions of this question a few times:

Since Joe knows us pretty well, I figured if he’s not clear on our rebranding, then it’s pretty likely other folks might be confused, too. (The @replies to Joe’s tweet query confirmed it.)

So I’ll try to clear up any misunderstandings about what we’re up to.

Yes, the company is still AideRSS, Inc. We have not changed to PostRank, Inc. Or AideRank, or PostRSS, or whatever some witty people may imply. One of the reasons for moving focus away from the AideRSS name is that people tended to stumble over it — misspellings, problems remembering it accurately, and it didn’t seem to clearly communicate what we do.

Our core technology, which powers all our products, is PostRank. It was before and it will be in the future. (But who knows what future innovations our geek geniuses might be cooking up in their wily little brains…)

Because PostRank is central to what we do, and, when we’re asked what AideRSS does, we’re really explaining what PostRank does, we’ve decided to focus more on PostRank, as the technology that we develop and improve, as the power and value behind our products and tools, and as our flagship brand.

Many companies have more than one product, and brands tend to be built around those products. To use another local example, lots of people know what a BlackBerry is, but outside of Waterloo, not that many people talk about RIM, the company that makes them. I’ve even been at a conference with a friend who worked for RIM, and heard plenty of folks say, “Oh, she works for BlackBerry”.

PostRank is kind of like that for us. In the future we’ll potentially have lots of products, some built on PostRank, some perhaps built on future technology we’ll develop.

Our actual products and tools (things we offer that the public can put to work for themselves) include:

• PostRank analysis (which you can do on our website, and which takes place behind all our functionality)
• filtering and ranking functionality for your feeds (which you can do on our website or with the Google Reader extension)
• the Top Posts widget (on hold briefly)
• the PostRank Firefox extension
• the Google Reader extension
• APIs that enable third party developers and partners to integrate PostRank functionality into their own applications.

In the future, engagement analysis (”Engagement rankings in the blogosphere”) will become part of our public toolkit as well, but at the moment it’s mostly just a spectator sport for you folks (and an interesting way to find new feeds to subscribe to).

So, we’re focusing on what drives our work and makes us useful (hopefully). PostRank is a focal point for our thoughts, ideas, and development so that everything we work on benefits our user community (present and future).

And no, I don’t know just yet whether that means our t-shirts will become collectors items, so don’t fire up eBay just yet…