UK Marketing Case Study: How To Develop a Rss App?

When you want to follow specific writers, publications, and channels—to see every piece of content they publish—nothing beats an RSS reader app. RSS apps access web feeds published by websites, letting you aggregate and curate content you care about. Instead of visiting multiple sites, just open your favorite RSS app to see all new content in a central source.

What is RSS app?

Really simple syndication

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is an online file that contains details about every piece of content a site has published. Each time a site publishes a new piece of content, details about that content—including the full-text of the content or a summary, publication date, author, link, etc.—are automatically generated in the file and displayed in reverse chronological order.

Since it's updated with details about every piece of content a site publishes, you can use RSS feeds for things like keeping up to date with every new article your favorite blog publishes or automatically generating email newsletters or social media posts to promote your new content.

Make life easier

RSS feeds remain great for an in-depth look at a site’s new content — not just the stuff that gets pushed up on social media. If you are genuinely devoted to a site and want to see everything it has to offer, then an RSS feed is still the best way to make sure you don’t miss anything. While this doesn’t work well with all sites, even large ones like ours can compartmentalize the feeds, giving you better access to only the content you want. It’s an excellent alternative to social media if you want the news and articles without all the baggage that comes with having a Twitter or Facebook account.

Additionally, RSS feeds are often very easy to read at your leisure and will update even if you are not online — they are particularly useful for catching up on the news during your downtime. As such, RSS feeds have grown into a beneficial tool, thanks to the emergence of well-crafted mobile apps that act as feed readers.

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The feature of a RSS app: Keep track of new blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube channel uploads

Receive and view email newsletters in your RSS reader

Kill the Newsletter generates an email address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters you want to receive. You'll be able to view the newsletters you want to read alongside the other content you follow in your RSS reader, and you don't have to worry about newsletters clogging up your email inbox.

View social media posts from important accounts

If you're tired of only seeing the posts social media algorithms think you want to see and, instead, want to see everything that a company/person posts, you can create an RSS feed for that account in RSS.app and then subscribe to it in your RSS reader.

Discover newly posted job openings

Some employers post their open roles on Glassdoor, some post on Indeed, some use niche sites, and some only post jobs to their websites. This makes looking for a new job a long process of navigating to multiple websites to look for new postings you might want to apply to.

Create email newsletters automatically

RSS is a great way to keep track of the content your favorite publishers are posting, but it also works well from the other side of the fence, too. If you're a publisher, you can use an RSS feed for your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, social media profile, etc. to build your email newsletters automatically.

Create social media posts automatically

Another way publishers can automate some of their work is by using RSS feed updates to automatically post new content to their social media profiles.

What makes a great RSS reader app?

For over a decade, Google Reader was the gold standard for RSS apps—at least until July 2013, when Google abruptly stopped supporting the tool. A good chunk of the internet is still mad about that.

But it's not all bad news. There are plenty of polished, high-quality feed reader apps that let you access the content published on your favorite sites exactly how you want to read it.

For this piece, we will focus on the best free, online RSS services—the best alternatives to Google Reader—and we narrowed our recommendations using the following criteria:

Free: Each featured app is either completely free or offers a free plan that rivals the features of most premium plans on the market.

Web apps: Web RSS apps let you read content online using any device by accessing a URL. This is opposed to native RSS apps that sync feeds directly to your device. The apps featured below are all web apps.

Traditional: A traditional RSS reader app does two things: displays content in reverse chronological order and lets you curate the content you want to read. We excluded any apps that use an algorithm to determine the order in which posts are displayed (e.g., popular posts displayed first), and we also excluded tools better described as content discovery platforms (e.g., Flipboard).

Full-text: When creating an RSS feed, publishers elect to show either a preview of their content or the entire article, so it's not always possible for RSS readers to display articles in their entirety. But for sites that have elected to show full-text, RSS readers should display the entire article, unless not having full-text is a specific feature that provides value to users (e.g., the app is designed to make it easy to skim lots of headlines). We eliminated any apps that placed access to full-text—when made available by the publisher—behind a premium plan paywall.

Usability: One of the major goals of using an RSS reader app is to simplify the process of seeing content from multiple sites. The apps we chose make it easy to perform basic RSS app functions like following your favorite sites, organizing your feeds into meaningful categories, saving articles, and marking articles as read.

User experience

All great apps pay special attention to offering a great user experience such as a clean design and an easy to use interface. For an RSS feed reader, the most important features are the most basic ones such as organizing your feed categories, saving articles, and appropriately tagging them.

Based on the above criteria, here is a list of top 15 RSS Feed Reader apps to help you monitor your favourite sites.

RSS evolution

While RSS readers offer a sanctuary from the algorithmic approach, they're also not opposed to using algorithms of their own, as they continue to evolve and regain relevance. That's not quite the conflict it might seem.

"Machines can have a big role in helping understand the information, so algorithms can be very useful, but for that they have to be transparent and the user has to feel in control," says Khodabakchian. "What's missing today with the black-box algorithms is where they look over your shoulder, and don't trust you to be able to tell what's right."

With its focus on professional users, Feedly hopes AI can better connect users with niche experts. Wolf, too, touts AI as a way to better flag standout stories. "I think algorithms are great," Wolf says. "I think the problem is when the algorithms are run by advertising companies."

And despite Digg Reader's demise, new RSS tools continue to come online. Even Winer has re-entered the fray, this week introducing feedbase, a database of feeds that makes it easy to see what others subscribe to, ideally prompting discovery and an even more open approach. "I thought it might be a good time to try to add an important feature to RSS that was always part of the vision, dynamic subscription lists," Winer says.

Still, the lasting appeal of RSS remains the parts that haven't changed: the unfiltered view of the open web, and the chance to make your own decisions about what you find there.

"The most amazing thing to me about RSS is that no one really went away from it," says Wolf. "It still exists. Somehow through all of this. It's crazy, in a way, that when you go away from RSS and then come back to it, it's all still there."