FeedCycle: Smarter Serialized Stories
Marshall Kirkpatrick
28 comments »
FeedCycle is a new tool that provides an interesting level of control to publishers of RSS feeds with a very simple interface. If you are telling a multi-part story, or communicating a segmented message over time, you should give FeedCycle a look. Publishers can use FeedCycle to create publication schedules and intervals; all subscribers then start by receiving the first item in a feed regardless of when they subscribe and future items are delivered at the intervals determined by the publisher. Text, audio and video podcasts can all be scheduled and delivered with FeedCycle.
FeedCycle is a product of UK travel tech consultancy Travel UCD. Many of the company’s example feeds are serialized travel stories. Having access to all information at once has clear value, but the old fashioned serialization of stories has a distinct impact on audiences that this company is smart to tap into as a service provider.
Stories serialized through FeedCycle can be offered by RSS without being delivered all at once - I can subscribe to and watch a series of video podcasts, for example, without the last episode being visible to me until I’ve seen the episodes before it. If I ran a business, I could prerecord a series of training sessions, each new employee could subscribe to the series and then get a new session delivered in sequence at regular intervals.
FeedCycle feeds can also be run through FeedBurner for more detailed analytics than the service itself offers. The service has a hefty feature list in the free version and offers premium subscription for features like the use of your own domain, pass word protected and encrypted feeds. All versions of the service support tagging and OPML export by batch or tag.
Episodes can be reordered by drag and drop, attachments are well handled by pointing to a URL and the resulting feeds validate. You can select a window of dates for publication and items can be published at regular intervals ranging between one hour and one month apart.
I love RSS in large part for all the services built on top of it. FeedCycle is another example of a smart, easy way to leverage feeds. It’s not something that most bloggers will end up using, but there are far more uses of RSS that we’ll be seeing in the future as consumer and enterprise feed readers, RSS integration in other applications and tools like Ajax startpages proliferate. This is a tool that non temporally-bound online communicators could make great use of. If you’re concerned that your subscribers don’t widely use RSS yet, it would be just as easy to offer scheduled deliveries through an RSS-to-email service as well.
Do they actually offer RSS to email as a way of delivery? The whole time I was reading this story I was thinking ‘Mass mail marketing’…
You know, those sites that hit you with an email every few days to keep you interested.
It doesn’t even matter, really, if they provide RSS-to-email delivery. If you can burn a Feed Cycle feed with FeedBurner, you’re set - FeedBurner does the RSS-to-email functionality, and it’s pretty effortless on the part of the publisher, too.
Excellent! I first threw this idea out there 15 months ago, and I’m so glad someone’s finally released something that does it (being too lazy to do it myself :)). It’s also nice to see another RSS tool out of the UK.
Mike: “all subscribers then start by receiving the first item in a feed regardless of when they subscribe” .. this probably means FeedBurner is out of the question, since I think FeedBurner only keep the copy of the feed *they* see in each case.
Yes Peter is right. there is no question of feedburner. Can you explain if feedburner can be used with this anyway.
Nice idea. RSS is slowly capturing a bigger ground.
I’m getting really concerned about Web 2.0. If this is interesting enough to make it to TechCrunch, what is that saying about the market? It seems like TechCrunch is more frequently rehashing topics related to “mature” Web 2.0 companies like Digg and is reviewing new startups that have low mainstream appeal and in some cases, are quite esoteric.
I hope that VCs are not starting to receive executive summaries that begin:
Ever wanted to read War and Peace but didn’t have the time? How about if you could be fed 2 chapters each day for 6 months? That’s right. This is now possible using an innovative application of RSS technology by FeedCycle. FeedCycle provides a cutting-edge RSS solution for non temporally-bound online communicators. The company’s proprietary patent-pending Cyclic Web Feed technology (or CWF), revolutionizes the concept of serialised RSS web feeds and is poised to take a market leadership role in the RSS industry, which research firm Some Research Firm estimates grew by 125% last year. The firm estimates that by 2010, 100 million people will be using RSS on a daily basis and that revenues will reach $1 billion.
Sorry, but anytime I see phases like “non temporally-bound online communicators” I can’t help but have flashbacks to the JavaScript bullshit generators used by entrepreneurs to craft their business plans back in Bubble 1.0. There is hope, however. At least this wasn’t an announcement that FeedCycle had raised $10 million.
Another one buzz-thing…
Is this a service worth to mention?
Drama 2.0 brings up som interesting points. I have to agree.
Sounds great!
good grief, that’s one ugly home page they’ve got … shame, because conceptually this is rather interesting perspective on the use of RSS - which is relevant to some of our own ideas under development, but from a business context.
I don’t like their UI, and the idea of serialised RSS isn’t striking my interest anyway.
I’d rather focus on mobile RSS.
Btw, there’s a press release on my company that I’d like to share here.
http://www.myth200.com/wudi/?p=67
New story please.
I wish somebody would cover companies outside of the same five Web 2.0 topics everybody seems to constantly cover, aka, social networking, anything related to video, photo, digg-style technologies, blogs, blog aggregators, blog grouping sites, etc. There has got to be more to tech right now than these topics.
That’s pretty much Web 2.0 Patricia. I think everybody’s ready for Web 3.0 and it would be truly innovative of the VCs to start another bubble before the previous one has burst. Think of it. Bubbles competing against each other. We could even do mashups between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 sites! Exciting times we live in!
^ I know. I know that Web 2.0 has a lot of these areas involved in it, but is everybody really playing in just these few little areas? I loved finding out about image/likeness search from Like.com, I thought it was interesting that women-focused sites were starting to get funding and draw attention for a bit there, I just read about a new search site that mirrors how the brain thinks (or something like that), I love AJAX and what’s going on around it - doesn’t this stuff count as Web 2.0 or no?
lol. I love the idea of dueling tech bubbles. hehe.
Yes!!! Another RSS feed thingy!!! The world can always use another one of these!!!
Phew - what a response.
Ugly! Ouch. But probably correct.
1} FeedBurner - it can be done with FeedBurner - even though we have unique URLs per subscriber (sort of). Not an easy solution currently. FeedBurner do handle dynamic URLs though - but its a commercial service they offer. Lets see where this takes us in the future.
2} Are we web 2.0 - certainly I don’t particularly care for the term - and don’t use it myself. I just had a problem on a site we were running and couldn’t find a solution - so we built FeedCycle as a solution. It seems to be picking up a life on its own. If other people can make use of the free service that is fine by us.
3} Is it old news? We didn’t build it to be new news! We built it to solve a problem. From that perspective I don’t mind if its new or old news…
4} VC. Hah! Time yes, VC no. We are a company that runs a CMS for websites… and also supply ecommerce project management services for leading UK dot coms. Really - do you think we went to a VC with a plan to put War and Peace on the web? Come on!
Instead of War and Peace, a much better idea would for a podcaster to put a few of their “best” podcasts on FeedCycle and offer it as a “taster” - to get people interested in signing up to a full feed.
Summary - thanks everyone for your interest in FeedCycle. Still work in progress - but isn’t everything on the web?
Alex
http://www.feedcycle.com
Right around the time Peter Cooper posted about this last year we developed something similar…
http://www.surfarama.com/?p=242
It was commercialized at feedhoster.com, which was subsequently sold…who knows what they’re doing with it now.
A similar site to your feedhoster, quite easy to create a feed in about 1/2 a second, is http://mynotify.com/