Automating feed subscriptions

Excerpt: Adam Kalsey: We’ve also added support for this to Pheedo, so in addition to i...

Excerpt: Randy: Adam's the first mover. 999 million bloggers, hosting services and clients to go. Adam also sent me a bunch of great ideas to improve the USM client. I'll add new aggregators. If you want your aggregator added to the USM client, then send me an ...

bad, bad idea. Spammers will exploit this in a second. I would hate for my bloglines account to get all these extra feeds just because I was tricked into clicking on a link.

Think “spyware” and why it’s such a problem even though people have to give permission for the download. This could turn out to be the same.

That argument doesn’t hold much water. People don’t try and trick you into viewing a newsgroup even though the news:// protocol does almost exactly the same thing as this. There isn’t a rash of people sending email that they didn’t intend to because they were tricked into clicking a mailto link.

Verification of intentions is a client-side problem. The client should present the feed to the user, including all the items, and ask what they want to do with it. They may choose to subscribe, or they might just be looking at the feed once to see what’s in it. Clients that automatically add feeds into any sort of permanent subscription list without first asking the user will not be used for long.

Spyware gets in through piggybacking on a useful download (Like 180 Solutions), by providing some useful functions (like Gator or HotBar), or through browser security holes. Spyware is an entirely different issue and bears no relation to a feed subscription.

…good idea but I think in future popular browsers will be able read and manage popular xml based feeds without assistance.