Feedonomics

I’ve added FEEDcombine and RSS Mix to the list of feed merge services being tracked. You can see the details in this Grazr:

I’ve completed a comparison of 3 feed merge services: FeedBlendr, FeedJumbler, MySyndicaat. The results are combined in an OPML file and displayed in Grazr below. This file contains the five feeds I’ve used to test the merge, so you can see their original contents, then each merged feed appears along with details for the service that created it. Of the three services, MySyndicaat clearly has the most features, although that comes at the expense of a more complex interface. Once you build your first merged feed with it, however, the interface becomes understandable.  All three seem to deliver good performance, and are free for personal use, so it may be largely a matter of personal taste as to which one you prefer. I’ll continue adding to this OPML file and reporting here as I test more services.

One of our next steps for GrazrScript is adding feed manipulation commands. These will include the ability to sort, select, and merge items from multiple feeds into a single feed. While sort and select seem fairly self-evident, the exact meaning of a merge is unclear. How many feeds should be included in a merge? How often should it be possible to perform a merge? Do all the feeds have to be read in real-time for each merge? How do you preserve the origin and ownership of all the feed items? Should a merge incorporate a full feed item if it is available, or just an excerpt? Does a merge service have to be completely free, or should there be some level of service that deserves payment?

In spite of all these uncertainties, the desire for a feed merge seems clear. Whenever I give a demo of Grazr and explain our plans for GrazrScript, the one feature that gets the most response is a merge. Even if none of the specific answers to these questions are known. It also looks like a new feed merge service gets announced a couple of times a week. So there is plenty of demand for some type of merge and quite a few providers.

While our coders are working on building the database capabilities needed to support a feed merge, I’d like to gather information about exactly what is done by all the websites offering this as a service. I’ll work through each one and report on it here. My goal is to build a public matrix of all the providers and their answers to each of these questions I’ve posed. It would also be great to get comments on what you think a merge should offer.

The interesting thing about the feed ecosystem and Grazr’s place within it is that while we will be competitors with the other providers of a merge service Grazr will also be able to consume the feeds that they provide. They in turn will be able to consume the merged feeds that we provide. It is this multi-tiered aspect of feeds on the Web that makes this space so open for new technical opportunities and forms of commerce.