FeedPassé

FeedPass is a service that will wrap your RSS/Atom feed in a web-friendly shell with subscription chicklets, help information for RSS noobs, and the like. Rather than go into detail, you can see what it looks like right here:

FeedPass for inkBlots

The first question I had was: “I already get the same thing with FeedBurner… what does FeedPass give me?” (See FeedBurner for inkBlots to compare.)

Pros: If you have an Adsense account, you will get credit for the ads displayed in the FeedPass version of your feed. There is also a lot of help text for people who aren’t familiar with RSS.

Cons: No full-text items… you only get to see a preview description of each item. No statistics. (In fact, they recommend in their FAQ to use FeedPass on your FeedBurner feed in order to take advantage of FeedBurner’s stats.) Really overwhelming layout. Too much help text… there is more help text than feed content.

Conclusion: This is an easy way to monetize your feed for people who are viewing it in a web browser. Anybody who sees it a feed reader will never know the difference. You’re trading ads for content, however, by losing your full-text items. To me, that is a deal breaker.

Thanks to Rob Fay for poking me again on this.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 15:17 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

5 Responses to “FeedPassé”

1. Jim Woolley Says:
   May 19th, 2006 at 15:47

   A nice summary. Feedpass sometimes does display full feeds in the content preview, like here:

   http://www.feedpass.com/engadget
   http://www.feedpass.com/slashdot436

   Other feeds trigger an abbreviated preview, with a […] to see the full feed on your blog. Still others, like many Blogger.com atom feeds, show only the item title. We’re working on this now, but are still not convinced that potential subscribers really need to see full feeds on our site. Instead, we’d rather drive users to your blog, where something else might catch their eye, or where your own advertising can also be a benefit.

   Feedpass was created to aid in the subscription process, not to be used as the RSS Reader. So, while full feeds are nice, it is more of our intent to drive subscriptions to your feed via readers, etc. We realize that once someone is subscribed, they won’t view the feedpass page often, or ever, again. That’s okay.

   Thanks for your feedback. We’ll keep improving the tool with your help.

2. Mark Woodman Says:
   May 19th, 2006 at 16:16

   Jim,

   I have a couple of suggestions which would really turn it around for me:

   1) Add a configuration option to display an abbreviated help text section (versus what you have now), perhaps with links to a page on your site which has the full information.

   2) Add a configuration option to force full-text items. I understand the “drive to my blog” emphasis. But with full-text items AND ads (and less help text), I’d be just as happy to have people bookmark the FeedPass URL as I would my own blog.

   - Mark

3. Rob Fay Says:
   May 24th, 2006 at 12:37

   Some interesting commentary over at TechCrunch.

4. john Says:
   May 25th, 2006 at 21:47

   I hate feedburner. At least leave up a regular RSS feed so people like me who can’t use feedburner can still subscribe.

5. Mark Woodman Says:
   May 25th, 2006 at 21:51

   FeedBurner provides a valid RSS 2.0 feed with a stylesheet reference for browser viewing. Why can’t you use it?