The Robot Co-op

We’re not very good at letting people know about new features are out there, so I’d like to try and remedy that in this new year by highlighting a feature every day or so that might’ve otherwise slipped by unnoticed. To start, here’s one of my favorite, yet obscure, features that some people might find useful if you have several different places around the internet that you write and post stuff.

Add an RSS feed to your account

If you’re not familiar with RSS, here’s a good explanation. We try to keep it as hidden away as possible, but for those that do care, here are some interesting things we’re doing with it.

As you may or may not know, you can add RSS feeds to your account on 43 People (go to your page, click “View your recent entries”, and then “Add a feed to your account”). From here, you can add any RSS feed from anywhere on the internet (your blog, your del.icio.us account, your library, etc). It will automatically have all of your 43 Things/Places/People and All Consuming feeds, as well as your Flickr feed if you have given us your screen name, but since I’m an RSS MANIAC I’ve also added feeds from my library, my Live Journal, my TypePad blog, my Tada Lists, and my NetFlix activity. (Here’s my page if you’re curious to see how this ends up looking.)

Subscribe to me instead of to an RSS feed

The great thing about this (in my opinion) is that people can then subscribe to ME, rather than my feeds. I think people are more interesting than RSS feeds… and when people move around, I don’t have to worry about updating all the feeds. When I get a new account somewhere (hey, look, Yahoo Answers has an RSS feed for all my questions!) I can add it and everyone that’s subscribed to me now gets this new content.

Choose only what you want

Now, some people (like me) probably are a little overzealous about adding content… so there’s a chance that you don’t actually want to see every blurry camera phone picture I post. For cases like this, you can unsubscribe from particular feeds within a person’s set of feeds and still be subscribed to the person as a whole. You do this by clicking on their name in the sidebar and selecting only the content that you want.

Your subscriptions page

If you’re subscribed to me and 100 other people, you can get an up-to-date list of all the entries from your subscriptions page. Or, you can export the content as a new uber feed and read it in your RSS reader of choice.

Add feeds to other people’s pages

You can add feeds to anyone’s page, not just your own. And, if you want to read feeds by people that don’t have a 43 Things account, you can do that too. For example, here’s Miranda July’s feed page. ))<>(( Forever!

Random bonus NetFlix feature

If you have a NetFlix account and add your NetFlix “Most Recent Rental Activity” feed (available from this page), we’ll automatically mark movies that are shipped to you as “I am consuming this” on All Consuming account. When you ship them back, we’ll mark them as “I have consumed this”. We love combining things like this… even if only 5 people are using it at the moment. If you are one of those 5 people, enjoy!

RSS is made out of people! Okay, time for lunch… I hope I don’t lose at credit card roulette as I need money for tonight’s one-year anniversary party. Hope to see you there if you’re in Seattle.