No Feed is an Island: Introducing FeedFlare
We started with a cookie recipe and a dream, but we don't bake well, so we restarted with the notion that publishers should be able to tether interesting services to their content anywhere it travels. In a recent Feed for Thought post …
Context & Ripple Effects
FeedFlare lands two weeks after Matt McAlister sketched a new content distribution plan for online publishers built on pushing content out to where audiences already are rather than waiting for them to arrive. FeedBurner's move is the first concrete mechanism for that thesis: instead of the feed being a dead-end copy of an article, publishers can tether actions and services to each item wherever it travels.
The story travelled fast and wide for a developer-blog announcement — same-day write-ups from TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, and Fred Wilson's A VC all frame it as part of a busy day in web services, suggesting feeds were already seen as contested infrastructure rather than a niche format.
First-order effects
- Publishers using FeedBurner can now attach interactive services to every item in their feed, so the content carries functionality — not just text — into whatever reader or aggregator displays it.
- Web services gain a distribution surface they didn't have before: placement at the foot of syndicated content across thousands of feeds, reaching readers off the publisher's own site.
Second-order effects
- Other feed toolmakers face pressure to offer comparable extensibility, since a service-rich feed makes the plain syndication feed look inert by comparison.
- The publisher-feed relationship tilts toward whoever hosts and processes the feed: if flare definitions live with the intermediary, that intermediary sits between publishers, their audiences, and any third-party service attached to the content.
Third-order effects
- If services-in-feeds becomes standard practice, the RSS feed evolves from a syndication format into a runtime for third-party functionality — a structural shift that makes feed hosting itself strategically valuable.
- That shift points toward monetizing content beyond its original host, since value accrues wherever the feed travels, a direction the broader 2005–2006 wave of feed-layer startups is already circling.
The trend: RSS is moving from a passive content pipe to an extensible service layer, with feed-hosting intermediaries positioned to decide what functionality travels alongside published content.