This morning I checked out Feed Rinse. I actually registered last night but for some reason it kept telling me I needed to upgrade when trying to rinse one feed and upgrade wasn’t possible as it was a “coming soon” feature.

The idea behind Feed Rinse is you can take a feed and filter it for only the things you are interested in. At Hmm, you can already do this without using Feedrinse by running a keyword search and subscribing to the RSS feed, so you can imagine that I’m supportive of a program like this.

What I suspect it will be used mostly for is stripping out single RSS posts with ads (and it is effective at doing that, keep reading), so I would suggest to folks who are running ads to make sure they include them at the bottom or integrate into their posts which will make it more difficult to filter out using this program.

For example, one of the feeds I read has an ad as a single post every couple of posts with no other value. It’s always the same sized-ad and it gets old real fast considering in my reblog reader I have to click or use a keyboard combo to continually archive this same tired ad. For a demo I ran that feed through Feedrinse and used the keywords (they’re always the same) for this ad and Feedrinse created a feed that filtered out that ad.

Feedrinse plans to make money by limiting the number of filter criteria per feed. For a free account 3 filters are allowed, $5/month will get 20 filters and $8/month will get 300 filters.

One problem I see is just as Feed Rinse is circumventing the RSS feed publishers wishes by allowing filtering within their feeds, users of Feed Rinse could sign up for multiple accounts and get additional feed filters. I’m not sure how or if they’ve taken that into account (I didn’t test), but they should be on alert that this could happen.

Also the feeds aren’t blocked in anyway so somebody else could set up a third party Feedrinsed RSS feed sharing service so that feeds that were filtered already could be linked up (and thus circumvent the need to sign up for an account to rinse the same feeds for the same criteria). This could also cause some problems for the parent Feed Rinse service as the RSS feed owners get pissed about their ads being stripped out and Feed Rinse (potentially) making money off their content for the service. I don’t see the logic in RSS feed publishers being upset about allowing their readers to get posts with only certain keywords in it, but I can see their concern if the ads are being completely stripped. Slippery slope.

We don’t run ads in RSS feeds at this time but we’ve considered doing this someday if the right program comes along (something not invasive and worthwhile). Since we already allow readers to create keyword filters by RSS feed — and get them straight from us — I don’t see any harm/foul from Feedrinse, but for those publishers who don’t want their ads stripped out they may want to look at how ads are being incorporating into feeds and not separate them in posts with the same text every time so that they are easily identified and filtered by services like Feed Rinse. It should be fairly trivial programatically to throw in dynamic components so that the ads don’t always appear with the same boilerplate text.

Finally, I wonder if Feed Rinse users will feel dirty stripping out advertisement posts from their favorite blogs or if they’ll have a clean conscience just like using Greasemonkey or Norton Anti-spam? What do you think?

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