I finally remembered to ask Scoble about partial feeds at FastCompany now that he is working there. I new that he shared my dislike for partial feeds and was hopeful that he might be able to do something about it.
It looks like they are going to go full-text now! They are really starting to get serious about being online lately. They are well positioned for replacing NYT and WSJ for my generation. Which means they only have ten years before becoming old media, but a very profitable old media. I have enjoyed FC content for over 10 years now. They seem to be quite in touch with the future of business.
Here is a clip from the conversation:
I have been meaning to ask – Can you do anything about partial feeds at FastCompany? Sure the content is pretty long in some cases, but even a longer summary might be a good idea. I am still subscribed for some reason, but I skip most of the posts because the first sentence does not match the title of the post and for some reason the first sentence of a lot of their articles are not interesting.
If they need money, put lots of ads in the feed. That is fine, but I need a little help getting started. Once I get into a FC article it is usually interesting and informative. I get smarter when I read FC, but they make it hard even for someone who values their content to get started reading.
Comment by Luke Gedeon — February 8, 2008 @ 9:09 am
We’re back up! We’ll be watching the site closely this morning, and hoping to iron out the performance issues some of you encountered.
@Luke — we hear you. We’ll be reevaluating our RSS feeds now that we’re live on our new software platform.
Best,
Paul Maiorana
Director, Technology
FastCompany.com
Comment by pmaiorana — February 8, 2008 @ 9:20 am
Luke: I +hate+ partial text feeds and will fight to the death to get them to go full text.
Comment by Robert Scoble — February 8, 2008 @ 9:33 am
@15 might be a tough fight. For Joe Blogger full text is okay. For commercial sites partial feeds hope to suck the reader to the site in the hopes of sticking around. Whichever generates more money will win
Comment by Steve — February 8, 2008 @ 9:52 am
One last thought in response to Steve’s response to Scoble. It might be a tough fight but it is for FC’s own good. As far as getting people to stick, you can put links in the body of the article and at the bottom that link to other FC articles.
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