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Putting the Really Simple back in RSS

Introducing Primal’s intelligent content feeds

intelligent-rss

If you’re like us, RSS feeds are an essential part of your content pipeline. You use these feeds to keep track of the sources you care about, and share the best items with your customers and colleagues.

RSS is often referred to as Really Simple Syndication. The truth is, it’s really not that simple. And the more you use it, the more complicated it gets!

In this post, we unpack the problem with RSS and introduce you to Primal’s powerful yet simple solution.

The Problem with RSS

fire-hydrant

On the one hand, RSS is the victim of its own success. It’s been pervasively adopted by content producers and web services as a data exchange format (that’s the syndication part).

But anyone that makes use of more than one RSS feed knows how tremendously complicated and time-consuming RSS feeds can become.

The problem with RSS is that the feeds aren’t tailored to your specific interests. Any given feed contains a few items that you care about and many items that you don’t.

As you increase the number of feeds, the problem gets worse. After only a few feeds, you have hundreds of items to manually cull through to get at the stuff you need.

Mashup and filtering services like Yahoo! Pipes are intended to help with this problem, but they ending up making work in a different way. It can be painful and time-consuming to implement a large series of filters to automate the content filtering process.

Source: New Think Tank

Introducing Primal’s intelligent content feeds

Primal provides a simple yet extremely robust solution to your RSS problem.

Instead of using many individual RSS feeds to handle your content aggregation and curation needs, use a single intelligent content feed generated by Primal.

To get started, simply enter a topic of interest. For example, if you’re running a store that sells bike parts, maybe one of your interests is “mountain biking”.

Primal creates a one-of-a-kind, personalized feed for you to follow and share with your audience.

Primal will become more attuned to your interests over time, as you interact with items in the feed. You get more of what you really care about, and less irrelevant stuff to sift through.

Behind the scenes, Primal is investigating thousands of the top news and information sources, and selecting those items that are most relevant to your individual interests. (If you’d like to add your own RSS or Web sources, that’s supported, too!)

Problem solved!

Getting Started

Interested in trying Primal’s intelligent content feeds? Check out our developers site.