Feedoor: I’m Going to Wait for Door Number 3

StartUpArabia alerted me to a cool tool called Feedoor, a feed management tool launched last year. Feedoor allows users to edit feeds, filter them, and create new feeds based on mash-ups of multiple feeds and filters.

Feedoor may be the ultimate in vanity tools if they can just get the filtering right. By creating a new feed, you can add any feeds you want and create one huge feed. Want everything under the Denton umbrella? Add Valleywag, Gawker, IO9, and the rest and create one huge time-sucking feed. Have more than one blog? Create one huge feed to share with friends and family that includes everything you write.

In its present state, Feedoor only uses RSS2.0, but has plans to add ATOM in the future. They also provide a handy subscription tool on the feed page to add your newly created feed (located at an easy-to-remember subdomain of feedoor.com) to your feedreader of choice.

Feedoor isn't perfect, however. The filters currently only search in title and text of blog entries, not an author field. I attempted to create a vanity feed that would show only my entries here at Profy as well as at The Industry Standard, and got nothing but a blank feed, even when I used only my first name instead of my entire name (the hyphen creates a lot of web app fails). The UI also needs a bit of work, since many commands require too many steps to complete. For instance, clicking "Filter" only lets you set up how many posts the feed should pull at any given time for the full feed you created. To filter the individual feeds you may have added, you actually have to click "edit" then "items" to add the filter.

Still, Feedoor looks like it can be a very handy tool, especially for those of us with more than one blog to wrangle when sharing. If they improve their filtering mechanism and the UI, I think I'll see a lot more feeds on FriendFeed coming in as X.feedoor.com.