Steal this idea

I want to know when my favorite writers publish something. That’s it.

In a time when all content is atomized from its source publications and distributed through social networks, I’ve noticed I read writers even more than I read publications.

Which is why I can’t believe the following doesn’t exist yet.

Imagine a site where you can “subscribe” to any writer. Every time they publish something new, it appears on the site, in your “feed,” which is a collection of all the writers you subscribe to, organized chronologically.

That’s it.

On the writer side, the ask is just as simple: Once you’ve convinced the site admin you are whom you claim to be, you can log in and, whenever you write something new, you paste it into a field and hit enter. The headline and first couple of sentences auto-populate on your “feed.”

That’s it.

What I’m proposing isn’t a startup, though if someone thinks they can turn it into one, more power to them. It’s more like a single-purpose app, though it exists on the web, because, still, the web is where you can bulid something once and know it will work everywhere.