Put an example on the front page. Show a site before and after a change, along with the resulting RSS entry. The quality of the diffs will determine whether I want to subscribe.
Yeah I couldn't really tell what the point was until adding a page. Then since it wasn't really a page that updated I didn't get it. Have an about page that shows a feed for a commonly known page. Something that changes often. That would make it really clear what your product does and if I would find it useful. Since this is YC I went a head and added a page and played around to see how it works, but in the real web I wouldn't take that much effort to try to understand the point of the product.
Once you see it working it is a really cool. It would be useful for some of the sites and blogs I read that still have no RSS feed. Nice work, I like that you keep it simple, but if I want to know more and I am willing to click to learn more you should offer some other information.
The watch changes button made me expect that the page would show me real time changes. Why not change it to "Create Feed" as thats what it does.
You have a lot of white space to work with. Use it to better explain what the site is about. Display the pro account option more prominently. Add a little color.
It would be cool if you indexed the sites people are tracking (with their permission) or at least had an index showing changes on the top N sites on the web. I'd like to be able to browse changes across Facebook, Google, etc., without having to set up a feed, add it to my reader, and wait--it'd be great if I could see a history right away.
I've often wanted something that'll alert me when URLs change, and show the resulting diff (e.g. changes to the terms of service or privacy policy of the sites I use, or the page for tracking some FedEx parcel I shipped, or areweatwarwithiran.com). ChangeFeed is designed to basically turn any page into a completely impartial RSS feed.
Who do you think will use your website? Would it be throwaway monitoring (something like mailinator)? People who are not savvy enough to use a RSS reader or RSS itself?
I love the minimalist design and the very functional UI -- good job.
You might want to shorten the subscribe URL so that it doesn't get wrapped in emails. Look at how short the you tube URL's are.
Are you for real with the "unlimited" part of the pro accounts? I.e. I will definitely get one if I am allowed to interact with my account programatically (ie I am free to write a script to add urls to monitor I?) this is functionally I have to use in a lot of the little tools i develop.
My intent is that unlimited would be basically unlimited, but I suppose if things become crazy I might have to put a cap in place (1000 URLs or something). The API already exists in a sense; check out the bookmarklet.
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'TException' with message 'TSocket: Could not connect to localhost:9091 (Connection refused [111])' in /var/changefeed/thrift/thrift-php/src/transport/TSocket.php:182 Stack trace: #0 /var/changefeed/thrift/thrift-php/src/transport/TBufferedTransport.php(73): TSocket->open() #1 /var/changefeed/www/incl/conf.php(31): TBufferedTransport->open() #2 /var/changefeed/www/pub/new.php(5): diffConnect() #3 {main} thrown in /var/changefeed/thrift/thrift-php/src/transport/TSocket.php on line 18
Nice idea. Made me think of tinyurl, so thats good. But this is just as easy to replicate, which makes me think of the hundreds of tinyurl clones. If you take a look at how those clones tried to distinguish themselves from tinyurl and what features they added, it might give you some ideas on how to add value to your site. Might let you stay ahead of the inevitable competition if people find this useful.
Also, a pro user would want to integrate this into some other service. So you should consider providing a simple request API call that returns the feed address. You should also consider not charging any money initially and focus instead on building a userbase.
I remember a company that did something similar, a while ago. You would give it a URL and it would email you with any changes (It was before RSS and Web 2.0... probably around the time of the bubble). I think they even let you specify what type of changes to monitor by feeding in an XML file. Anyone remember the name of that site?
