Medium acquires Superfeedr

Today’s web is very different from what it was 8 years ago. We’ve said it several times: publishing and consuming content are new frontiers for most of the web giants like Facebook, Google or Apple. We consume the web from mobile devices, we discover content on silo-ed social networks and, more importantly, the base metaphor for the web is shifting from “space” to “time”.

Superfeedr, the open web’s leading feed API and PubSubHubbub hub has been an independent player for 8 years. Superfeedr exists in order to enable people to exchange information on the web more freely and easily. Today, we’re excited to announce Superfeedr has been acquired by Medium. In many ways, it’s a very natural fit: Medium wants to create the best place to publish, distribute and consume content on the web. Together, we are hoping to keep Medium the company a leader in good industry practices, and Medium the network a place where this conversation can gain even more traction.

At Superfeedr, we’ve promoted the open web by embracing open formats and protocols, such as RSS, Atom, XMPP and PubSubHubbub. Over the years, we’ve also learned that these protocols are only as powerful as the people who promote them. As we want the open web to remain strong, we were delighted to find that the folks at Medium share the same values. And we think that Superfeedr’s acquisition is a powerful indicator of Medium’s support for open protocols. As an example of this, my first commit at Medium was to enable full content RSS feeds both for publications and users (available in your settings). Medium already lets you add your own domain name, import and export all of your posts, point to a canonical URL if you cross-posted, supports DNT… and we’ve started working on more.

If you are a Superfeedr customer, nothing has changed: it’s business as usual. More than ever, we are dedicated to providing you with a convenient way to consume or publish feeds from all over the web using open protocols as well as tracking keywords in real time.

Finally, I also want to take a couple moments to thank all the Superfeedr family: the numerous contractors with whom we’ve worked over the years, our investors (Betaworks and Mark Cuban), as well as our advisors and partners.

I’m confident Medium is the right home for Superfeedr. The team here is one of the most talented I’ve ever met and we’re already leading the way when it comes to enabling amazing content publishing. Every month, people collectively spend 2,000,000 hours reading these stories, and I’m delighted to be part of the team building this!