As a segmentation exercise, we have revamped our service plans for a wider variety of options for our users. A complete comparison of the updated service plans can be reviewed on our website.
Here’s a brief summary of the changes:
The Premium plan has been renamed to Starter, and includes a basic set of features (same as before).
The Pro plan has been renamed to Business, and includes an advanced set of features (same as before).
A new Plus plan has been introduced to satisfy the mid-range requirements.
We have also been offering a high-demand custom solution (Corporate plan) for RSS publishing (and consumption) to a few organizations. This plan is also publicly available now. It includes managed isolated hosting, and provides better performance, stability, and scalability.
The Free plan remains as is.
The new service plans apply to all signups, upgrades, and renewals. Please contact us if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.
We hope that the flexibility of our service plans would allow everyone to explore and gain from RSS publishing.
We have released an update with two new features this month: Podcast Feeds and Broken Feed Notifications. We received several requests for these features from Feedity users, so enjoy our feature-rich service for data syndication and information/news delivery.
Podcast feeds are automatically created (like regular feeds) based on the source webpage content (i.e. if it contains direct hyperlinks to valid media files). This will make podcast publishing as easy as dropping your media files in a public folder, and Feedity will take care of the rest. Supported file formats include m4a, mp3, mov, mp4, m4v, and pdf. The podcast feeds with media enclosures comply with the Apple iTunes specification, but we do not include any iTunes specific RSS tags for now.
The Broken Feed Notifications feature will allow Feedity users to be instantly notified by email if any one of their RSS feeds stops picking up feed items from the source webpage. An early detection is critical for optimum delivery. It can assist users in correcting the issue sooner than later, by editing and refining the feed. This feature is available as a global setting on the ‘My Profile’ page for our Premium and Pro plan users.
If you find Feedity useful (for personal subscriptions, or your business applications), then please consider upgrading you account. Our service plans start as low as $3.25 per month, which is nearly about the price of a cup of coffee!
In a continuing effort to enhance the Feedity user experience, we have released a nifty analytics feature for our users. The analytics charts appear on the ‘My Feeds’ page to depict your feeds usage (quota balance) and highlight the most requested feeds for your account.
The analytics charts will appear for all Premium and Pro plan users who have created 5 or more feeds.
Under the hood, among other things we have fixed a few bugs and improved the performance of the Feedity parser. More analytics and other new features are in the works, so stay tuned guys!
Its been busy for us here at Feedity. Despite the global economic downturn, we are seeing a decent growth in the usage of data delivery solutions. The New Features Poll gave us an insight into what you (our users) want. We are planning to launch some new useful features in the coming weeks. What we are also planning ahead, is an overhaul of our Feed Builder module, so that it’s more interactive and easy-to-use. We’ll post more on that in the coming weeks.
There has been a common consensus among the data liberators that government web sites should focus on RSS, not redesigns. What’s exciting to see with the new US government, is its keen interest in opening up all sorts of data and statistics to the general public. For example, the implementation instructions [pdf] for the new US Stimulus Bill require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:
For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.
The document is clear to state that the items in the feed can’t simply be unstructured text, but have to be reusable structured data. A proposal (and guideline) such as this, is a great effort. It should be followed by all government agencies (and even in the corporations), around the world, to keep the public informed.
In December last year, I wrote about our plans on launching a simplified social exchange for Feedity users to share ideas, concepts, and experiments with Feedity-generated RSS feeds, along with general feature requests. This month, I’m glad to announce the launch of Feedity Labs. Take a look, and share your ideas.
Planning ahead, we are also looking to hear from Feedity users about the new features we should be aiming at. Please take a few seconds to complete the poll (below), and tell us how you would like to see Feedity evolve.
Thanks, and please subscribe to our blog feed or follow us on Twitter for future announcements and other service updates.
You can also checkout a lot of cool and popular RSS feeds we have hand-picked in our Featured Feeds section.
