The distinguishing factor between the different types of feeds on follow.it lies in the source of their messages, i.e. where the feeds get the messages from which are sent to followers.
On follow.it there are the following types of feeds:
A) RSS-powered feeds
Those feeds take messages from RSS feeds. The process is fully automatic.
To allow more granular filtering options in the feed directory, RSS-powered feeds are further broken down into:
A1) “Website”-feeds
Those are RSS-powered feeds which don’t fall into any other categories below. The most typical use case is a blog or website using RSS feeds to update their followers about their latest posts.
A2) Podcast feeds
These feeds typically contain links to podcast episodes.
A3) Youtube feeds
These feeds allow people to follow Youtube channels.
You can set up an RSS-powered feed now.
B) Manual feeds
Publishers enter messages for those feeds manually on follow.it. The most common use cases are:
- Publishers who prefer to send different messages than the ones published on their websites
- Publishers who don’t have a website
- Publishers who have a website but no RSS feed
Unlike RSS-powered feeds, the process isn’t fully automatic, which has both PROs (more flexibility what content is posted, scheduling of messages independently from website publishing times etc.) as well as CONs (more effort).
To set up a manual feed, go here and click on "set up a feed where you enter messages manually".
C) API feeds
API feeds are feeds which take content from an API. Learn more about them on our blog.
D) Focus feeds
Focus feeds alert followers when something specific happens. Opposed to API feeds (which may also alert followers for specific events) focus feeds rely on a manual entry of news; however, unlike with manual feeds, the data entry happens in a structured form. We already launched the first sub-type of focus feeds: "Date feeds". Learn more about them on our blog.
E) Open feeds (coming soon - get alerted when they are launched)
Open feeds will allow any user to “suggest” messages to get sent, which then get approved (or declined) by the owner of the feed. They allow tapping the power of the crowd to help everybody stay up to date.
Feed type combinations
The classification into different types of feeds isn’t rigid; one feed can fall into several categories. For example, publishers may set up an RSS-powered feed, then activate manual message sending as well (for messages not contained in their RSS feeds), and then also allow visitors to suggest messages, which would make the feed fall into categories A), B) and C) at the same time.
However, as most feeds only have one major source of messages, the paradigm of separate feed types is still helpful, for example to allow readers to quickly find the feeds they need in the follow.it directory.
