PostRank

» see postrank.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

PostRank started in July '07 as AideRSS, a feed-reader-adjacent tool that scored posts inside an RSS feed by how much external chatter they generated. ilya grigorik built it in Waterloo, Ontario, the same campus town that gave us BlackBerry. the rebrand to postrank.com happened in October 2008 when the company narrowed its focus from RSS-reading to social-engagement scoring. the corporate name changed to PostRank Inc in July 2009.

the product was a number from 1 to 10 attached to every blog post. the score combined social-sharing signals from twitter and digg with on-site engagement like comments and link clicks. external links from other blogs that referenced the post weighted the highest. the higher the number, the more the post had moved through the social layer that mattered to bloggers in the 2008-2011 window. forbes and cisco both put postrank widgets on their posts. google's own product blogs used them for a while too.

google bought the company on june 3, '11. the team relocated from waterloo to mountain view and stopped taking new postrank signups within weeks. existing customers got twelve months. on may 1, '12, the postrank services formally shut down. ilya grigorik became a google web-performance engineer and went on to write the book on high-performance browser networking, which is its own arc.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually scored ~

the postrank score sat on top of an aggregation pipeline that pulled engagement signals in near-real-time. once a post hit your RSS feed, postrank started counting. twitter shares, digg votes, facebook likes, comment activity on the source page, click-through from feed readers. the score updated as the signals came in. for a blogger it was a way to tell which post had legs without watching analytics for a week.

the product also exposed an API that let publishers and ad networks pull the same engagement scores into their own dashboards. postrank connect, the influencer-marketing product, layered campaign management on top. the API was the part google was buying. social-engagement signals were going into google's analytics stack and that was the strategic value, not the consumer-facing widget on a blog post.

~ what carried over ~

google's social analytics line, briefly, was the inheritance. some of postrank's scoring concepts ended up in google analytics social reports through the 2012-2017 window, before google folded the social-reports tab into broader campaign attribution. the consumer-facing postrank widget on blog posts disappeared cleanly. by 2013 the only remaining references were old WordPress plugin pages still loading dead JavaScript against a 404.

i was reading blogs through google reader in this window and never installed a postrank plugin. the engagement-score-on-every-post tier was not a problem i had. but the larger pattern is the one worth marking. the rss-reading social-scoring blog-analytics layer of 2007-2012 was a whole product category that completely vanished into the platform-owned attribution graphs that came after.

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