Online Vendors Should Enable Customers to Spit Their Products

As many of you know, one of the coolest features of Google’s Feed Reader is that it enables you to share the most interesting content items coming through your feed. Other people can subscribe to the list — which Robert Scoble calls a “link blog” — and see what you found interesting.

If your business sells stuff online — whether it’s songs, furniture or toys — you should enable users to share their favorite products in similar ways, whether through an RSS reader on an online social network like Facebook. For example, if the iTunes Store offered RSS feeds, I would be sharing Maroon 5’s awesome new collection of songs with the whole wide world. As it is, I can only share the URL with my friends on Facebook through their “share” feature and link to it on my blogs, both of which take longer than just hitting “shift + s” on my keyboard when I come to an item of interest in my RSS reader.

I think it was Scoble who originally said that anyone who launched a marketing site without an RSS feed should be fired. I’ll add “sales” to that list.