Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress.
The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading tastes.
The new site launch comes less than a week after Dave reached a settlement with former contractor Rogers Cadenhead over previous plans to relaunch the same features. Hopefully the site is here to stay and isn’t just a political move.
I always liked the Share Your OPML pages. The public exposure of browsable feed lists introduced me to many new sources of information. Robert Scoble started subscribing to as many feeds as he could find just to be on top of the list, spawning a link blog and a Bloggercon session as people started to wonder if anyone could really keep up with 1300+ feeds.
I’d like to see lots more features on the new site. Members should be able to subscribe to all of someone else’s feeds at once, cloning their reading list. The server should continually poll hosted files for the latest subscription list updates from personal servers as well as large aggregators such as Bloglines or NewsGator. I’d also like to see the unique feeds of someone with a reading list like mine. I might find one or two new sources of information.