Yesterday I was working on my realtime feed reader (and writer). I can read feeds with this, but I can also write posts. With it you can write a small post with a title, description and link.

When I was looking around for websites that support WebFinger I found a similar thing on Twitter. It contained the host-meta file, but instead of showing WebFinger related links, it showed something called an OExchange link. So I took a look what it was.

OExchange is a protocol that allows sharing of URLs with any service. It supports discovery of share URLs. When you have a service that allows sharing of URLs, then OExchange allows tool builders to share URLs with your service.

I created such a service, so I thought how about using this to share URLs. So I added these files. Now I couldn’t find tools, that allow me to use this with my own service. Every tool I found could only share with pre-discovered websites. I couldn’t even put my own domain name in there. That sucks for a tool that is about discovery.

Someone should write a Firefox extension that uses this. Maybe Firefox Share could do this?

Ok, but lets get back to the point I was trying to make. What about using a similar thing to allow tool developers to discover URLs to subscribe to feeds?

Such a tool or extension could include a list of pre configured domains, but allow you to add your own domains. The discovery process takes care of the rest.

It important to know that this file could be cached. It shouldn’t be downloaded every time you like to subscribe to a feed.

This could make subscribing to feeds as easy as it is in Twitter. How about that?