The death for Google Reader will surely bring a gigantic wave of innovation in the RSS Reader ‘market’. We’ve shown yesterday that there are many many alternatives. Superfeedr is in the business of making RSS easier, we’re introducing a little, simple (baby step thing which we hope will make a subscribing easier to use for everyone.
Subscribing is hard
We’ve heard a lot of people say that they replaced their RSS reader with Twitter, or Facebook. It’s also possible that Google killed Reader to promote G+. These platforms are popular for news reading because it’s so easy to subscribe or follow news sources, or people sharing the blogs… etc. It’s just a click of a button.
Subscribing to an RSS feed is still very hard. When I am on a site I like, I have to find the RSS link (which is often hidden), copy its url, open a new tab and paste the url in he right field. Finally, I can click on the ‘subscribe’ button.
UPDATE; people on HackerNews said that subscribing to an RSS feed is easy. Check this video of how people react when they’re asked what a browser is.
Meet SubToMe
SubToMe aims at simplifying that. It’s a button, click on it:
If all goes well, you should see something like this:
Of course, that’s kind of dumb you may think. This is just a list of readers and it’ll be hard to list them all. Luckily, this button has a registration mechanism. For example, click on use Feedly or Use Bloglovin, and eventually, click again on the button above.
You should now see only the services for which you have been registered. Of course, this should be 100% transparent to the user, using iframes, like The Old Reader already does! This way, each user will be able to use their favorite reader and publishers don’t have to put dozens of follow me on xxx buttons on their sites.
Of course, you may wonder how this is done. Here is a little secret: it’s all stored in localStorage. All the SubToMe files are just static HTML files. No server involved, no app running and no data is ever leaked.
We also have a bookmarklet and browser extensions for you to subscribe easily.
Do you have a blog?
If you do, you probably understand the need for you to control the distribution of your content. You just can’t rely on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ to send your content to your subscribers and followers.
Make sure you pick a platform that has RSS feeds and make sure you allow people to subscribe to your content in the easiest possible way. Follow these instructions if you want to add a SubToMe button.
We have a SubToMe Wordpress extension. Install it!
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