By Dominic Jones | Published: April 12, 2007 | 
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A short open letter to Thomson and Shareholder
Dear Thomson Financial and Shareholder.com:
We’ll keep this short. Just one question.
When any of your current IR website clients want to leave your service and switch to a new provider, is it true that they will lose access to anyone who has subscribed to their RSS feeds?
Come on, we know you’re reading this. Use the comment form below to post your replies.
Regards,
Investor Relations Blog Team
(P.S. If anyone else wants to chime in on this issue, please go ahead. Investis? Hemscott? B2I? SNL? Hmm?)
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April 12th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
“All your RSS feeds are belong to us.”
Ha, ha.
Good question!
April 12th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Hi Phil,
While funny, I’m not sure how true that comment is. That’s why we’re asking. Of course, a lack of response would suggest you’re right. Companies don’t own or have any control over RSS feeds hosted by Thomson or Shareholder, or any outside vendor for that matter. In other words, they have no way to move their feeds without losing subscribers. Now I’m wondering if companies were told about this before they agreed to add RSS to their hosted sites.
April 13th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Hi Dominic,
One of our products is an RSS feed for LSE Regulatory News Announcements. BAT have an example on the front page of their website.
It is not possible to keep a detailed list of subscribers, due to the open nature of RSS feeds. Users do not have to go through any kind of sign-up procedure to access the feed (this is one of the reasons why RSS has taken off) and hence we do not know the individual details of each reader. We can harvest general statistics as to how many times the feed is accessed, but we cannot gather specific details of the users. Our clients understand this before they take the service.
Because of this, unfortunately should a client choose to turn off a feed, those subscribed cannot be automatically carried over to any new feed (should the client or new provider decide to set one up).
This is not a scenario we have come across yet, but our solution to this is to post a message within the RSS feed informing the user that the feed will cease to work after a certain time, and the action that they should take - this will show up in their reader software. This is for us a more simple solution than introducing an RSS registration form - which would discourage users.
The Hemscott IR solution aside, talking generally about RSS feeds - one might assume that if a user is tech savvy enough to subscribe to an RSS feed, then they are also able to realise that the feed has been turned off (their software would tell them so), and revisit the website to locate a new one.
I too am interested to hear other views - from suppliers and users themselves.
Jonathan Godsell
Product Manager
Hemscott IR (an Ipreo Company)
April 13th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Jonathan,
Thank you. You are so right about those stupid registration-required feeds. Our research shows that almost no one is signing up for them. Actually, we are — and probably two other people who work at the company! Those feeds are the stupidest thing we’ve seen in seven years of reviewing IR websites.
But let me stop beating around the bush because those other folks aren’t going to post here, and if they do now it’s too late.
If your company’s feed is hosted on someone else’s domain, you’re going to have a helluva time trying to get your subscribers to move over to a new feed on your own domain or another domain. Many bloggers have experienced this, and they’re dealing with an audience of early adopters.
Furthermore, there’s a huge PR and potential legal risk if someone thinks they’re subscribed to a feed that still is live, but the feed is no longer being updated and they miss important news. That can happen very easily, by the way. I don’t know what software you’re talking about, but many feed readers won’t tell you if a feed is broken or has moved. They just show that there’s nothing new. And another thing, all the evidence with tech savvy early-adopters suggests people don’t manage their feeds well, so you can’t expect all of them to change their subscriptions. Furthermore, trying to use code to automatically redirect feeds doesn’t always work either.
So, if you’re at a company, the best thing you can do is to host the feed at a URL your company has complete control over. If you can’t do that, delay providing a feed until you can. But there is absolutely no reason why you can’t simply publish an existing vendor-hosted feed to a URL your company owns. It’s a simple technical detail, something vendors should have been urging their clients to do all along.
Host feeds on domains you own. Anything less than that is not smart.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Jonathan,
I forgot to mention that we have been impressed with some of the new things Hemscott IR is doing. Wolseley’s annual reports are pretty good. We like your RNS module, although searching seems a bit hard. Oh lord, we must be turning over a new leaf. We’re dishing out compliments!