So this has been bugging me for a while. Why don’t we share our personal RSS feeds with each other?
There are tons of sites out there that perform this function in amazing ways, but not for RSS feeds. There is digg and delicious for bookmarks. Flickr for photos, youtube for videos, myspace and facebook for nearly everything. I can share my daily actions on twitter and my docs on google.
So, why hasn’t anyone “socialized” RSS feeds? Not sure. It could be due to the lack of interest. RSS has been around for a while now, but is always secondary to the main tools. You can see this on websites where the feeds often break and they are poorly placed on pages. Or, maybe a lack of innovation. The companies that are releasing aggregators offer no really amazing features, just more of the same. Maybe it is because the mainstream public hasn’t caught on to RSS yet.
Anyway which way you want to slice it, I am surprised. Sharing our personal feeds and creating a community out of them, is an obvious evolution. Here is my list of 10 benefits that we can get through “socializing” feeds:
1. See what everyone else is following
2. Tag Feeds. Allows them to be grouped and searched on, while giving you may more ways to find feeds.
3. Send feeds to friends.
4. Feed networks. See what feeds you have in common with friends, what they just subscribed to, or unsubscribed from. (delicious networks)
5. Comment on feeds. Talk about their content and layout.
6. Help new users. Offer pre-populated, popular feed lists based on topics, interests, or preferences.
7. Show a list of the most popular feeds. What are the most popular feeds?
8. Share feed lists. See what your friends are following, try out their feeds for a week, or see what Chuck Norris or other luminaries are following (similar to itunes playlists).
9. Feed list ranking. Publish your list and see how many people like it or use it. (Amazon lists)
10. Numerical analysis – newest and most popular feeds in real time (digg).
If you can think of more, let me know. I mostly just copied what popular sites are already doing. You would then think that most of these could be created quite easily. I have been trying find out if their are sites already doing this, but the best I found was feedburner, share.opml.org, technorati, and I just found spokeo.
None of those seem to be focusing on the social networks that could be created around sharing RSS feeds. So, if you happen to know of any great sites let me know. Or, if you would be interested in teaming up with me to develop something like this let me know.
I look forward to sharing my feeds and creating a community of “active bookmarks” on the web.
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