Feedpass Does Absolutely Nothing

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1. Pete Cashmore
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 4:38 am

   I think you could argue that this is on shaky ground ethically - there will be users who set up thousands of Feedpasses and earn a decent sum from other people’s content. That’s pretty close to what the sploggers do.

2. steve olechowski
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 5:18 am

   Just to clarify and put this to bed once and for all, the “link” to FeedDemon that used to be on the FeedBurner BrowserFriendly page was never meant to be interpreted as an “advertisement”. It was created by me within the first month of us launching FeedBurner as a way to point people to one of the best of breed feed readers that existed at the time (early 2004). It pre-dated our investment from Mobius and Brad Feld, and also pre-dated Newsgator’s acquisition of Bradsoft and Nick Bradbury, who was a one man band that created FeedDemon.

   We also private labeled FeedDemon really early on as an experiment to the distribution of our publishers’ feeds, so we could help track how such activities affected the stats of publishers’ feeds.

   At no time did Nick Bradbury approach us and ask us to put that link there (as many many other aggregator developers do every day). I approached him and asked him if was okay for us to put the link there. It was the only way to encourage people to download what we thought was the best offline reader at the time (I still think it is the best). As it stands today, I think our Browser Friendly page provides a slight unfair advantage to online, browser-based aggregators, but the fact that they make it easy to subscribe cannot be debated.

   At any rate, if I sound irked, it’s only because you seem to keep pointing this out as something evil we were doing, when I can tell you straight from the horse’s mouth, that was not the intent.

3. Steve
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 5:27 am

   http://www.oreillynet.com/onla.....k_for.html

   From some thoughts I’ve been having (at the above URL) on data control (your content): “There are people sharing connections on MySpace, now there are non-human entities - open source projects and at least one blog (mine) on MySpace, well how about using that kind of fun and interesting interface for data use permissions? As for data usage permission - you may not know that if you use feedburner for your RSS/ATOM feed syndication you can leave usage open to anyone -or- cut them off completely.”

   It won’t solve people taking content, but it will help brand people who are using content without permission first.

4. Pat Matthews
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 5:40 am

   Mike, why are you spending your valuable time writing about companies that do “absolutely nothing” when there are still plenty of companies to write about that could potentially provide tremendous value to your readership? Just curious.

5. Michael Arrington
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 5:47 am

   Pat - well, I spent some time looking into this last night and thinking about it, so I thought I’d put my thoughts down.

   Also, the last sentence in my post is a flag.

6. Michael Arrington
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 5:49 am

   Steve,

   Don’t be irked. All companies get tossed around in the blogsphere a little. I’m a big fan of feedburner and what you are doing. And I write about you often.

   Mike

7. Dan100
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 5:49 am

   Seems to me that FeedPass does do something - makes it lot easier to one-click sign-up to feeds, with a much better page than FeedBurner’s BrowserFriendly page.

   Further, as Mike himself points out, anyone can put any feed through FeedBurner, so there’s no difference in ethics there.

   What FeedPass does have is a revenue model. Can’t see anything wrong with that!

8. Erik
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 6:14 am

   This has angered a number of bloggers who see it as hijacking their content for commercial purposes (which is exactly what it is).

   One wonders what those bloggers think of YouTube…

   I would assume none of those bloggers would ever put copyrighted video on their site via YT without the permission of the video creator.

9. Chrono Cr@cker
   

   May 21st, 2006 at 6:59 am

   It would probably be better if Feedpass let you add ads after you claim the blog. Atleast this criticism would decease.

   Oh! Well, another web 2.0 service down the drain.

10. Randy Charles Morin
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 7:06 am

    There’s plenty of value in Feedpass and I’m sure plenty of users will end up using it. It’s not a competitor to FeedBurner, in fact, you can use them together. It’s an RSS landing page. That’s all. But, it’s the best RSS landing page (as an application) that I’ve seen. Saying it does absolutely nothing, is kinda weird and makes you sound kinda ignorant.

11. Dave
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 7:12 am

    Honestly. Who actually clicks on ad links!

12. Randy Charles Morin
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 7:17 am

    Hmm, I was thinking. Feedpass is like an amazing version of solosub. So let’s compare Michael’s review of each.

    SoloSub takes a step towards fixing RSS
    Feedpass Does Absolutely Nothing

    Full post here -> http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20060521081354

    What’s up Michael? This seems extra-ordinarily hypocritical or biases.

13. Blaze
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 7:21 am

    Well the trend these days is to place a few little pictures next to your ads so they line up with the ads as if to make them a feature. With people coming up with silly things like this, it’s going to be harder to work out text links. In saying that though, I’m still not fooled myself.

14. Dave Winer
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 7:36 am

    I wonder how you can read my emotions from the other side of the Atlantic, but in this case you got it wrong, I’m not angry, merely cautious. People then assume you’ve correctly read my emotions, and now that has become the issue. Please Mike, let’s have a great high-level discussion about this stuff, and try to make some sense out of this, because it’s important stuff. When you reduce it to emotions, you invite others to do the same.

15. Hope Leman
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 7:55 am

    Would Randy Charles Morin and Dan100 please explain what they see as the ease of use of FeedPass compared to FeedBurner?

    For me, a slightly inept Internet user the biggest advantage FeedPass has over FeedBurner is that FeedPass has a nice little screencast that shows me exactly what it can do. I just want to set up RSS feeds for library patrons unfamiliar with RSS and who need heaps of education on everything about tagging and RSS. FeedBurner’s site is way too geared to experienced bloggers and mystifying for non-bloggers who simply want to set up RSS feeds for their patrons to use. FeedBurner needs to provide way more info for the non-geek universe. FeedPass appeals to librarians who want to reach out to patrons who are even less Web 2.0 savvy than the librarians are (and that is a huge number of librarians).

    But librarians are acutely aware of fair use requirements and red flags are waving all over FeedPass in that respect. If the leading Web 2.0 blogs (e.g., this one and Mashable) are saying, “Stay away…” you can bet that librarians and corporations will stay away. That leaves FeedPass a potential customer base of bloggers—and those are the very people who are furious at FeedPass right now.

    I don’t see much of a business model so far. But the tool is neat. We just need some clever open source person to make one very much like it. And an OPML one while he or she is at it.

    Um, I can’t quite see what Dave Winer finds less than high-level in Michael Arrington’s discussion of the FeedPass issue. Seems to me that the discussion has been civil and illuminating thus far.

    Hope

16. Ivan Pope
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 8:14 am

    Does do quite a lot, actually
    I’m with Randy etc on this. To say that FeedPass ‘does absolutely nothing’ is a bit extreme. It gives a page full of information on how to subscribe to my feed. Compared to that, Feedburner does ‘absolutely nothing’. Feedpass provides an alternative to an ever growing list of subscribe buttons in the sidebar. It’s well organised and aimed at the average user who might click on the subscribe button.
    And as Feedpass themselves say - it’s an addition to Feedburner, not an alternative. I like Feedpass and I think it will get widespread use.

17. Dave Winer
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 8:23 am

    Hope, sorry it wasn’t clear — he said I was angry, and I’m not angry.

    Now I’m frustrated. Still not angry.

18. Dave Winer
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 8:29 am

    In any case, I don’t like it when a decentralizing technology like RSS is centralized. What happens if Feedburner goes out of business? How many feeds would we lose on that day?

    I certainly don’t approve of newcomers doing what Feedburner does, without even asking for permission to do so! Who are these people? How do we know whether we should trust them? Why should I have to trust them?

    Further, it’s not good business, long-term, to take advantage of the naivete of trusting users. Eventually what was once mysterious becomes commonplace, and they figure it out. I was there when they figured out copy protection in software in the 80s, and boy did they make our businesses rock. Rightly so.

    It’s like the backup issue that comes up every time Typepad goes offline, whether or not it’s SixApart’s fault, the users all of a sudden start to worry about what would happen if the company went offline permanently.

    The beauty of RSS is that it doesn’t depend on any one company, until stuff like this comes along. The fact that they might put ads in the feeds is only a small issue relative to the larger one, the fragility of a centralized network.

    BTW, I’m aware of the major competitor coming into the market that Mike talks about, ominously, in his last sentence. I don’t know what their policy is on this. I am available to help them, but so far am not in the loop. It’s a good time for us to be looking at this stuff, because I’m sure it’s going to be much-discussed when the new system comes online (or when Mike leaks its existence, whichever comes first).

19. Nick Dynice
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:07 am

    The Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and all of the other buttons at the bottom bookmark the re-published feed’s feed item address. In this case of this post, it would bookmark http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=872 and not http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....-nothing/. How us fully is this?

    A feedpass URL that is made by someone other than the blog publisher is not going to appear on the blog, so the URL may not see any traffic. So, then, the challenge for the person who has submitted the URL that is not theirs it to publicize it. What better place to do this than a splog? In this sence, FeedPass is a total splogger tool. A splogger can submit a bunch of feed address, publish the FeedPass feeds on their own splog, and try to get people to subscribe via the FeedPass feeds.

    True, this could also be done with FeedBurner, but there is no incentive (no AsSense revenue to be made), unless the splogger tries to redirect this feeds in the future. If this was the case, and the splogger had enough subscribers, the splogger would have gotten enough attention by that point and be taken down (if it was a BlogSpot or Wordpress.com blog) or as least blogged about to point out the splogger is hijacking feeds.

    What would really be bad is if FeedPass had a search engine or directory. Then it would be easy for any user to search for and subscribe to a FeedPass feed. I am not against helping users figure out how to subscribe to feeds, but this does not seem right.

    It seems that the consensus it that it is ok for a company/site/useful and trusted web app to make a little money from helping people find your content (aggregators, FeedBurner, Technorati), but it is not of for an individual who is not creating original and useful content (spammers and sploggers) to make money of of your content.

20. Jon
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:18 am

    Isn’t Google Search doing the same thing (having a short paragraph of text from your website along with their own ads)?

21. Michael Arrington
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:37 am

    Dave says he’s not angry, and I agree that I may have misstated his position. I’ve updated above. Dave, if you’d like me to remove the link or change what I’ve written, please let me know and I will.

22. Dave Winer
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:40 am

    Please, don’t remove the link, and no need to change the post. I just wanted to be sure that everyone knows that I’m a happy camper. Haven’t had this much fun with this topic, ever.

    http://www.scripting.com/2006/.....Feedburner

    

23. Randy Charles Morin
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:45 am

    Now Dave is happy!

24. Les
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 9:47 am

    1) I do not see it as a competitor of FeedBurner. It only competes with Feedburner as a landing page to help subscribe. That is all. I would like the discussion to include whether it is a good landing page. With respect, both FeedPass and FeedBurner could use some feedback in this area.

    2) I agree with some previous comments. Google and Yahoo use the content of others to sell ads. There is a fine line of difference.

    3) If I want my readers to find TechCrunch, and I describe TechCrunch, and link to TechCrunch, then that is a good thing? If I use FeedPass to help my readers find and subscribe to TechCrunch, then that a bad thing? Ah yes, because that way I might make some money.

25. Hope Leman
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 10:00 am

    Hi, Dave. Too funny. A frustrated white male. Not an angry white male. I don’t see why people get so mad at you all the time. You seem like a pussycat to me. But maybe you are nicer to female commentators, which is sweet. I am new at the world of RSS commenting.

    By the way, thanks so much for developing all these neat technologies. You and the inventors of PDF should get the Novel Peace Prize and Macarthur fellowships. It is that important. I can’t tell you how much they have benefited our work in my tiny medical library. Makes us so efficient and on top of things. Would you please make a screencast for average people on OPML?

    You are right to say, “Who are these people?” of FeedPass. There is so little info about them on their site, given the amount of money they stand to make by piggybacking on the efforts of others. Good point, “Why should I have to trust them?” I would add, “Why should I have to spend my time asking them not to steal from me?”

    But I do agree with Ivan Pope when he says of FeedPass, “It’s well organised and aimed at the average user who might click on the subscribe button.” FeedBurner is too geared towards the techno-savvy and it is time to “de-geek” (Steve Rubel’s phrase) RSS.

    I think Nick is correct that FeedPass is more like infringement than aggregating. And Jon, I would say that search is different from basically repackaging blog content a la FeedPass. It is interesting, by the way, how there is so little interplay between those who write about search proper and those who write on RSS and OPML.

    Hope

26. Randy Charles Morin
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 10:11 am

    Hope Leman,
    There’s one big difference between FeedBurner and Feedpass.

    With FeedBurner you get the whole enchilada, which is not always a good thing. As Dave points out, you kinda lose your feed, which can be good, but can also be bad.

    Now, with Feedpass all you get is a landing page and you get to keep your feed. That’s pretty good.

    Now, some might wonder if I’m biased here. Well, I am. I’m the original fan of FeedBurner, as Dick, Eric and team can confirm. I was also a big fan of spyonit.com (that’s the company FeedBurner’s founders created in Web 1.0). And it gets even more insestus, but I’ll stop there.

    And even with that bias, I maintain Feedpass is a better landing page. Mind you, I use FeedBurner, not Feedpass because they offer the whole enchilada and I want the whole enchilada. But, for the average user using Blogspot or Wordpress and buying into Dave’s decentralization theory, Feedpass is a great solution.

27. Dave Winer
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 10:15 am

    Hope, honestly — the people who say they’re angry at me aren’t really.

    They just think they can make money by saying they are. It’s a business model thing. Not a very nice way to treat someone, but that’s life on the Internet.

    And thanks for the kind words. I’d love to get a MacArthur award. That would look great on the resume!

    I have some other ideas about how the RSS subscription process can be made easier. Maybe I’ll write that up at some point. The conspiracy theorists of course will say I’m doing something evil.

28. Jimmy
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 10:32 am

    So let me get this right.

    You take an RSS feed from a blog with ads on it, and put it onto a site which then takes that RSS feed, puts it on a page, and adds ads to it.

    How is that any different from the feed being read from the original source to begin with, aside from being slower? Isn’t that just literally taking a chunk of ad revenue from the original content creator?

    This sounds like something from the original bubble.

29. Keith Dsouza
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 11:02 am

    I dont anyone can beat Feedburner they are the best in their business.

    Though you should also try out xFruits, I have used and reviewed it at my site, its basically lets you create a Mashnup from various feeds and you can create aggregators for different feeds or create a webpage out of a feed and share it among friends.

    The only backdrop it has is it supports only three feeds for the mashup currently but otherwise I like the concept.

30. Larry Goodwin
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 12:05 pm

    Deberian de hacer mis VeneAuto Feeds for autos, carros, contenido

31. Phillip G
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    I think the only problem with this is that the content feed can be created by anyone. If I have a feed I want published from my site and go to FeedPass, there is a chance (albeit small for my sites) that someone would have made one already.

    So not only is there a feed for AYL (for example), the person who made it is making money off of it JUST FOR SETTING IT UP!!!

    WOW!

    Other than this problem, I do not mind that FeedPass is earning money off of my RSS feed, if I SET IT UP that is.

    As far as the argument that search engines do the same thing; search engines provide too much of a service to all to find ALL content. They do not corner it to YOUR rss feed.

    As for the other arguements like YouTube and such, I think that is the grey area, FeedPass crosses the grey allowing ANYONE to set up a feed and earn money from it.

    They stop doing that, then they can be a competitor to FeedBurner (not that I would just use one anyway).

32. Phillip G
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 1:45 pm

    /me goes off to FeedPass and makes feed landings so no one else does it…

33. Hope Leman
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 1:46 pm

    Dave:

    Busines model thing. Check, right–got it.

    Do, do, do please write up how to make RSS subscribing easier. That would put the kabosh entirely on FeedPass. All we we harmless airheads want is an easy way to employ that techology and an easy way to get the word out about it. Sorry, not techology. Enchildada. I am going to spend the rest of the day trying to determine what a whole enchiilda looks like, as opposed to part of an enchilada.

    Ah, Phillip G So FeedPass is just another form of cybersquatting? I had better get busy and grab all the prime blogs. Let’s see, Coca-Cola. Cititbank…

    Hope

34. Bryan
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    If Web 1.0 is “providing information” and Web 2.0 is “sharing information” does this mean that Web 3.0 is “making money off of other peoples information” ?

35. Phillip G
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 2:21 pm

    Ah, Phillip G So FeedPass is just another form of cybersquatting? I had better get busy and grab all the prime blogs. Let’s see, Coca-Cola. Cititbank…
    ———
    No, but if you don’t want to have problems, it would be better to set up your feed before someone else does.

    Cybersquatting would not give anything back to you, the owner of the feed. In this case though, as I wrote on my site, someone ends up promoting your feed. It even gives someone a reason to promote your blog/website feed.

    That is the other side. Its still a wierd business model, but it could work.

    So in the end, its still YOUR FEED. Your stories leading to your blog/website. The problem I have with it is pretty much the same that Coca-Cola, Citibank, and Disney has: who is making the fan art (in this case, feed art) and do we want to associate ourselves with them.

    You see what I mean?

    In the end, I think they should just let the content owners earn from the feed. Allowing others to make the feed and earn from it doesn’t seem to be a good idea.

36. Hope
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 5:32 pm

    “Allowing others to make the feed and earn from it doesn’t seem to be a good idea.”

    Yes, it is really bizarre that FeedPass didn’t realize that alineating most of the A-List bloggers from its very inception by using this tactic was duuuuuumb. People generally don’t like being forced to deal with crooks. And if the people who are being forced to deal with the crooks are influential and resepcted, the buisness plan is, shall we say, flawed.

    Hope

37. Mike
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 6:11 pm

    It does more than these other pages that literally do nothing but show google ads (ad farms) - using misspelled domain names or parked pages.

38. William
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    Such argument 2.0 nonsense. Does the average user really care? Does the average user really understand? Does this make enough of a dent to warrant such discussions?

39. Francis
    

    May 21st, 2006 at 8:23 pm

    If having ads on the landing page is an issue, you may ask FeedIcon guys to write more useful help, such like feedpass’s, on their generated pages. They have no ads, though I do not know how they earn money.

    http://feedicon20.com/

40. Doug
    

    May 22nd, 2006 at 8:46 am

    Interesting to watch the debate amongst the bloggers here.

    I guess there is a dichotomy in the logic presented so far on systems that consume published data, store it, and then republish it with monetization that is not associated with the original source of the content. If it’s good for them, bloggers seem to approve of it - namely anything that gets them more traffic, so therefore Google must obviously be a good thing. But other systems are met with considerably less enthusiasm - and Feedpass seems to fall into the latter category … even though on certain levels it’s doing something similar.

    I guess bloggers want to have it both ways. And I agree, on some level - Feedpass seems a bit wrong to me. Ok - so here’s a solution … block Feedpass. I just created a feedpass for an exceptionally low utilization blog that I don’t really do much with anymore. It barely gets a dozen hits a day - so it was very easy to track down where Feedpass was coming in from, and how it was identifying itself. These are the relevant entry details from my IIS logs.

    206.130.100.7 MagpieRSS/0.72+(+http://magpierss.sf.net;+No+cache)
    206.130.100.7 FeedForAll+rss2html.php+v2

    So, configure this in your IIS/Apache/whatever to deny Feedpass - either by IP or user-agent, and you should be able to protect your content. Although it’s fair to mention that MagpieRSS and FeedForAll are stand-alone apps, that don’t necessarily have anything to do with Feedpass other than being tools that Feedpass seems to use to get its job done.

    Personally, I think it would be a good thing if Feedpass were to provide this IP address and user-agent information to RSS publishers, voluntarily, on a page on their site - so that RSS publishers can easily choose to opt out of the feedpass system. In any case, denying them access should solve the problems of anyone who is seriously concerned about this.

41. jme giffo
    

    May 22nd, 2006 at 11:44 am

    by testing it with some blog software i’m making in my spare time - using feedpass just messes up the xml feed and confuses me to what exactly is the feed and the feedpass text.

    http://www.feedpass.com/GiffoBlogtestingfeedpass

42. Jon
    

    May 22nd, 2006 at 10:46 pm

    “Please, don’t remove the link, and no need to change the post.” (by Dave Winer)

    Translation:
    “Don’t remove the link–I like the attention and the hits that link is sending me.”

43. Sabine
    

    May 23rd, 2006 at 4:20 am

    Here’s what I don’t get — how is FeedPass not a violation of copyright? I have a Creative Commons copyright that explicitly states “Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.”

    So isn’t that what FeedPass, and anyone who makes a FeedPass from my blog is doing — using my work for commercial purposes?

    Not that anyone is doing that to me. But this just bothers me — one more way to try to make money from someone else’s work.

44. Hope Leman
    

    May 23rd, 2006 at 4:57 am

    Jon: Couldn’t it be that Dave Winer just believes in not trying to dishonorably change the historical record? Give the guy some credit for good intentions. Sheesh.

    Hope

45. Blog Bloke
    

    May 24th, 2006 at 2:44 am

    I don’t want to ruffle any feathers amongst my esteemed colleagues, but uh, can’t we basically do the same thing with FeedBurner?

    I can (for example) take Dave Winer’s feed, convert it to Feedburner, add my Amazon ID, (yes it works) and voilà I got my own instant bank machine.

    (Don’t worry Dave I won’t make the link available so please call off the law dawgs

    Yes, it might be unethical and perhaps even illegal, but why all the confab over just Feedpass? Let’s keep our perspective boys and girls.

46. Garth
    

    August 4th, 2006 at 11:49 am

    You can buy feedpass cheap now:

    http://digg.com/tech_news/Feed.....e_on_E_Bay