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Switching To Full Feeds

August 30th, 2007

Should your RSS feeds be summaries or full content? There are pros and cons to both. For the longest time I’ve wrestled with this and refused to do full feeds, fearing content robbers. You know, those who grab your RSS feed to display your content on their website without having the decency to ask you.

But after owning a web enabled hand held device, I can see just how frustrating summary feeds are. You may have noticed lately there are a lot of posts around mobile marketing, mobile content and all things mobile. That’s because I believe mobility will be (is) a big part of the Internet.

Also, in re-visiting many arguments for full feeds, some sites claim that having full feeds actually bring people to your site - contrary to popular belief. Full feed proponents also report some gain in RSS readership. So, I’m finally ready to test it out. How do you like your feeds?

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4 Comments to “Switching To Full Feeds”

  1. Kelly Says:
    August 31st, 2007 at 8:31 am

    Lynette I much prefer full feeds. I’m annoyed when I can only get a small glimpse of a post through my reader.

  2. Lynette Says:
    August 31st, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    Thanks for your input Kelly, it’s much appreciated. Glad I’m not alone. I’ve been super annoyed the last 2 weeks. I like to read in bed and somethings just catch up on blogs. Much prefer to use my PDA for this but the summary feeds force me to get online.

    Although the PDA can handle getting online, I’d much rather not because it takes many steps for me to navigate back to the feed reader. So yeah, I’ll be keeping full feeds for now.

    Anyone else have feed preference? I’m actually thinking of offering two feeds really.

  3. Angela Says:
    August 31st, 2007 at 7:52 pm

    I don’t really get the point of partial feeds in terms of user-wise, anyway…..because I”m reading blogs through my feed reader because that’s where I want to read them — if I want to click through to the site I will but I don’t like to be forced to :)

    So that’s my preference.

    Angela

  4. Lynette Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 10:21 pm

    Hey Angela, point taken. I think a lot of this is left over sentiment from 2-3 years ago. Then, many people didn’t think the general Internet public would use RSS feeds. Many thought RSS is a geek’s toy, geeks love it but general users won’t be able to understand it well enough to use them. This is still debated some but comparably, RSS readership is way larger than it was.

    Also, at that time, Adsense publishing is like all time high (still is but that’s another post) and people just put 200% of their business on Adsense alone. You can’t put Adsense on RSS (then), so the idea was, when you force people to come to your site so they hopefully can be enticed to click on the ads.

    Finally, content scrapers. This is still being done a lot now. Greedy web masters who are too lazy and cheap to pay for their own content grab your feeds to fill their pockets with Adsense cash.

    So that was the whole point about partial feeds.