Archive for April, 2010

Scheduled Downtime – Sunday, April 25

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Update: Thanks all for your patience while we upgraded our systems! We really appreciate it!  Everything went as planned (in fact better since we were actually down only for over an hour)!  Everything is now back in place and we are fully up and running.  However, if at all you find any thing fishy happening or broken then please report it to support@rapidfeeds.com.  Thanks again!

We are planning a scheduled downtime on Sunday, April 25. Our services will be unavailable between 10:00 AM to 06:00 PM IST (12:30 A.M. to 08:30 A.M. EDT) for maintenance and upgrades. Hope you will bear with us.

Thanks!

Upcoming Features and Service Enhancements

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Following our announcment of the Freemium model for FeedManager, a lot of you have showed interest in knowing more about the features and service enhancements we would be investing in and here is the quick list summed up for you.

Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of items, nor is it in the order of priority. It is just what we have set our focus on for the coming months:

Upcoming Features

* Real-Time Feeds
We will implement technologies like RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub to enable real-time updates for your feeds. This will make your RSS feeds available to your users the very instant you hit the publish button.

* Twitter Updates:
This feature will automate for you the process of posting on Twitter about the new items and podcasts that you add to your RSS feeds from time to time. This surely will make your life easier saving you all the effort you need to go and manually do so.

* Podcast Themes
With this you will have all the new browser friendly styles for your podcasting feeds that would enhance your feeds’ appearance when viewed in different browsers with more organized page style and highlighted subscription options etc. making it even easier for your users to subscribe to your feeds and perhaps increasing the conversion rate.

* Deeper iTunes integration
Once implemented, the item level iTunes tags will also be added in your RSS feed. Specifically, the Podcast media file play-time will be available in the itunes. Moreover, all the info of your files will be automatically calculated and added just like the enclosure details.

* Monetization options for your Feeds
We are exploring all the possibilities and will add monetization support for your feeds whereby you can display advertisements within your feeds and monetize on them.

* Update Feed via Email
This will allow you add items and podcasts to you feeds from anywhere, anytime, by simply sending an email to a given email address using any device. This means you can add items and podcasts to your feeds without even login into your RapidFeeds account!

UI

* User Interface improvements
We have identified many potential areas within the website where we will further improve the UI so that it will save you some clicks, make the interface more intuitive, loads faster etc. This should perhaps make your job on RapidFeeds done even Rapidly!

* Mobile compatible version of RapidFeeds
We’ll be launching this whole new interface for you to be able to use RapidFeeds on your mobile devices with convenience.

Others

* Better Support
We will transition out from Email Support and will set up a Support Ticket System instead. This will enable our support team to prioretize, better track and respond quicker to all your support queries.

* CName
This feature will allow you to brand your feeds by way of customizing your feed URL to your own domain rather than feeds.rapidfeeds.com. Your feeds will still be hosted with us and served from RapidFeeds.com in the backend, but what the user sees is your domain name and not RapidFeeds anywhere. This will also give you a permanent URL for your feeds that’s owned completely by you for ever, wither you use RapidFeeds or not!

* Performance Improvements
We have a lot of backend improvements in our pipeline which would significantly improve various aspects of our applications and uptime. This will ensure you an even better experience using our services apart from robust and reliable service all the time.

* Automatic Backup of Feeds
This will ensure retrieval of your feeds if you happen to accidentally delete them!

* API
Some of you have requested for this but doing this haven’t been feasible for us yet. However, if we receive more requests in the future we may as well release the API for our services. In the meanwhile, please feel free to get in touch with us if you think you have some really cool ideas around it and if we find them interesting we may plan to prioritize this!

* iPhone and other mobile Apps for RapidFeeds
So that you get more options to update your feeds even on the go!

We hope this sounds as exciting to you as it does to us!

We have our ears wide open for any questions, suggestions or concerns you might have. So please feel free to email us at support@rapidfeeds.com for anything that you wish to. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

Free (Default) Package revised. Included iTunes, Scheduling and Password Protection!

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Thanks to each one of you who wrote to us with your concerns, requests and suggestions for our Freemium model.  We must say, we were overwhelmed and truly appreciate each one of your emails!

Keep them coming!

From the numerous requests we received, the one that surfaced as the major and the most common among all of you who wished to continue with the Free package was to include the Support for iTunes in it as well. And we are glad to announce that we recognized the need and have revised the Free Package to include not just iTunes, but Scheduling and Password Protection as well!

For those of you who showed interest in knowing about the upcoming features for the paid packages, we have the list almost ready and we’ll post it here shortly.  So stay tuned.

Enjoy the Freemium!

Package details for FeedManager

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Update: Free (Default) Package revised. Included iTunes, Scheduling and Password Protection! Learn more

As we mentioned in our earlier post, in order to equip ourselves to provide you an improved overall service, we have decided to follow the Freemium model for FeedManager going forward.

What this means to all the users signing up for FeedManager starting today is that the Freemium model will be immediately effective for them, and they’ll have to subscribe to a package to start using FeedManager.

But if you are an existing FeedManager user as of today, you can continue to use the FeedManager without any difference in service until July 1, 2010.  However, with effect from July 1, 2010 the unlimited use of FeedManager will no longer be available to you for free of charge.  Rather, it will be available via 4 different levels of free and paid packages as described below:

Update:

To keep the service free of any interruptions beginning July 1, 2010, we have put in place for you a system, using which you can subscribe in advance to the package that suits your needs best starting right now!  However, you will start getting billed for your package only from July 1, 2010 and not before that.  Moreover, you can still continue to use the unlimited version of FeedManager without any difference in service until July 1, 2010 on which date your account will be automatically converted to the package you opted for.

We highly recommend you to subscribe to the package that suits your needs best as early as possible to avoid any interruptions in service when the Freemium model would take effect on July 1, 2010.  Please follow the below give instructions to subscribe:

1. Login to your RapidFeeds account
2. Go to the Billing tab
3. Select your package and billing cycle
4. Subscribe via PayPal
5. You are done!

Important:  Please not that the FeedManager accounts of all the users who did not susbscibe to a package as of July 1, 2010 will be automatically converted to the “FeedManager Free” package.  This would mean that all the feeds in your account, except the oldest one will be automatically disabled and you’ll not be able to use them or execute any functions like edit, add item, update etc. on them.  Also, all the advanced features which are not part of the “FeedManager Free” package will be automatically disabled for your active feed as well.  You’ll however have an option to go back and upgrade your account to any of the paid packages and your feeds and the advanced features will be restored accordingly.

Please feel free to write to us at support@rapidfeeds.com if you have any questions in this regard and we shall get back to you as soon as possible.

Improved Service, Prompt Support, 99% uptime, New Features and much more with FeedManager Freemium

Monday, April 5th, 2010

It’s been a terrific journey of 5 years in public service for our free to use FeedManager since its inception back in February 2005.  Thanks to each one of you who used it, for your continued patronage and to make it such a success!

Over the years we have received numerous love mails from many of you who used FeedManager and a lot of you had many great things to suggest. Thanks again! Many of you have also expressed in your emails how important a few things, like quicker responses to your support emails, 99% uptime guarantee, faster feed-serving and page-load times etc. were to you, and we did our best to give you for free what was possible of us with all the time, real money, energy and effort we could spare.

Things have been scaling at a great speed at the technical side as well with ever increasing adoption of our services, growing number of feeds created, increasing number of subscriptions to the users’ feeds etc. (not to forget RSS feed serving itself is a highly resource intensive job) demanding more and more Processing Power, Bandwidth, Memory and other resources. Nevertheless, we have always tried our best to keep pace with all this and to provide a smooth service, with frequent hardware and software upgrades, intensive optimizations etc. This obviously has cost us real money but we still kept the service free of charge all this while!

However, in some serious discussions during the past few weeks, we at RapidFeeds have analysed a great deal of data including the demand vs. our capacity to supply, user feature-request trends, support / inquiry email volumes vs. response time history, feed uptime value to our users and its impact on their businesses, traffic vs. resources required for faster feed-serving and page-load time, and much more, and came to a conclusion that we can create a win win situation for both our users and RapidFeeds by adopting the ‘Freemium’ model going forward.

This ‘Freemium’ model will make available our services in form of different packages (free and paid) that will put us in a better position to cater to the needs of our users based on their demand. In other words, using this model our users will be able to reserve for themselves, for a very little price, a degree of resources in all aspects based on their requirements and enjoy a greater level of service.

On the other hand, the money that flows in will allow us to employ more resources to further improve and scale our services, guarantee 99% uptime, decrease the TAT (Turn Around Time) for support requests, provide dedicated support to the users who need it, upgrade hardware and software from time to time to ensure uninterupted service, develop new features and much much more!

We hope this sounds as exciting to you as it does to us!  We’ll post here further details in this regard shortly, including the package details and prices.  So watch this space and stay tuned!

Special Note: We would like to thank each one of you who took the survey we sent out recently.  Your responses have been of great help and one of the main factors in deciding the future of RapidFeeds. Thanks again!