Feed-to-Email

Today, I posted a couple comments on TechCrunch (1, 2) on "FeedBurner Will Dominate Blog-to-Email". I found myself surprisingly opinionated about the topic. That's because I used Netvibes, Gmail, Rssfwd and iTunes to manage feeds – that's right, 4 different apps/services – and that's pretty ridiculous. You'd think with so many great services that if I clicked on a feed like this one, it would automatically do something cool like, say ask me what I want to do with it. Something like, "Would you like to subscribe to this site?" would be nice.

Instead, I get something like this:

I know, I know… If I had a desktop feed reader installed, it would know what to do with it (maybe).

My point is in 3 parts:

1. I don't want a desktop feed reader.
2. My Mom doesn't know what a "feed" is.
3. The feed icon/button () is probably the most useless and ineffective thing on the Internet you can click. You click it and then you get a bunch of garbage.

How can we fix this? I proposed in my first comment that perhaps an extension or application would be an effective in helping more people use feeds. I think it would be especially nice if a browser like Flock could build this functionality into it's interface. I click the feed icon, the browser asks me "Do you want a subscription to this site?", I say "Yes", it asks me "Would you like the entries from this site sent to you via email?" or offers to add it to my preferred online/desktop/Outlook feed reader (which can be pre-set).

If something like this exists, please email me.