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January 18, 2006

FeedXS - RSS for Everyone

Michael Arrington

31 comments »

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.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 4:13 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. meneame.net

    January 18th, 2006 at 7:19 am

  2. RSS4Lib

    January 18th, 2006 at 7:28 am

  3. teknokool.net » links for 2006-01-18

    January 18th, 2006 at 7:32 am

  4. Micro Persuasion

    January 18th, 2006 at 8:17 pm

  5. Free Hogg » FeedXs: another signal to the end of e-mail.

    January 19th, 2006 at 12:44 am

  6. Basic Thinking Blog » RSS Anwendung: FeedXS

    January 19th, 2006 at 3:42 am

  7. Fogelmania » ארכיון » RSS להמונים

    January 19th, 2006 at 6:22 am

  8. hetkanWel.net » Blog Archief » RSS voor iedereen- inspirerend weblog over onderwijs, spiritualiteit, wetenschap en samenleving.

    January 19th, 2006 at 12:22 pm

  9. Just a Memo

    January 19th, 2006 at 1:01 pm

  10. VentureWeek » VentureWeek #7 - Week Ending 1/23/06

    January 23rd, 2006 at 11:16 pm

  11. 2.0 Web Apps .com » Faux Feed Instant Feed Creator

    January 24th, 2006 at 5:05 pm

  12. Mashable*

    February 21st, 2006 at 10:15 am

  13. Design Tastes Good - user experience blog » Blog Archive » Feedblog Experiment

    May 21st, 2006 at 8:31 am

  14. Surfarama

    January 18th, 2007 at 2:55 am

Comments

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  1. Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

    January 18th, 2006 at 4:43 am

    Wow, this is a dutch initiative too, just like Fleck.com…

  2. Paul Watson

    January 18th, 2006 at 4:49 am

    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.

  3. Ismael

    January 18th, 2006 at 5:33 am

    It really is an interesting use of RSS. No one said RSS was limited to replicating some website’s original content, after all.

  4. Ebrahim

    January 18th, 2006 at 5:48 am

    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!

  5. Dan Gore

    January 18th, 2006 at 10:03 am

    Ewww, the main page is Flash.

  6. james

    January 18th, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    looks like there is a whole clan of Velhuizen van Zanten’s releasing on tech crunch today!

  7. Shawn

    January 18th, 2006 at 5:17 pm

    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.

  8. alan

    January 18th, 2006 at 7:25 pm

    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.

  9. alb

    January 18th, 2006 at 7:48 pm

    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?

  10. Cybermagellan

    January 19th, 2006 at 12:18 am

    This site is one of the many reasons that I made mine http://cybermagellan.com.

  11. James Corbett

    January 19th, 2006 at 4:21 am

    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.

  12. Dave Ferrick

    January 19th, 2006 at 9:38 am

    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.

  13. alb

    January 20th, 2006 at 2:40 am

    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

  14. Robin Blandford

    January 20th, 2006 at 12:13 pm

    Micheal, had you seen the Irish http://www.nooked.com previously?

  15. Michael Arrington

    January 20th, 2006 at 12:22 pm

    nope, it looks cool though.

  16. Christian Schade

    January 23rd, 2006 at 3:05 am

    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

  17. hyybfxpii

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:15 am

    iqbevwk breilksau pipridjady

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