Month: January 2010

FreeMyFeed: A Really (Poor) Clever Idea

Have you even wanted to subscribe to an RSS feed in Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Bloglines or Google Reader (or anywhere else, for that matter), but discover that the feed is inconveniently served from behind a login-protected server? We all have, I think. Well, now a free web service allows you to do just that. As convenient as it is, this is a spectacularly poor idea.
FreeMyFeed handily takes care of those pesky login problems. You give it your feed URL, your login, and your password. It then gives you an alternate URL at FreeMyFeed that contains your login information in an encoded way. FreeMyFeed then acts as a proxy, grabbing the feed without storing your login credentials on its own server, and passing it along to your reader:

FreeMyFeed account set up screen

So I created a COMPLETELY FAKE login for this blog’s feed. The login does not exist, does not work, and is (of course) not a real login to anything: username rss4lib and password temp1234. The FreeMyFeed link that encodes this is:
http://freemyfeed.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5yc3M0bGliLmNvbS9pbmRleC54bWw6OnJzczRsaWI6OkxzUGcwWHRrRktDUytJdkFrUTFMN0RvNk5BPT0=
Well, it is encrypted, but there’s usually a good reason that a feed is behind a login. This takes those feeds and puts them out in the public, where any search engine find them, index them, and expose your organization’s secure information. End runs around reasonable security are poor choices. I would recommend that, if your organization has RSS behind a login, that you work with your technical group to block FreeMyFeed from accessing your site.
To their credit, there is a fairly explicit disclaimer of the risks on the FreeMyFeed front page, that includes a warning to be careful and not to share your personalized URL with anyone (other than the feed readers, of course). So if you must use this tool, use it only on your own browser, not on an aggregator to minimize the sharing of an all-access URL to your feed. Don’t be tempted.

Farewell to Full-Text Feeds?

I’ve noticed over time that the number of people who ‘consume’ RSS4Lib on RSS4Lib.com has declined steadily over the years. Yet the number of feed subscribers is still steadily increasing (see today’s subscriber report and has recently broken 2000).
At the same time, few articles I post are read on RSS4Lib.com more than 100 times the day they are published, and most are viewed only a few times a day after that. (Selected items in the backfile, thanks to Google and Bing, get more traffic than recently published items once the new posts have aged a few days.)
I suspect this trend holds true across many blogs, whether they’re produced for love or money. (This one, to be clear, is not produced as a moneymaking venture.)
Some are suggesting that the days of full-text feeds are numbered (see “Say Bye Bye to Full RSS Feeds and RSS: What’s the Deal in 2010?,” as examples). I’m curious to know if these commercial prognosticators are correct — will bloggers tend to pull people toward the richness of their sites, even if there is no particularly strong monetary incentive to do so? Or will full-text feeds continue to be the way to go? I suspect a trend toward full text feeds (for blogs that are works of avocation) and snippet feeds (for those that are more vocational). And I’ll wager that this will break down (to oversimplify greatly) into an academic/commercial divide.

RSS Readers Not Dead Yet

ReadWriteWeb says, “5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock.” To summarize the post, here are the five reasons RSS readers are still relevant, according to RWW:

  1. Control over Information Flow
  2. Evolving User Interfaces
  3. Tracking Twitter
  4. Mobile News
  5. Categorized News

This post is in response to an earlier RWW post, “RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline,” which engendered a lively discussion in the comments.
Dave Winer, a pioneer of RSS, noted in the comments to the more recent post that RSS readers get one thing fundamentally wrong: they treat feeds like email by telling you how many unread messages you have and encouraging you to read each one. (I’m one of those weirdos who cannot stand having messages, especially unread ones, hanging around in my inbox. Having a growing tally of unread RSS items pushes me right over the edge and is the main reason I stopped consuming my feeds in my mail application.)
A number of automated tools offer filters for RSS feeds (many have been reviewed or discussed here). Most of them rely on explicit, user-defined keywords. Others, like Twitter, rely on one’s peers to identify the interesting stuff. However, I have yet to find a tool that offers the best of keyword filtering (letting through articles on topics that are of likely interest) while still surprising and delighting me with nearly, but not quite, on-topic posts. That’s an incredibly delicate, arbitrary, and undefinable balance to strike.