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Feed ownership verification?
My perception is that Soup.io is supposed to work as a personal portal, a la iddy.jp, because when I'm importing a feed, the function is captioned "me elsewhere."
I understand that public feeds are easy to "steal," but does Soup have to make it any easier? The personal portal interface design is good and does give the impression that whatever is on it belongs to the person behind the ID -- the problem is, it may not be.
I actually tried importing a feed a friend has incorporated into his Soup profile, and Soup was totally happy with two different accounts having the same feed -- which were imported under the "me elsewhere" function, which is ironic, like there are two of the same person.
If Soup intends to act as a trustworthy personal portal instead of a feed aggregator like Bloglines, then a feed ownership verification process needs to be in place, like when someone wants to import a feed, the person has to first post something through that feed for a Soup verification bot to check, and the feed is imported only after the verification is done.
And btw, a friend tried importing his own Soup feed into his Soup, and it totally worked. It's not harmful but nonetheless makes Soup look kinda silly; not sure if you want to fix that.
Just hope that you can devise something to discourage impersonation.
I understand that public feeds are easy to "steal," but does Soup have to make it any easier? The personal portal interface design is good and does give the impression that whatever is on it belongs to the person behind the ID -- the problem is, it may not be.
I actually tried importing a feed a friend has incorporated into his Soup profile, and Soup was totally happy with two different accounts having the same feed -- which were imported under the "me elsewhere" function, which is ironic, like there are two of the same person.
If Soup intends to act as a trustworthy personal portal instead of a feed aggregator like Bloglines, then a feed ownership verification process needs to be in place, like when someone wants to import a feed, the person has to first post something through that feed for a Soup verification bot to check, and the feed is imported only after the verification is done.
And btw, a friend tried importing his own Soup feed into his Soup, and it totally worked. It's not harmful but nonetheless makes Soup look kinda silly; not sure if you want to fix that.
Just hope that you can devise something to discourage impersonation.
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Inappropriate?I fully understand your concern, but the verification idea works against some of our core concepts - letting users start using soup with as little trouble as possible. That's why we don't require you to sign-up and we've even put "Me elsewhere" on our front page as an invitation to try out soup, so having a tedious verification step in between could really ruin the experience. Additionally, some feeds like last.fm won't really let you insert the 'control message'.
While I'd personally really like to assume everyone's good faith and hope there are not going to be much misuses, you're right - we'll sooner or later have this problems.
One idea would be to provide a possibility to authors whose feeds have been impersonated a possibility of inserting a "drop this feed" control message in their feeds which would cause the feed to be dropped. For now and with current amount of users/traffic, we're still able to deal with individual cases.
You're right about the soup to soup imports - that shouldn't be possible ;-)
Thank you very much for your valuable input and suggestions! -
Inappropriate?Hey thanks for the response. :-)
It seems it's a trade-off between higher trust quotient and faster initial setup...
But, from a new user's perspective, having the opportunity to play around with non-feed-import-related functions was quite enough for me to test out and decide whether I wanted to use Soup. I'm raising the verification question because I want my Soup profile/ portal to be indisputably "me" once I start using it. As a user, I don't feel that having a more "tedious" setup process discourages me from signing up. It'd actually make me feel "safer" and hence induce me to use Soup, ike you'd feel a shopping site is more trustworthy because it demands the verification code on the signature stripe for credit card purchase.
And the fact that "some" sites don't allow inserting user-generated content and therefore are unavailable for ownership verification doesn't mean that other sites that are available for verification shouldn't be verified; it's illogical. It'd be enough to discourage impersonation as long as the verifiable ones are verified.
Anyway, I hope Soup will soon grow big enough for it to be impractical to deal with impersonation/ feed-stealing with human labor. ;-)
Again, thanks for the response. I really appreciate it. :-)
I’m happy
