I agree with Fred Wilson – email can be an important way to syndicate blog content. Fred has about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers.
Until now Feedblitz was the only real choice to bloggers. I’ve chosen not to use it because of the heavy orange feedblitz branding included in emails. And while they’ve made improvements in their service, there are a number of features which are unacceptable, like the fact that they group blogs into a single user email unless a blog is paying the premium fee, etc.
Tonight I heard about Squeet, a new competitor in the space. But while Squeet seems fine for a user looking to get email from a feed, it does not supply the necessary tools to bloggers to allow them to promote the service.
What I’m looking for is a service that provides a “feedburner” level of features and service:
- zero service provider branding on emails
- I am in control of the email list; no spamming by the service provider
- options on frequency of emails
- options on email template
I’m happy to pay for this service, although I think there should be a free version as well that has ads within the email. I actually think it would be smart for the provider to share ad revenue with the blogger.
Feedburner is the obvious company to build this product, but they have a partnership with Feedblitz and seem to be making no move to build their own. I’ve been asking Constant Contact build a blog specific product, but so far no luck. They are just not set up to auto-send daily content from a blog.
Maybe MailFeed will be the answer.
It’s on our backburner now.
Do we need to move backwards? Why not look forward and let RSS catch on. Email is a terrible medium to get content. I filter through enough crap, I can’t imagine all my feeds in my in box. Can’t people spend more time making RSS better and stop with the web 2.0 nonsense.
Ok, so we now have:
1. coComment
2. co.mments
3. myComments
And now eMails?
Can’t we have an umbrella instead of scraps?
What you say you ask for is what FeedBlitz offers, not that I’m promoting FeedBlitz, actually I’m evaluating them now.
But you ask for:
*zero service provider branding on emails
* I am in control of the email list; no spamming by the service provider
* options on frequency of emails
* options on email template
You say you’re willing to pay for them and FeedBlitz offers all that for a fee and would allow you to get rid of the orange branding and send newsletters separately. So are you penalizing FeedBlitz for not giving you that stuff for free?
By the way, when did you start blogging? For many of us, at least a couple who are serious about blogging, Bloglet was the early legitimate offering and it’s only been in the last half a year or so that they really lost it.
You know, there’s a reason FeedBlitz focused on wooing Bloglet users.
In any case, I’m not totally happy with FeedBlitz but they seem to be heading in the right direction.
Clyde
Sorry about the double post. Please nuke the earlier of the two. The third link is wrong.
Apologies again. (You can nuke this one too.)
I’ve been using bloglet.com for quite some time on my blog now, and although it’s somewhat unreliable and the last “News” on the site dates back to March 2004, it still works.
I tried shifting over to FeedBlitz, and I must mention that their bloglet import tool is brilliant. I’d have made the move, but then I found their huge, imposing ORANGE header being inserted in the feed mails and the visually destructive formatting of the emails, with huge fonts and mismatched colors.
Frankly, I’m much better off with Bloglet’s plain jane text mails, than Feedblitz’s advertizing banners for emails.
RssFwd.com is an excellent free service.
I subscribe to Luistxo comment. I am currently using RssFwd. I did an evaluation some time ago on them and R-mail. You can see it here: http://mapopesc...ons-evaluation/
Maybe you coud contact RssFwd.com which is run with an open source Rails library and try to get what you need.
Mike – I’ve been using an autoresponder service for a number of years now called AWeber to deliver my email newsletter. They have been pretty progressive about adding RSS and other features. About 3 months ago they added an email subscription RSS feed
It does everything you mentioned. You control the subscriber form, the list is yours and you create the template – I send mine out in HTML so my RSS feed looks very much like my branded site.
not relevant to this post. But i was just checking Techcrunch Francaise and the stats dun look too good. Why doesn’t techcrunch go Chinese? I am sure millions in China are crying out loud for something like your blog…
It’s moving backwards to subscribe to blogs with email. Instead, we should make RSS easier to use and give our inbox a break.
I agree. For a good while now I have been talking up RSS forwarding to email. I am sure most people spend a significant amount of time using email. I know that I have gmail open all day as I work. Installing and learning to use another rss reader app or web service does not make sense in my world… I dont want to shift my attention around to multiple user interfaces if i dont have to.
this has nothing to do with ending the evolution of RSS, as one comment suggests. A service providing RSS forwarding to email can co-evolve if need be, but in truth the basics are all a user really needs.
Using gmail, as an example, i can completely manage my RSS subscriptions by using labels and filters.
The messages come through logically using RSS Channel Name as the From name, Post Title as the Subject and the source permalink is included with the content… which can be html or text.
It’s a natural use of RSS on the subscriber end. Content is king, right?
Well i get my RSS content emailed directly to me and can access the content wherever I am (since i use gmail).
Someone here mentioned rssfwd.com. This is the service that I use. It’s clean and intuitive and I love it.
I have deployed the same service for the videoblogging community at http://vlogdir.com. Videoblog posts, including link to the RSS item enclosure (the video) are sent to users.
As the audience who want and should be able to easily use RSS widens and varies, email will become more apparent as a logical use of subscription handling for RSS, just as it always has been for email newsletters and alerts.
Some things dont change, and shouldnt.
Making email better, as google has done IMO, is more critical than making RSS readers better. Geeks will always want to play with new software, but beyond that, i don’t see many apps and services being vastly better than using email services. Not to mention that these email services themselves will also be providing deeper RSS features and other interactive features basically, which furthers my point at focusing on one interface, not many.
sull
Agreed. But these blog services have trouble scaling their applications! Just think about them trying to scale mail and storage. I just don’t see it in the near term.
What is wrong with using the WebClips feature on the top of your Gmail inbox to alert you of new postings on Blogs. Then click through and read it at source.
Get ready for the next release of FeedDigest
Not just e-mail out, but e-mail in, too. I’ll be in touch with our beta is up, as the next release is just finishing alpha.
It wouldn’t be very hard to write this functionality as a plugin for WordPress (or other hosted blog systems). Is there really a reason to use someone else’s service if you can install plugins and your server has mail capabilities?
Oh, and we let you entirely rewrite the whole content of the e-mail (unless you’re a free user).
I’m in the blogs by email camp. I don’t want to waste time checking another app for new posts. By combining with email I only need to check a single app. Plus I get to search and filter the entries using gmail.
Generating outgoing email for each subscriber is probably a comparable load to responding to all of their pings when nothing is new.
It would be even better if comments came by email too as a thread under the main topic.
If you think about it, a blog really is a private email list where only the owner can generate topics and all of the comments are threaded off from the main topic. The email list archive is equivalent to the blog web site.
As for Google WebClips, it is completely annoying and I turned it off the first day. WebClips alternates content and ads in the same spot in the UI. That forces me to waste attention deciding if I am looking at an ad or a new post. I am unwilling to waste the time sorting this out.
A much better UI would be to make each blog look like a folder (in a new section called blogs). When you open the blog folder each topic is listed. Open the topic and all of the comments appear. Add your ads on the right like gmail.
I’m also a big believer in RSS to Email for now. My thinking is that Email isn’t going anywhere and email applications will probably always be “ahead” of RSS apps. I’m an Outlook user and very happy with its filtering ability.
My feeds don’t clutter up my Inbox at all; instead, they’re automatically sorted, flagged, etc. right when they come in.
Squeet’s management console looks pretty good, and the OPML import should make it easy to try — I’m going to give it a shot.
You may want to have a look at http://www.rssfwd.com/. I use them at http://www.digitaldevotion.org and it works like a champ.
I’ll have to agree that the standard FeedBlitz email is fairly ugly. It says a lot that more than one person is deciding not to use that service largely or partly because of that.
On the newsreader vs. email tip, I actually use both depending on the product. I’m gradually moving more to a newsreader, ok, two newreaders but, generally speaking, delivering my content is about reaching my readers however they want it, wherever they want it.
But I need good tools to make that possible. I’ve got some. I want more!
If you want full control over this service, you better install it yourself on your server.
PHPlist is een open source distribution list manager: see phplist.com.
I documented the setup of phplist to send daily rss items (weekly or monthly, depending on the users) at http://docs.php...ConceptualSetup
There are a great many services that manage to integrate blogging, email, and rss all into one neat little package. Probably my favorite is Near-Time (http://www.near-time.net) – They allow for outbound email notifications on new articles/pages, updates, etc. Very clean, and easy to keep up with emails. They also allow for inbound email (i.e: email sent to a particular address will be automatically posted in your near-time blog/wiki.) Good stuff, I am able to both keep up on near-time sites and publish my own, all without ever having to actually go to the site.
Feedblitz seemed to be the best I could find (feedburner integration is a bonus).
With the paid version I don’t get the heavy orange branding Mike speaks of, but I’ve always wanted more in relation to the frequency. I want a console that allows me to do scheduling. More importantly, I want to check off which articles to include in the mailout. Email fatigue sets in quickly and blasting off every single post is a sure fire way to keep your churn rate high.
The other question I keep asking myself is deliverability. I know how hard traditional mail vendors (ie. verticalresponse, constant contact) work to keep their IPs whitelisted and that’s with paying customers who need to take time and effort to pull together a mailout. One has to wonder how many of the emails from Feedblitz and other rss blast services are actually being delivered? Peter – any numbers to report on this? Isn’t keeping your IP whitelisted sucking your day dry?
Are there no WordPress extensions that allow for this? In Movable Type, you just plug in “MT-Notifier” and you’ve got your e-mail subscription stuff all set up in about one minute.
Mike:
Please address comment #4.
[snip]
“But you ask for:
*zero service provider branding on emails
* I am in control of the email list; no spamming by the service provider
* options on frequency of emails
* options on email template
You say you’re willing to pay for them and FeedBlitz offers all that for a fee and would allow you to get rid of the orange branding and send newsletters separately. So are you penalizing FeedBlitz for not giving you that stuff for free?”
[snip]
It’s a reasonable question. You say you’re prepared to pay.
Go on then.
Phil
Why don’t you try InfoMinder?
It not only syndicates blogs but also marks all changes on the page. You can receive the changes as an RSS feed. You can track both blogs and web pages.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but thought it may be something you want to take a look at.
– Dorai
Mike
Take a look at http://signup.alerts.msn.com
We’ve been doing what you want for quite a while. Answer a few questions, point us to your feed and that’s it.
Dave
#28 – Phil, as far as I can tell there is no way to remove feedblitz branding and links from the email, even with the premium version. Is that incorrect?
I checked out Squeet and they had a promotion section which seemed decent to me. Is it new, or do you not find it satisfying for some reason?
I think I might put this on my blog after I’m done with the renovation.
If you customize the emails there’s a teeny weeny logo in the footer at the moment (try signing up and seeing a practical example at http://www.universetoday.com where FeedBlitz serves over 30,000 readers using a combination of Pro and Turbo services).
One of the hallmarks of FeedBlitz is how we’ve evolved the service to meet the needs of our publishers, that’s why we’re both the number 1 and the fastest growing RSS to email provider. I’d welcome the chance to work with you rather than having a public debate about our use of orange. You’ll have mail in a few minutes.
Phil
Phil, can I take the email list with me with no hassles if I stop using the service?
I am signing up for the newsletter above.
http://www.camp...ignmonitor.com/
I suggest you take a look at campaign monitor and plug them in place of constant contact.
yea, thats serious, there really should be email
Don’t tell too many people about Squeet. It’s a far superior service to RssFwd and we wouldn’t want the masses to come in and ruin everything. You guys can stick with RssFwd though. No problems.
Give Feedlinx a try at http://www.feedlinx.com
This is a new service, but there is a lot of potential.
One of the problems with emailing feeds is that you eventually go back to your feed reader and have to remember which posts you’ve already seen. Feedlinx tracks what’s already been sent to your email address and marks it read. It tracks “read” posts across machines, feed readers, and now email.
One really bad thing about FeedBlitz from a user perspective is the fact that they share the user’s email with all the publishers for the feeds the user subscribes to. That is a major privacy violation! If I subscribe to 20 feeds, that’s 20 publishers that get my email.
I looked at Squeet.com and they specifically say in their privacy policy that they do not share emails with publishers.
Re: comment 42 from Phil
Actually, FeedBlitz users can sign up anonymously. Of course, traditionally when you register for an email newsletter the publisher has your email.
I don’t get the privacy violation but, as I said, you can register anonymously.
Feedlinx (http://www.feed...x.com/publisher) has a new interface for publishers. It’s VERY new, so suggestions are definitely welcome. Changes are implemented very quickly so you could have a direct impact on the future of the service.
Since Feedlinx emails are direct representations of your feed, you control what the users see. You can view your subscriber list and also make it simple for your readers to signup. Emails are sent out every 15 minutes in an individual fashion, just like a feed reader.
This service is for bloggers who would rather spend their time blogging, not managing subscription lists. You control the content because you control your feed. There’s a little bit of branding at the bottom, but that also serves the purpose of allowing the subscriber to go to Feedlinx with service issues instead of the blogger.
http://www.CommunityServer.org supports email blog subscriptions and other types of email notification.
aweber.com now is offering the same service.
Hello… I think I have what you need for RSS to Email… I have a very large database of subscribers I want to keep in touch with all of my blogs and post… so I found this real cool autoresponder service that does that with no branding etc… This works great because it monitors my blogs and then converts feed to email and then sends it out to my various list… been using it for 2 months now with great results… email me and I will send you a link to the site…
Great Blog I refer to it often…
Best,
dom:)
Actually, there’s been dozens of email options for a long time.
PG Email Newsletter software is an effective solution for online business with easy installation & use, free tech support and free trial. We did all the programming for you, you need only to install and use all your talent.
I’m surprised Google haven’t jumped more onto the RSS/email subscriptions bandwagon. Google Reader excepted they haven’t really made much of an effort. Stick to Feedburner.
Karaoke Kev
http://youtubek...ke.blogspot.com
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