Sunday, March 26, 2006
FeedRinse: Filter Your RSS
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FeedRinse is a new site that offers you the chance to pre-filter the RSS feeds you subscribe to. Let’s say you’re subscribed to the ESPN NFL feed but really only care about teams in the NFC North. Simply import the feed to FeedRinse, set it to filter out any stories that don’t include the Lions, Packers, Bears and Vikings and you just created your own NFL feed. Pretty cool huh?
The site itself is a perfect example of web2.0 in action. From the design to the pricing structure to it’s single purpose of filtering your feeds it screams “look at me I’m so web2.0!” FeedRinse exists to do one thing and to do that one thing really well. It simplifies your feeds giving you some of your valuable time back. Since it does it’s job well and that’s all it does it’s pretty hard to find anything wrong with it.
The pricing structure seems to be the only place I see that they might have a problem and in the few days since launching they’ve already tried to address it. Initially you could rinse three feeds for free, twenty-five for $5/month and 300 for $8/month. I don’t know about any of you but I have 300+ feeds and I don’t think I want to pay $96/year to filter my feeds, of course that may partially be because my feed reader of choice has filtering built-in. Today I noticed they changed the free acount to five feeds and the top-end account to 500 feeds which I think is just about right. I think eventually they’ll see that the free account is going to need to be near 25 and the mid-tier account around 50-75.
It looks like they plan on introducing a few new features shorlty (a nod to 37signals?) that could make me eat my words and sign-up like advanced filtering (regex, etc), profanity filtering and smart aRSS. I don’t know yet what smart aRSS is but it sure sounds interesting in a pirate voice kind of way. The only other thing I think would be a nice feature to add is to put all my filtered feeds into a single feed. FeedRinse is definitely worth checking out if you’re an RSS junkie without the ability to filter unwanted stories with your current RSS reader.
