Over the past 4 years, I’ve been working on an article reader, smry.ai.
For most of the time I had only a rudimentary understanding of RSS, so I didn’t think to add an RSS reader to the product.
I had never used a traditional RSS reader myself, relying on news apps like google news (which themselves are heavily reliant on RSS)
But trying RSS readers like Feedly pushed me to expand the product, and a small subset of users really liked it—it became an agglomeration of a read-it-later app and an RSS reader, which I quite liked in theory. At this point I still didn’t really understand the depth of RSS and what it’s capable of. It wasn’t clear that it is the lifeblood of every news app on the planet, custom aggregators like daily.dev, intelligence/monitoring products like Feedly Intelligence, is the primary distribution layer for the world’s podcasts, and much more.
Still, I couldn’t find myself using the RSS features in my own product until I added an API to manage RSS feeds with my local agent. This became a major unlock for me, and suddenly I had groups of feeds for competitor monitoring, developer news, and market opportunities. Even updates in my software dependencies that my agents use to improve the product.
I still wasn’t passively scrolling the RSS feeds themselves—mostly still using the reader to read individual articles my agent recommended, but my agents loved it and pushed RSS to the absolute limit, turning things I’d never expect could be feeds into feeds.
By doing this, I discovered a couple things:
1. Feeds are massively important for agents. Not just news/blogs/podcasts, but also socials, websites monitoring—almost anything can become a feed, and agents need their own ways of keeping track of what is ‘seen’ and what is new. This became a major bet for Smry, and why I’m putting a lot of effort into the API/MCP.
2. Agents can manage far more feeds than humans. An agent can easily follow and track hundreds or thousands of feeds, while for most people that takes years to accumulate.
Despite this, the product still has major issues.
1. most users still don’t know what RSS is. following feeds is weird to them, as I feel they are used to algorithmic feeds.
2. while following hundreds of feeds is fine for agents, for most consumers this is not really that useful. for consumers, it feels like they would rather follow topics (think daily.dev) or have a deeply personalized feed.
My question for you guys is how do you think I can make the product more usable to the traditional RSS reader audience, and what would make it better for non-RSS folks?
There are folks here that have a much better understanding of RSS than me—is there something obvious that I’m missing that would make it substantially better?
Is there something I can build that would make you switch from your existing RSS reader, or is there something I can build that you’d use together with your existing RSS reader?
I’ve completely fallen in love with RSS over the past few months, and feel like there’s so much to be built!
My goal here is to build something people come back to every single day, and that shapes how they discover and monitor what’s going on around them.
submitted by /u/TerrificMist