From Outbound to Inbound and Back Again: The Hidden Power of RSS Feeds

Recently, Dave Winer wrote about creating a truly open social web through RSS feeds that flow both inbound and outbound. His idea, put simply, is to let users specify RSS feeds as input (inbound), and generate RSS feeds as output (outbound). While reading Dave’s post, I couldn’t help but become more and more excited—in certain ways, this is exactly what we have been doing with Feedle for the last couple of years. We have never dared to conceptualize it in these exact terms, but now, thanks to Dave, it’s helping us understand the growing importance of RSS syndication in a world dominated by Big Tech’s closed social platforms. And that alone makes me even more excited about the prospects of the Open Web!

For those unfamiliar with RSS (Really Simple Syndication), it is a web standard that allows websites to publish their content in a structured format that other applications can easily consume. Think of it as a standardized way for websites to say “here’s my latest content” that machines can understand and process.

In the vast majority of cases, RSS feeds have been considered to be uni-directional, or outbound. A new blog post gets published somewhere, and, thanks to its RSS feed, it immediately appears on the screens of millions of readers subscribed to receiving updates from that feed. The only requirement is that these people need to be aware that the blog exists in the first place.

This is exactly where tools like Feedle change the game. It brings people’s content to previously unaware readers all around the world, thanks to RSS’ little known inbound nature.

Think of a piece of content as being a person who wants to reach from point A (the author), to point B (readers who have no idea the author’s blog exists). There is no direct train, so the content must take an inbound train (the blog’s RSS feed), arrive in the city’s central station (Feedle), and take another, outbound train (one of Feedle’s millions of generated RSS feeds). On the other end of that outbound train are potentially millions of users, who simply subscribed to a search topic of their interest, and now get this piece of content without even knowing its author.

This is all thanks to the unique nature of RSS. Unlike HTML and plain text, RSS has a rigid format and structure, which make it perfect for parsing from other software. Feedle monitors thousands of blog and podcast RSS feeds 24/7, indexes their content, and makes it searchable. From then on, every time someone searches for their favorite topic of interest, Feedle can generate a completely new and unique RSS feed that takes matching content from across all of those thousands of sources.

From outbound to inbound, and back again #

This is where it goes full circle. We’ve had this idea of allowing people to receive email updates on their Feedle searches, to remove the necessity of using an RSS reader. So, besides providing Feedle users the RSS feeds themselves, we now take the same RSS feeds we generate, parse them, and send the new updates to email recipients. We also use our own RSS feeds to spread interesting stories on social media and other channels as well. The same technology, a different distribution method. How cool is that?

P.S. If you are interested in trying out Feedle’s email digest beta, you can sign up here.