Other than it’s bold ORANGE color, FeedXS launched yesterday. A Netherland-based company,
FeedXS gives everyone in the world and every business its own personal feed. By creating a feed, everyone who subscribes to your feed, will always be on top of your latest news.
It’s totally FREE!
Meanwhile, while this looks like a promising web application, I wonder how it will effect the Blogosphere. By reading the Personal Feeds tour section, I understand that you pretty much just add entries and publish them to your feed. Somewhat like the workflow on Blogger.com (or any blogging tool) but instead of publishing your latest entry on a webpage, it updates/appends your latest entry to the feed.
Will we see a decrease in blog-site creation in the future because of services like FeedXS? People are always wanting to take the easy route. I see this as one of those things. But, bloggers are a different class of their own. They seem to want everything they create and write under their complete control; for me at least. Also, what would happen to those bloggers who get some cheese by writing great content (i.e. Om Malik, Andy Budd and Michael Arrington to name the least)?
Interaction. What willl happen to the communication that blogs thrive on between the author and his/her readers? I guess this is a drawback. Instead of just posting a comment on the entry page of the post, one will have to click on the entry’s archive page URL; that’s even if the author has a site. I guess I just see this product as a one-way service. Even though it’ll be easy for everyone to publish an RSS feed, it does not provide the readers a way to give a way to send feedback or thoughts back to the author. Or does it?
I just got an email from Esteban Kozak, Product Manager of SearchFox, with the following sad news:
SearchFox will shut down on January 25, 2006
Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.
This came as a complete surprise to me. Nothing in the blogosphere signaled it’s peril or what have you. Oh man, I guess it’s back to Newsgator for me till I find another web-based RSS-reader that can do the job the way SearchFox did it.
One of the “weaknesses” that I have (other than a sucker for FREE food) would probably be the fact that I like to learn a lot of new things. How can this be a weakness? Well, it’s kind of like playing sports. You would like to get into each sport you see on TV or the ones that your peers love to play. By doing so, you get to become a great athlete. However, a downside to that would be you not being able to become a great player of a particular sport. Now, this might not be true for everything and everyone but collectively, it is.
Lately, this weakness have been getting me in the world of technology, more specifically web-technology. With all of this “Web 2.0″ boom going around in the air, it just makes you wonder when this “upgrade” will be set. Applications left-and-right are coming at you at ludicrous speed. Trying to keep up with every single one of them is a chore, but also exciting, educational and inspiring.
With the boom comes competition. The will to succeed and ideology “to be better, smarter and more efficient than the next guy” are what fuels these new breeds of think-tanks and Web 2.0 innovators.