Email Syndication Services - Zookoda and Yutter promising
A couple of months ago Mike Arrington posted a plea to the blogosphere for more email syndication services for blogs. Mike didn't like the overly orange branding of Feedblitz, but more to the point he noted that blogs still need email. Now I'm about as big an RSS advocate as you'll find on the Web, yet even I recognize that a lot of people don't use RSS - and until Microsoft embeds it into Outlook are unlikely to. I'm sure there are a number of people who would like to subscribe to my blog, but haven't done so because they're not interested in or intimidated by three letter acronyms and "news readers". Well email syndication is for those people - perhaps also for folks who don't like the information overload that RSS brings (it's still an issue in '06, despite the growing number of filter options).
Overview of the email syndication space
I agree with Mike that FeedBlitz is an eyesore. But it seems to be leading the pack currently in the 'blog email notification' space:
Other such services I've found include:
I'm sure there are others, but my intention with this post isn't to do a Frank Gruber and compare a bunch of services. I'm really after the 'next generation' email notification service - and two apps have come across my virtual desk recently which look promising in that respect.
Zookoda - compelling feature set
Zookoda is an Australian company that offers a range of email notification services, primarily email newsletters and "recurring broadcasts". The Zookoda team describes it as "web-based email marketing application designed specifically for bloggers". The best thing about this service is its powerful set of functionality, together with its flexibility. For example: a lot of non-RSS readers may not want to receive notification of every single post from your blog, but a weekly email newsletter with all the highlights may be just what those users need. Zookoda enables that and it also has reporting, which is a key feature for a 'next gen' email notification service to offer and especially relevant to marketers.
I spoke to Zookoda co-founder Nick McNaughton and he told me their user uptake is going very well (he provided me with the figures to back that up, but asked me not to publish them). They have a lot of great development plans too, which again I can't divulge. But what he did say for public consumption is that Zookoda is aimed at "publishers who are blogging to a non-technical audience" - that's where he thinks the target market is. I also think it's useful for a blog like mine, which is technical but probably has a lot of readers who mainly want to keep track of media trends - or of me personally (e.g. family and friends) - and so are not necessarily RSS junkies. An email newsletter may help me attract more of those readers.
To get started with Zookoda, check out this tutorial. It's a fairly lengthy process to get an email newsletter up and running. I'm still working on it, so I haven't yet published mine. The Zookoda blog has case studies.
Yutter - simple yet hits the spot
Another interesting new email notification service is yutter (weird names must be a prerequisite for these services!). Yutter is currently in beta and they're still working on advanced features like analytics and OPML support for importing/exporting.
What I like about Yutter, even at this very early stage, is that it's very simple to use and the interface is a joy to behold (unlike the much-maligned FeedBlitz). Also it's good to know that Yutter emails will be counted in my Feedburner stats.
Summary
Although it's early days for both Zookoda and Yutter, they look to be very promising email notification services for blogs. Zookoda has a compelling feature set and one which I anticipate a lot of uses for, but their challenge will be to create a simple interface for it all. Yutter is a simpler feature set, but so far I'm encouraged by the neat interface and RSS/Feedburner compatibility.
Watch this space! I'll update my progress on both of these services - and please feel free to comment on your experiences or if you know of other promising email syndication services.
Share1 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2648
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Richard, Great post.
I would personally stay away from any service that shares my email address with the RSS publishers that I have subscribed to. FeedBlitz shares your contact info with every publisher you are subscribed to and that to me is a major violation of privacy.
Richard, have you seen Squeet's Publisher capabilities? (login to Squeet account and click on the "publisher" link to learn about it) We just released it a few weeks ago and we're adding a TON of new publisher functionality shortly. Stay tuned.
Thanks heaps for that, I signed up with feedblitz while ago and didn't realise that I was the only one cringing at the orange... The two readers we currently have using the email rss don't really warrant paying to get the nice customised email either, so I'll certainly be checking out these options..
I was looking for an email service to send out a batch of posts weekly or monthly, and Zookoda seems a great bet, I found out FeedBlitz also has this option.
I also explained how I want an RSS feed that pushes a monthly newsletter post.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/03/15/rss-newsletter/
Great topic. It'll be interesting to watch the equal but opposite space as well: email to rss. Guaranteed deliverability is a unique characteristic of rss and a huge benefit over email. If the effort involved to opt in and opt out of email newsletters continues on its current path, it won't take long for RSS to popularize.
I've been using Zookoda now for two months or so, and so far it's been a great solution for keeping my readership up to date. I now run four blogs off it (two personal.) Folks are welcome to keep reading me in their RSS reader, but for those who don't always remember to check for new posts, Zookoda's been great.
Richard, FeedBlitz actually offers rather nice branding of those not so eye pleasing Orange Julius deal e-mails (don't think you have those in your neck of the woods). If you have a FeedBlitz account, click on the link below and then login to take a look at what I did there.
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?BrandPreview=2936
Hi Ken:
Thanks for the support - but that link is password protected and only *you* can access it. The best way for people to see FeedBlitz customization is to subscribe to one. If you want to subscribe to Ken's go here:
http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=2936
These days, FeedBlitz standard emails are a lot less orange than they used to be as well. And a working business model that means we won't put third party ads into your emails.
Phil
For comment #2:
1) You can always subscribe to FeedBlitz anonymously, please read the FAQs on how to do this. Our privacy statement is very clear on this point, and our terms of service are direct and enforced.
2) I think you'll find that every one of the products here shares subscriber addresses with the publisher (and only the publisher you're subscribed to, of course, not ALL publishers). I don't know whether they allow you to subscribe anonymously like we do.
3) If you really think this is just plain wrong, use a standalone RSS reader over an encrypted connection. That way you're only sharing the IP of your proxy server.
I think sharing the email address with the publishers isn't really much of a problem. I mean, if you signup for a newsletter on any given site, the publisher has your email address.
So I don't really understand what your saying anonymous in comment #2. I've seen you (probably you) post that before about FeedBlitz I think on Mike A's blog and I didn't understand it then. It's defenitly not a breach of their privacy policy.
And yes, Yutter does allow publishers to view the emails on their list. This is so incase they want to leave, they can. We defenitly don't give it out to anyone else, and we don't use it other than to deliver the feed itself.
And we don't put third party ads in our emails either.