The issue and problem with this sort of site is: do you really want to give an unaccountable third party site such power over your subscriptions? The idea of a central pointing body has been mooted before - and it has been shot down in flames. There is some sense to it - but it does give a lot of power to the SoloSub’s of this world.

Yeah, Ivan, you are right.

I am comfortable handing my feeds over to feedburner though - the reporting and usability make it worth it. With the right export tools in place I could get comfortable with another third party as well.

Brian Benzinger just IM’d me with a good point - SoloSub does not take over your feed. Your subscribers are still using your normal atom/rss feeds and if solosub disappeared it would not affect your subscribers in the least.

There is a body of work around USM - Universal Search Mechanism which aims to do the same as Solosub and is currently supported by FeedBurner.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/what.....#whatisusm

But which ever method is chosen, something needs to be done before we get mass market adoption. The Atom 1.0 proposal has a very good auto-discovery mechanism if only the world looked and were not myopic about RSS.

I found a solution that provides the selection of RSS feed readers called “Quicksub” - it works as a DIV layer that displays a list of feed readers for the given feed link/button.

You can find it here: http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

I’ve added it to the feed links on http://www.ArtistServer.com - so far no feedback from the users though.

One of the hurdles that also needs to be dealt which in such a solution, is educating the user. Most people still don’t know what RSS feeds are - or why they should even check them out.

QuickSub provides a “What’s this?” link at the bottom of the layer which is nice since you can point that at your own page where you the site owner explain how/why people should use RSS.

All of us turbogeeks are assimilating this technology - but JoeUser is still having trouble navigating and types full URLS into Google search instead of their address bar. A link to a page offering feed options doesn’t help the user - it simply gives more options, adding to the confusion for the average user.

SoloSub should provide a default chunk of info on RSS feeds and readers to educate the user, and provide the ability for a site owner to provide that info on their own.

This could be done by using a standard file at the root of each site using this service, maybe and XML file with a few settings [SiteName.com/solosub.xml]. When SoloSub gets a request, and a variable is passed, like f=1 for “yes, use the xml file” - SoloSub hits your site and includes the RSS info and any other settings from your xml file. When f=0 or doesn’t exist, they display the default info.

Educate and empower the users!

Asside from the lack of info about what RSS feeds are, or what feed readers are on the service demo page, it’s a nice idea - it just needs some additional details and/or options.

- Gideon Marken

I think the true fix for this problem is going to be browsers incorporating feed auto-discovery and subscription.

I’m drawing parallels to the web-email providers who over time released small apps to act as the default mail app for “mailto” links, etc.

Until then, checkout QuickSub. It’s a very slick (even intuitive) method of offering multiple subscription options.

Opensource and very customizable.

This seems like a poor man’s FeedBurner. The problem is that FeedBurner is free.

Randy, you have a point, in that the landing page for a feed created by feedburner does have this functionality - see our feedburner page as an example - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch.

There is a difference though. With solosub you do not turn your actual feed over to them. You keep whatever feed you had.

That last point made me see the difference between solosub and feedburner (which I was also going to say did the same thing, but doesn’t.) Your subscriber uses solosub only once, it just passes your feed URL along to the reader they want.

I have a similar project as well called SingleSub which does the same thing as well as generate chicklets and JavaScript.

RSS feeds today are a pain - you either need to include tons of subscription buttons to make it easier on people who don’t fully understand what the “XML” button means, or rely on autodiscovery of feeds, which seems to break as often as it works. I spend a lot of time with aggregators requesting that they re-cache the feeds on TechCrunch, and it is still an ongoing project.