RSS Reader Survey

Randy at KBCafe.com posts an interesting survey of RSS Readers used by his readers.

As Randy states, "Although GreatNews basically dominates almost every score in this survey, it gets no where near the same attention as other top RSS readers."

He goes on to point out that "The only explanation is that the folk of GreatNews don't have the right connections into the blogosphere a-list. How many times has Michael Arrington blogged about GreatNews? Never! How about Bloglines? Constantly. NewsGator? Constantly. Pluck? Constantly?"

I would also point out that nobody EVER sees an "Add to GreatNews" button on any blog anywhere. At least I've never seen one. In fact, when we created FeedPass, GreatNews was relegated to our drop-down list of readers, with just a link to www.curiostudio.com I always have to Google to even remember where their homepage is. Too bad they don't own the more memorable address at www.greatnews.com.

On a side note, Randy qualifies for a "cluttered sidebar" award with his array of subscription buttons. Come on Randy...get a Feedpass. And yes, it does work just fine with your "burned" Feedburner feed. Use our screen real-estate for all the buttons and use your sidebar space for something more valuable than free advertising for those readers! USM isn't broad enough yet, so tools like Feedburner and Feedpass are really needed to bring RSS usability to the common internet user.

Too many subscribe buttons....or none at all.

These days you can find any number of approaches to placing subscribe buttons on feeds and blogs. I just pulled this one off of a random WordPress blog that discussed the topic of RSS subscription buttons. Pretty crazy. Sadly, the practice of using piles of badges is pretty common out there. After all, you'd hate to not have the button that a potential subscriber wanted to use, right?



Of course, that's why we created feedpass. Imagine just a single subscribe button on your blog or feed. Clicking it gives your users the ability to subscribe using 56 different RSS readers (and growing), 4 email tools, 15 bookmarking/tagging tools, or manually with a copy and paste of the feed URL. Feedpass makes this ridiculously easy.

Now, instead of wasting 6 inches of valuable screen real-estate in your sidebar, you can let feedpass do the work and generate your buttons, tutorials on RSS, and more. Best of all, you don't pay a thing to do it. Feedpass is free and we intend to keep it that way.

Meanwhile, it's been an interesting first few days of business for feedpass. Getting the word out takes time, but we've had some nice comments and some attacks. Too bad some bloggers are above being told about a tool like feedpass that could really clean up their feeds and make subscriptions easy for their readers. We've focused on direct contact with bloggers, writing personal email messages, one at a time. And yet, we've still been called spammers by some who just don't get it.

For those of you who have discovered us and like what you see, please tell a friend or drop a comment on your blog.

Jim

We're live! feedpass.com opens for business...

After months of development, we're thrilled to announce that feedpass is up and running. Beta no more. We are official.

In future posts we'll continue to discuss RSS feeds, blogging, and the challenges that regular internet users face when attempting to subscribe to feeds. We'll review RSS readers and other feed related tools too!

For now, tell your friends in the RSS business that there is a new way to make subscriptions easier than ever for your readers. It's called feedpass. Just go to feedpass.com and enter your feed URL. Within just a few clicks, you'll have a powerful one-button subscription tool that gives your users the ability to learn about RSS, preview your content, and subscribe using over 55 different RSS readers, 15 social bookmarking and tagging tools, 4 email distribution tools, and various feed-aware browsers.

You can also use feedpass to get chicklets, otherwise known as buttons, badges, etc. for all the popular RSS tools. Best of all, these buttons are pre-programmed with your feed or blog information. So to use them, all you have to do is paste a little code into your feed or blog template.

Plus, you can use your Google AdSense ID to earn money even before someone subscribes to your feed. We'll cover this in more detail in a future post, but it's a way for you to make money from your feedpass subscription page and even from other links to your blog or feed.

Feedpass. It's cool stuff. Get yours today. It's free!