Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

Feed Splicing, Part 2

We have launched a couple different feed splicing capabilities now, and as these have led to some interesting conversations (along with lots of email), we thought it would be appropriate to discuss our plans for splicing in a bit more detail.

There are lots of other splicing capabilities we can and will layer into the product. Organizations want the ability to splice their calendar feeds into their blog feeds. Individuals have asked for a variety of splicing services, from feeds of playlists to moblogs, many of which we're working on. These requests usually accompany the question: when will I be able to just splice any N feeds together? The answer generally has to do with ownership. As more "readership" traffic moves from web page to feeds, publishsers big and small will look to monetize their feeds in the way they have monetized their blogs or sites, be it with ads, affiliate programs, or some other mechanism. As a result, when we launch a more generalized splicing service, we will want to make sure that publishers sign off on the fact that they hold the rights to the contents of the feeds they splice together. I'm using rights in the general sense, i.e., you should be able to splice your blog feed and moblog feed together, but you probably shouldn't splice major media company's news feed into your blog feed and then pump ads into the feeds. That would be what we call "problematic." There a number of ways to move forward with a generalized splicing service, and we're just thinking through all the issues. As part of such a service, FeedBurner could automatically respect and progagate any Creative Commons licensing present on the source feed. We don't want to launch something and then have to pull it back, so these initial forays into specialized splicing services are a nice way to see how the capability is used.

We will continue to experiment with and launch more specialized splicing services over the coming weeks and months. We have received a bunch of fantastic suggestions, and the popularity of the link and photo splicers highlight the demand for such services. One of the things we've done is embrace the notion of a core feed, that is, the feed into which other feeds are spliced. The logic behind this is that it's easy to see when you view a spliced feed in an aggregator. We "mark" the title of the item spliced into the feed with the service from which it was spliced. This helps gives the reader a bit of context as to the source of the items in the feed. It could be otherwise disconcerting to subscribe to a noted financial whiz's blog feed to wake up one morning and see five pictures of her dog in the feed, go visit the blog to see what's going on, not see any pictures, and wonder what the heck is going on (it may be disconcerting in any case, and this will be the topic of our post "Feed Splicing, Part 3"). As we continue to roll out new splicing services, we will also continue to gather feedback from the community about what works, what doesn't, what's confusing, and how the services should be adjusted.

Finally, there is some obvious overlap between the community's discussion about splicing and "meme on the rise" RSS ad networks. We will have some interesting things to say on this topic in the very near term, but for now, we will leave it at this: we are only interested in providing services to publishers that enhance the publisher's ability to distribute content while, hopefully, improving (but at the very least not diminishing!) the subscriber experience. The implication is that there is much work to be done to ensure that the benefits of aggregating lots of feeds in a newsreader remain intact. We are confident that we are approaching this in a thoughtful manner. When we were raising money, one of the potential investors with whom we spoke had a simple but fantastic insight, which is that in our world, the subscribers and publishers are quite often the same people. This has tremendous implications for the ways in which new services should be exposed.