Content Curation World

Feed2email.net is a useful free tool for anyone needing to track and monitor specific web sites or RSS feeds. Just provide any web site URL, or RSS feed url and an email address and Feed2email takes care of the rest. Without having to register, pay anything or login, it will automatically forward any updates of your favorite websites and RSS feeds into your email inbox.

An extra useful option allows you to export all of your subscribed feeds / websites into an OPML file by simply replying to any email from Feed2mail with 'export' in the subject line and you'll get instantly an OPML file with all of your subscriptions which you can import in many dedicated RSS feed readers.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://feed2email.net/ 

FAQ: http://feed2email.net/faq.html 

*Added to the RSS Feeds Management section of the Content Curation Tools Supermap

Marco Arment the creator of Instapaper, has an excellent and provocative piece on why Google is closing down all of its RSS appendages (they just closed also the RSS feeds in Google Alerts) and the logic behind this strategy.

He writes: "Officially, Google killed Reader because “over the years usage has declined”.1 I believe that statement, especially if API clients weren’t considered “usage”, but I don’t believe that’s the entire reason.

The most common assumption I’ve seen others cite is that “Google couldn’t figure out how to monetize Reader,” or other variants about direct profitability. I don’t believe this, either. Google Reader’s operational costs likely paled in comparison to many of their other projects that don’t bring in major revenue, and I’ve heard from multiple sources that it effectively had a staff of zero for years. It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people."

"The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).

Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4"

Provides better perspective on RSS, Google, FB and Twitter and your future relationship with RSS.

Must-read article. 9/10

Full article: http://www.marco.org/2013/07/03/lockdown

(Image credit - RSS logo - Shutterstock)