Hispanic blog network launches Feedtwister; Do we even need it?
By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 09:50 pm ET
Got email from #2 hispanic blog network InicioGlobal that they have launched a new feed-mashup service - Feedtwister. Nothing to do with the original story - InicioGlobal claims to have 3 million monthly unique visitors. Coming back to Feedtwister.com, the service allows you to mix up to 50 feeds to generate a new list, with the info you want. All feed formats are supported and you can create as many lists as you want. Embed codes come standard. While the intentions of the development team might be good, I am not exactly sure what problem does a service like Feedtwister solve. I mean while there are quite a few slick options available to mashup feeds, why in the whole world would one use a arcane looking service.
on May 31st, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Hi Vivek,
Thanks for writing about our tool. I filled in your SUBMIT YOUR STARTUP form by the way, I didn’t send you an email.
We wouldn’t have created a tool that nobody needs really. In fact, I built it because I wanted to add a similar thing to my website but couldn’t find anything on the internet, at least with the flexibility I required.
What could you use it for? Well, for example, to add a box with the latest news on a topic from the blogs you choose. Or if you own several blogs, you could merge them all with our tool.
You could also add only your website to your list and give away the code Feedtwister gives you, allowing other websites to put your news on their website.
A webmaster that already is using it, to name a case, is using it on all of his forum pages to display his latest website articles. He used to use Feedburner to do this, but found Feedtwister to be more flexible.
This also tells us something. If Feedburner has a similar service (I’m not sure how it works but I think it’s very restricted, like you can only add the feeds you own), then it’s probably useful.
If you don’t know anything about RSS or programming, then Feedtwister makes it super easy for you. You just have to enter the feed’s URI. Even if you know these things, if you want to create something like what Feedtwister can generate to include on your website, you would have to create databases, do the programming, etc. and some people, I think, would rather avoid this.
It’s just my opinion though, and if people continue using the service, then I guess it was useful.
Thanks again for featuring us here, and I obviously respect your opinion, I just wanted to give my point of view.
on June 3rd, 2007 at 11:31 am
Clearly someone needs it because we have thousands of people paying us to use almost the same thing
I know Julian gave us a try recently, and I’m guessing he developed FeedTwister because we no longer offer a free service
And I second Julian on the ineffectiveness of FeedBurner’s offering in this area. It’s truly lacking.