RapidFeeds Blog

We are very glad to bring another valuable feature to all the FeedManager users today – the Auto Tweet. This again is one of the features from our long list of features we have set our focus on developing in the coming months.

As the name suggests, once you enable this feature for a given feed in your FeedManager account, all your updates to that feed will automatically show up in your Twitter timeline. This not only will save you all the time and energy you would spend doing this manually but will also help spread your feed updates virally, and the very instant you publish them!

To enable this must-have feature, please follow the instructions on the Auto Tweet help page.

Please note: This feature is available for Basic and above accounts only.

Happy Feed Tweeting!

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!

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!

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.

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!

You might see a sudden increase in your feed traffic in the next few days.  Please be happy that there is nothing wrong with our stats system and all that traffic is genuine.  You might see this sudden plunge in subscriptions and traffic to your feeds as we are broadening the coverage of User Agents.  This is a routine at the backend to include in our stats system the new User Agents from time to time as they become more popular to track subscriptions and hits from them.   However, this time around there are more than a few User Agents that we are adding to our database and this might make your graphs surge a little if your users are using these agents.  Also, for the few users for whom the Google Reader subscriptions were not showing up, the good news is that this is now fixed and you should be able to see the subscriptions and hits coming from the Google Reader to your feeds.

Cheers

In our quest to serve you better and better, we have totally revamped the Help Center and made it much more user friendly and useful.  This update was pushed a few weeks ago and was being tested so some of the users might have already noticed the change!  Now you can find all the help you need with RapidFeeds documented in this space here: http://www.rapidfeeds.com/docs/ – bookmark it now!

We tried to cover most of the topics in these documents, but if you feel something is missing, please feel free to request the inclusion by sending an email to suggestions@rapidfeeds.com.  We’ll be adding and updating the documents to this space as and when required.

Cheers!