inessential by Brent Simmons

Web services for newsreaders?

If you haven’t seen feeds.scripting.com yet, it’s a place you can share your OPML subscriptions files. It has a rankings page so you can see what’s popular, you can see who subscribes to a given feed, and if you’re a member of the site there are a few other cool features.

Other web sites have some similar features, of course. (Technorati is one of my favorites.) I bring up feeds.scripting.com because it’s new and so it’s a good time to ask what you think about web services for newsreaders.

We at Ranchero don’t plan to create any web services. But we do plan to make NetNewsWire work with various newsreader-oriented web services—so here are a couple questions:

1. What existing web services interest you?

Examples: you might wish NetNewsWire uploaded OPML files automatically to feeds.scripting.com or somewhere. Or you might wish NetNewsWire made it easy to create Feedster search feeds. And so on.

And here’s the bigger question...

2. What new web services would you like to see?

I have to admit, I don’t spend much time thinking about web services, so no really good examples come to mind. And there are actually a number of good services out there already, some of them under-publicized, so it may be that a bunch of good ideas have already been done.

But I bet you can come up with some new ones.