Friendsweekly – A weekly newsletter to stay in touch with people you care about (opens in new tab)

I agree with the need for 'safe' social places like to be built.

But since the entire system is based upon lists and lists of email addresses, there REALLY needs to be a Ts & Cs and Privacy Policy in place here.

I'm assuming this is a one-man-band (Jayme?) behind this which I also commend, but if you don't add those things and also some background info about who's behind it (and how safe are all those email addresses) it's going to have a hard time winning trust.

(And yes, though I can kind of see where he's coming from, 'RSS' in the title title is misleading. Rather like Spotify calling a 'talkie' audio file a 'podcast'. It simply (and really) isn't.))

I can't find a link to their privacy policy. I like the idea but would be hesitant to give it a go without giving that a glance-over.

This looks great but I don't see anything about pricing / business model, which worries me. Are they going to start charging for subscriptions once they're established? or inserting ads everywhere to make money? or do the intend to pursue freemium features with a solid "free forever" feature set?

I only really want to invest the time and energy into getting my friends using this service if it's the latter.

Hey, this seems really neat to me. I'd really like it if it takes off.

That said, many people I know are 'addicted' to social media (mostly Instagram, some Facebook). It's less about sharing what's going on in your life with loved ones, and more about 'showing off' – a carefully curated feed of text and images. Often with the purpose of seeking approval or validation.

I have left all (traditional) social media for the most part, but I don't know if many people will be willing to do that, and/or replace/supplement it with this.

This is extremely sweet, quaint, and I absolutely love the concept... but... what RSS? Where's the privacy policy? Support via twitter? Who's project is this and what else are they doing with my data?

Can I at least see what the email will look like or how you'll pull all this data without signing up?

While I like the intent here, I personally would be really annoyed if a friend gave my email address to a site like this. It is NOT OK to give your friend's private email addresses to third parties.

I created an account and tested the subscription function.

1) The subscription URL starts with http: instead of https: though your site has SSL set up.

2) The subscription URL can only be used by someone who is logged in. To improve onboarding, I think it should go to the create account screen as opposed to the login screen.

For me personally, I won't use (divulge my friend's email addresses to) this software unless it's open source and I can host it on my own server.

I'd be happy to donate $20 if I end up using it.

so it says it keeps your fam stuff out of the public social feeds... but uses email.. which makes a lot of stuff public, like sending postcards around the world right?

I think people are already confused enough about how email works and how non-private it is.. so I would be careful with that wording.. unless the emails are encrypted of course - then good on you for working on something cool.

RSS in the title is kind of mean - I was hoping to see a new mobile friendly version of netvibes / pageflakes that allowed friends and family to check off boxes to get notified about updates in some of the categories (rss feeds)- and make opml shareable / clone-able so people could start their own..

I tinkered with the idea of doing just that with buddypress and rss widgets for profiles. Have not researched a good way to close a profile or set of feeds, but the other pieces are there.

As others have said. The idea is good but without a privacy policy that is a lot of PII to be forking over.

RSS in the title is misleading. This looks like an email newsletter thing and has nothing to do with the syndication format you can subscribe to in a feed reader.