FeedMagnet Launches Into Public Beta

Austin-based FeedMagnet launched into public beta late last week. The service pulls together feeds from your social media sites and presents them in a single stream. FeedMagnet also allows you to embed those streams directly onto your website. The public beta includes the basic, free service which limits the number of authors and search topics you can use, as well as how many updates they will pull per hour. The company is working on a premium offering with a monthly fee which will not have any of the limitations of the free product.

FeedMagnet is source-agnostic, so it is capable of pulling data from any social media site that the company incorporates into the service. According to their site, the sources that are fully “hooked” into include Twitter, Flickr and Delicious. The company states that they will be adding more sources on an ongoing basis. Another neat feature is the customizable filter, which allows you to choose what content enters your feed depending on keywords and other basic criteria. Finally, pictures and videos are displayed inline in your stream which is a nice touch and certainly a meaningful feature for businesses that want to increase the time that visitors spend on their site.

FeedMagnet is trying to solve a problem that many companies face with their social media content – they want to tie it into their main site, but it’s just not always feasible to build this type of functionality in-house. The frenzy to create widgets such as the embeddable columns that Hootsuite offers have proven that there is plenty of demand for tools that quickly make a company’s site more human-centric and engaging. FeedMagnet takes this trend a step further by trying to be inclusive of the content from multiple source sites.

The product not only allows companies to embed the widgets with ease, but as FeedMagnet hooks into more sites they eliminate the need to deal with a different widget for each service that you are embedding. Ultimately, the task of incorporating social media into your site is meant to become a matter of curation rather than an endeavor into writing code.