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.
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Wow, this is a dutch initiative too, just like Fleck.com…
The IM integration is especially interesting. I wonder if in a group IM chat it could be used as a logger. After the group chat everyone could check out the feed as meeting-minutes.
It really is an interesting use of RSS. No one said RSS was limited to replicating some website’s original content, after all.
User Interface is really very bad. 5 unsuccessful signups without any reason/error. (Colors are hard on eyes too)
I’m not returning to them anytime soon. uh!
Ewww, the main page is Flash.
looks like there is a whole clan of Velhuizen van Zanten’s releasing on tech crunch today!
You’ve been able to add blog entries (which have both RSS and Atom feeds) from AIM for about two years now. Just add AOLJournals to your Buddy List.
Something like Yahoo! 360 is probably a more useful “RSS for the masses” tool since it doesn’t just make the publishing and formatting easy, it also includes means of distribution and promotion through integrated online community. For business in particular, publishing is just one step - I also need distribution and promotion.
For instance, you can join a Yahoo! group with related interests with a few clicks and promote your Y! 360 blog to them, and people who want to read your RSS without a dedicated client can add your feed as a module in My Yahoo!
I can see that people might want to keep a shared IM log as an RSS feed as a meeting minutes archive, however, MSN Messenger is a consumer IM tool, not very popular in corporate environments.
i’ve registered for feedxs and have tried to publish directly from msn. but when i add the msn@feedxs.com contact to my list, it doesn’t appear to be online, so i cant start a conversation.
has anyone else had this problem? am i doing something wrong?
This site is one of the many reasons that I made mine http://cybermagellan.com.
Looks good but it’s hardly a ’somewhat new’ way of manipulating RSS. Nooked have been doing this for about a year with their FeedWizard service.
alb
“i’ve registered for feedxs and have tried to publish directly from msn. but when i add the msn@feedxs.com contact to my list, it doesn’t appear to be online, so i cant start a conversation.
has anyone else had this problem?”
Same here. It’s pretty disappointing really since that is a big feature. I just emailed them but who knows if I’ll get a response.
for anybody who cares, my feedxs contact is online now. maybe i needed to open and close msn a few times, or maybe the contact is only online sometimes.
thanks dave for letting me know i wasnt the only one
Micheal, had you seen the Irish http://www.nooked.com previously?
nope, it looks cool though.
I have registered and am publishing a feed there - super cool for oneliners/microblogs, but the MSN interface could be more elegant.
Several feedreaders seem to have problems with the RSS’s
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