Forms in Feeds Continued...
Okay, so cool... it looks like there's some decent support in aggregators for Forms in Feeds. So, now we know that it works, what can we do with them?
First, let me give credit where it's due. Even though I was playing with forms in feeds a week ago (check my comments on the RSS-Only post), it was actually this post on Feedster's Scott Rafer's blog about adding a Tag field to MT (image above) which I happened across this morning which tipped me off that there was something neat you could do with forms in feeds. I don't remember seeing that post until today, but you never know what hits my subconcious... it seems awfully suspicious that post was only written on May 19th, and suddenly I'm playing with this stuff, no?
Okay, so the big idea is that a form in a feed is there to capture feedback that a simple link can't, and puts it out in the feed itself so the reader has incentive to contribute right away. My first thought was a survey of different options sent out daily formatted with a radio-button list. But you can do that with a bunch of links just as easily, so that's not a big deal. How about a "tag my post" field like Scott's idea for Feedster? Instead of me having to bother writing tags, I can let my readers do it for me. :-)
Actually, I think the biggest opportunity is to combine this stuff with my Application Aggregation thoughts from last week as well. Now suddenly I can think of lots of ideas for forms in feeds. Imagine a help-desk feed with the response field embedded into the issue? Imagine a calendar feed with a form for changing the timestamp or adding other meta-data. Lots of stuff, both for public feeds and internal ones at that.
Your thoughts?
-Russ