Medium has acquired a small startup called Superfeedr, an API to turbocharge the way you handle RSS, Atom and JSON feeds. For a company like Medium, Superfeedr can generate feeds with a ton of items and push them in real time to PubSubHubbub-compliant services.
According to Superfeedr’s website, the company has been working with IFTTT, About.me, Etsy and Player FM. The startup doesn’t plan to stop serving these customers following the acquisition. Superfeedr’s servers will remain active.
But you might think that RSS feeds are dead? While only news junkies like me still use RSS readers to catch up on news, RSS and Atom feeds are alive and doing well. In fact, many APIs and services rely on these feeds.
Think about Flipboard, web crawlers, podcast players, Apple News… All these services rely on feeds to collect structured data from content publishers. Superfeedr is helping both content services that create a lot of feeds and services that need to poll a ton of feeds.
And, you guessed it, Medium is quite a big content publisher as well. The Superfeedr team will make sure that Medium websites can produce beautiful feeds in no time and push them to all the right places. By the way, you can now go in your Medium settings and turn on full content RSS feeds.
With today’s acquisition, it means that Medium is committed to building a platform that communicates with the rest of the internet. Medium might not be a walled garden after all. Making sure Medium users are in control of their content is important.
Superfeedr had raised an undisclosed amount of money from Betaworks and Mark Cuban. And terms of the deal with Medium are undisclosed as well. It’s probably not the biggest acquisition of the year, but still an interesting move.
