The other day I heard about FeedPass so I decided to go check it out. Honestly, I wasn’t overly impressed. Randy seems to think it’s pretty neat. At the risk of being considered part of the blogosphere mob I must admit that … I don’t see what’s so neat about it. I hope that I’m just missing something, and if I am, then someone … please enlighten me.
It appears to me that the service will scan in your feed, display the titles and excerpts to your 4 (?) most recent entries, and offer some options for subscribing to the feed. Until today I believe it was, they were displaying adsense ad’s next to the content. My problem is I don’t see what this is doing for me? If I wanted a pretty straight shot for folks to look at my feed / subscribe to it, I could either use feedburner (Randy seems to be saying it’s different … I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I don’t see how it’s all that different) or obviously I could do something custom on my own site.
It just seems to me like FeedPass is basically saying “Hey, let us spiffy up your feed and make money from advertising on it.” Where’s the added value? Why do I need / should I use FeedPass? What am I missing?
To the credit of the administration over at FeedPass, they have removed their advertising until some things have been figured/worked out.
I just think there needs to be some more value before they can really warrant taking my content (potentially) and earning money from it. They need to either be enhancing my content or preferably, providing some kind of added value to me as the author of the content. Perhaps that’s getting into some technorati type things like tracking inbound links, etc (because Technorati absolutely sucks these days), or maybe providing some kind of improved statistics I can’t get from elsewhere … I don’t know, but in my opinion right now they’re not doing enough to give them the right to earn money from my content to be frank.
3 Comments
No, you are not part of the mob. The mob are the people that are attacking Feedpass unfairly. Your comments are sane.
The big difference between FeedBurner and Feedpass is that FeedBurner controls both your landing page and feed, whereas Feedpass controls your landing page but you still control your feed. I’m not a control freak, like some, so I still prefer to let FeedBurner do all the work, but for others, not as liberal as I, then Feedpass is a great option.
Wow, love the comment system. That was cool!
OK, that makes a little more sense to me. Personally, I don’t think it’s something I’d utilize, but I could see how someone else might, which is fair. After all, I’m not a member of every niche market out there.
Thanks for the compliment on the commenting system. I can’t take credit for that feature though. It’s part of the K2 theme for WordPress.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing thoughts on it as well. I was trying to not come across as attacking FeedPass, glad it doesn’t seem to have been taken that way.