Use Google Sets for competitive analysis

I bet you've not heard of another crazy-cool service from Google, Google Sets. I first read about Google Sets some months ago but didn't bother looking until today, Sunday, when i saw this interesting article about Google Set's patents.

This is from that article:

"Google Sets is one of the first services that were added to Google Labs and it's a cool way to find list of related terms. Google Sets is a tool that generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples. For example, you could enter Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and get a list of US presidential candidates." (from Google Operating System)

So, think I, this would be a cool thing to use for competitive analysis. You know, answering the question, "What other companies are in this space?"

So being of a single track mind, I tried suggesting the following list: "BlogBridge, Google Reader, Net NewsWire, NewsGator and FeedDemon." Can you tell what they all have in common? Oh yeah, they are all rss reader / aggregators, a space that I have wasted too much of my life getting expert on.

According to Google Sets, the competitors in the space of RSS reader/aggregators are:

feeddemon, blogbridge, google reader, newsgator, netnewswire, bloglines, feedreader, sharpreader, rojo, pluck, newzcrawler, rssowl, jyte, netvibes, amphetadesk, awasu, newsburst, pageflakes, google, newsfire, feedster, rssreader, rss, feedlounge, 订阅到抓虾, feedburner, yahoo, technorati, feedness, firefox, msn, pluckit, newsmonster, aol, bottomfeeder, gougou, sage, myaol

Dang! That's a really good list. All the RSS reader aggregators I know are on that list, some that I don't know, and a few products which are closely allied.

Welcome to the new force in competitive analysis!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, competitive analysis