This is an FYI post. I thought about sharing my way of using RSS for various purposes that regard to staying informed about market trends or specific companies. I have used this simple method while interning at a cash-strapped company. Early-stage startups or just people with ideas may find this useful.

The gist of this is filtering your RSS feeds. I am assuming you are a user of RSS. If not, and you are reading this blog, then it would probably be a good idea for you to get started. Get the free FeedDemon and start saving time.

Let’s say you have an idea for a product, and you want to see what’s going on with other companies. So you subscribe to an RSS feed of an industry publication. But you want to know only about some specific companies, without having to go through every feed every day.  That’s where you can use Yahoo Pipes. They have a great graphic interface which kind of reminds me of wiring that you would do between modules in a music application. Your pipe should be extremely simple. You fetch a feed or as many feeds as you like with the appropriate module and hook it to a filter containing conditions on what words you want to see in the title, description or author of the feed. The last step is to hook the filter to the feed output. Then all you have to do is run it, and add the feed to your RSS reader. This is virtually creating a feed off of a search engine of a specific site, since sites don’t offer that kind of customization to their RSS feeds. This can be used for many purposes.

Yahoo pipes offers much more functionality, with many different modules and operators that you can run on RSS feeds. For instance there is a pipe marking a ship’s route on a map using the ship’s coordinate feeds and Google maps, and a bunch of neat stuff. There’s a host of user-created examples, with the source piping included to help you understand what’s going on, as well as simple tutorials.

I realize that this is a geeky post, but I wanted to expose something that I found useful. Let me know if you find this useful as well.

Unfortunately sometimes you do things first, but you learn later. In this case, I wrote a comment on TechCrunch’s MG Siegler’s Free to Use. Pay to Play, but now I am realizing that I could do the same in my blog, and employ a trackback. This is just great, because now I have to write new stuff in order for MG to accept my trackback. Well, there is always a first time. I hope you still accept it MG. If you are a beginning blogger like me, and don’t know what a trackback URL is, here’s a great article (there are many out there).

Freemium means that there is a set of features in a product that are free, and when you want to upgrade, or add some premium features, then you have to pay. The easiest example is Gmail. If you go over your ~7Gb of storage you have to pay a fixed amount per year for additional storage.

And now to the subject matter. Mr. Siegler writes accurately about the advantages of the freemium model as was first brought up by Fred Wilson on his blog, I absolutely agree with the article and the advantages of the freemium model. However, this still doesn’t solve the question of the new startups mentioned in the beginning of the article who can’t get positive cash flows. They still have to invest sometimes a lot of money in order to achieve that service/product that will build a huge user base. Yes, a subscription model could always enhance an ad-based model, but how do you get to the point that Siegler is describing, citing Pandora as an example, of being a service with an already huge user base, that can start employing the freemium model?

Moreover, as Yuval Ararat mentions in his blog, he quit last.fm when they started demanding subscription money from him. Same thing happened to me with BSPlayer, when they started making their software shareware. Evidently this model does not always work, and even when you have a big user base it doesn’t necessarily mean that users will stick around if you change the rules. There is a fine line here, and you have to be careful with your demands. If you don’t have any real competitive advantage and there are low switching costs, then virtually nothing prevents your huge user base from becoming very, very tiny.