Social subscribe options for a truly universal subscribe button?

[chrisaldrich]

I love Subtome! I am reasonably well-versed on its existence and raison d'etre, use it on several sites, use the bookmarklet regularly, and highly recommend it to others.

This being said, as I was reading this comment on an article about better support for open cross-web feed reading, an idea occurred to me which might help the awareness, uptake, and use of Subtome across the web in general.

While I'm terribly against social silos for a huge variety of reasons, it might be interesting and worthwhile for Subtome to add support for social media platforms. That is, in addition to search a site for its RSS feeds, it might also intuit the ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts and allow the user to subscribe to those lesser platforms as well (or direct them to pages for following).

I'd suggest doing this could do a few things:

• Really make it a true Universal subscribe button
• Increase broader general awareness and use of Subtome across the web
• by being used for other platforms it would still remind the public that there are great RSS feed readers out there for better/more flexible subscription options. (In fact, if the social platforms are added, I'd recommend they were put at the bottom of the list to show them as "second class" citizens for their lack of openness and flexibility.)
• Some sites syndicate duplicate copies of most/all of their content to social silos, and there are cases where subscribing to shorter "snackable" bites via Twitter for some sources (which the user deems less valuable perhaps) may be better than adding the thousandth feed into their (more valuable) reader queue.
• If it were available, I (and I suppose many others) would/could clear out the dozen(s) of social media bugs that clutter up my website (but which currently seem de rigueur) and offer just a single gateway method for following my content. (Excluding the other venues like email, mobile/browser push notifications, etc. which may not fit easily into this type of workflow.) Getting rid of this excess free advertising to social sites could be a major boon to help turn the tide toward "open" as well. (Instead of being visibly linked, these social links could be put in side of <link> tags for discover-ability which would at least put them on par with other feeds.)

Of course this all pre-supposes that the integrations could be done in the same open manner that the RSS feed reader portions do.