Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Feedly, the Firefox plug-in that consumers have enjoyed for organizing their favorite sites into magazine-like start pages—presenting input from Google Reader, Twitter streams, and other services they subscribe to and interact with—has been offering a version of its service to businesses for a couple of months now.

What’s the draw of the service for the enterprise? For one thing, it’s the semantic technology embedded within Feedly, which uses the OpenCalais web service to get a clean representation of metadata behind content. That gives power to enterprise users such as marketing professionals, who might be subscribed to various blogs and feeds and services and different content that’s relevant to their brand.

“Semantic technology comes into play,” says Feedly developer Edwin Khodabkchian. “Imagine you are launching a new product or event and multiple sources start talking about stuff related to that. Our users expected us to increase Feedly’s smarts to understand that these articles are somehow related. That is where semantic technology comes together.”

With the rich metadata the service disambiguates and delivers about entities across content sources, “we can organize content in more interesting ways. Thanks to user input and technology like Calais we could add smarts to Feedly to understand these correlated articles, group them together and make it easier for people to consume that information.”

Khodabkchian wasn’t aware there was a big enough business opportunity in how corporate users were using the consumer service until he began hearing from large companies when Feedly experienced downtime. “People would call and say we need this back up,” he says. “We didn’t realize we had that many enterprise users working on it.”

The realization led to the development of services that about 20 customers have lined up so far to use to aid them with intelligence gathering, competitive analysis, brand monitoring and community management. Those services start with better support options and extend from there.

Mashups for business

“Once we were engaging with those customers we started understanding their use cases and building features more tailored to what they do, like better integration with Google Docs to extract clips from articles that a marketing person reads and can then publish to a report in PDF,” he says. Or corporate users in competitive intelligence cells curating information can easily take the articles they like out of hundreds available and republish them as a micro-website that others in their company can view.

Under way in private mode with a few customers is its Feedly Mashup service, which allows small business and larger organizations to customize, brand and publish a subset of their Feedly categories as public web pages/embeddable widgets. Mashups now are more of a custom solution and priced to that effect, but there’s potential to productize that on a broader scale, and lower its cost, as the most common use cases are identified. Khodabkchian’s own background is in integration and composite apps at Oracle, and the Streets mash-up framework he created that led to Feedly powers the enterprise service as well.

Is that where Feedly’s real future lies? “To be honest, the consumer side of this is going through an explosion,” he says, and that’s where the majority of the attention is going. Khodabkchian aims to keep it available as a free service to consumers by using it as a marketing discovery tool. There is a development group for the enterprise version but Khodabkchian expects that he’d look for a partnership with a big vendor that has the sales support and customer relationships if he decides to go all-out in this area.

“We’d look for someone who really understands the enterprise side and partner with them to deliver more advanced features,” he says.

More doors to open

As for further enriching the business experience, semantic technology likely has more to offer. “There are definitely exciting things. We are partially there but we need to understand how to make other parts of semantic web technologies more simple and how to expose them to the user,” he says. “Sentiment analysis is obviously one.”

A marketing person, for example, tracking the company’s brand would really benefit if Feedly could identify which are the positive articles about a launch, and which are the negative ones.

“I think the technology is really getting close to executing on that, and also on the ability to understand quotes, where they come from and try to understand the context better,” he says. “There’s a lot more doors that semantic analysis opens that we haven’t really gotten the chance to digest and make available in a way that is accessible to mainstream users, but it’s definitely on the roadmap for the next couple of years.”