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Single Click Subscriptions for RSS

Posted October 10, 2005 – 8:49 am by Yakov Shafranovich in Projects, Programming, Technology

A few months ago Dave Winer mentioned the so called “Yahoo problem” - the proliferation of subscribe buttons for different aggregators. Instead he proposes to have a single service which stores user’s RSS feeds in an OPML file and different aggregators will access it. Of course this service will need to be supported by the aggregators.

To me personally it seems like a bad idea since the whole notion of the Internet is decentralization and this would make blog feeds very centralized (and liable to fail as a single point of failure). Additionally, the financial arrangements involved in this could make anyone’s hair being torn out. And what about open source aggregators which do not have the resources for this?

Instead, what I like is a semi-decenterlized solutions - have a service where any aggregator in the world can upload an RDF or an OpenSearch Query Language file, and this site will automatically include the aggregator in the subscription service. The actual subscription service will come into two flavors: server-side and client-side. The server-side is a website where a user can redirect a subscribe button and it will give choices of aggregators to subscribe to and then redirect to their subscription pages. The client side will be a javascript that can be included on anyone’s blog and give a choice of aggregators when clicked on. Additionally, it would also be nice to have automatic parsing of auto-discovery link tags in the originating site so the owner doesn’t have to do any maintanance and just include the javascript file. And did I mention the ability to handle multiple feeds and aggregators?

So far, I have found three services like the one I am describing but none do everything that I mention. The Syndication Subscription Service allows aggregators to submit their RDF files but doesn’t have a good interface or a javascript option. The SoloSub service is a bit better but also doesn’t have the ability to do javascript and doesn’t support RDF files. QuickSub is a pure javascript option which doesn’t have RDF files.

Ideally, what would be even better is a service that has an OPML list of references to RDF descriptors while the actual RDF files reside at the website of each aggregator service. This way, they can change their subscription methods while automatically updating the central service.