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December 13, 2005
Peter Cooper on People use FeedDigest because other things suck
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Peter Cooper of FeedDigest picked up on my recent comments (see Remember The Milk) about using FeedDigest to pipe my Remember The Milk to-do list into the left margin of Get Real. Peter is right when he worries that people are only using FeedDigest because other services don't provide RSS-to-javascript gaskets, and that FeedDigest has to aspire to do more:
[from PeterCooper.co.uk: People use FeedDigest because other things suck]
You might think that people using FeedDigest because other services suck is a good thing for FeedDigest. I'm not so sure.
Take what Stowe Boyd just wrote. He's using a new to-do list system which he loves to bits, but which lacks "a neato-keeno javascript to let me directly post a public to-do list on my blog, so if I want to do that I have to resort to an RSS-to-javascript gasket like Feeddigest." FeedDigest is a 'resort'. This is true in many cases. A lot of users only use FeedDigest because their existing tools are lacking.
FeedDigest can do more. For example, the service has very limited options for reformatting feeds. And they offer no capability to filter feeds based on keywords or tags, which would be very helpful. But with the attitude he is expressing in this post, I am sure that Peter will be working on it.
Comments (4)
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1. Eric Sohn on December 13, 2005 08:48 AM writes...
And this is bad...how?
Perhaps there is an opportunity to rescope FeedDigest, rebrand it, or for competitors. The "gasket", as it's referred to, provides a valuable service to some. Why not concentrate on enhancing and/or extending the utility of the gasket? Why not become a gasket shop?
For the want of an O-ring, lives were lost. I feel you're poo-pooing the little things, which are as vital in their domain as the Big Ideas.
Permalink to Comment2. Peter Cooper on December 13, 2005 08:51 AM writes...
Thanks for the encouragement, Stowe! Now that we have a reliable service, it's time for thinking about all of this sort of stuff.
You can already filter by keywords with FeedDigest. The feature is rather hidden though, but can be found on the digest edit page. We haven't promoted it much though because it needs some major improvements, and only 2% of our users have used the feature so far. Tagging is not properly supported, and this is a direction I want to go towards.
FeedDigest's templating is reasonably powerful if you get into the manual template mode, but the 'default templates' are a little lacking. Luckily it's easy to add more of these and we'll be doing so.
Our next feature release, however, is probably going to be OPML import and export, to make building (or moving) those digests just a little easier..
Permalink to Comment3. Marshall Kirkpatrick on December 13, 2005 06:23 PM writes...
I love that it splices multiple feeds into one. I know other services do that, but it offers better template manipulation, a customer support forum that's pretty nice, multiple formats of output (javascript, php and one other). I love FeedDigest!
Permalink to Comment4. Stowe Boyd on December 14, 2005 06:21 AM writes...
Eric - I wasn't pooh-poohing gaskets: I think we need more and better ones. I think Peter is taking my comments in the best way, as encouragement to do more, and quickly.
Peter - I think I had noticed the keyword thing, but forgotten about it. Tags would be a good way to go. I guess using the manual template mode and some serious CSS scripting outside of FD might go a long way, but I believe that it would be better to add more functionality to FD.
Marshall - I haven't actually taken advantage of that feature, mergering feeds together, but I can see how useful it would be in many circumstances. I have had some timing out issues when using php, and perceptible slowdown issues if I have more than one or two FD javascripts running on a page. Let's keep watching!
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