Netherlands-based FeedXS, which launched today, forces you to think about RSS in it’s purest form: a way to broadcast content. Jeroen Bertrams, one of the founders (the other founder is Hans Veldhyzen van Zanten) said in an email: “we are trying to make rss feeds accessible for the masses”.
The idea is to allow anyone to publish an RSS feed. Skip the blog. Go right to a feed, perhaps as a replacement to email to distribute personal news about yourself. The company feed is here, for instance. It’s more of an administrative interface and the content is designed to be read via the actual feed only.
The publishing interface has a few formatting helpers but is in need of an overhaul. But there is something really unique here – you can publish directly from MSN messenger. Once you are registered on the site you simply add “msn@feedxs.com” as a contact. You have to authenticate yourself (log in) the first time, and after that publishing is very easy.
So who’s the target market? Well, not bloggers, probably. And given that there is a need to understand what RSS is and how it is used, it’s not for mainstream uses either. But it is an extremely easy way to broadcast content to people via the MSN messenger feature. And I love that it exploits RSS in a somewhat new and interesting way.