Smart and permanent aggregation of multiple RSS feeds

Question

Many of the sites I use provide RSS activity feeds. Right now, I merge them together using FriendFeed, in order to aggregate all my online activity in a single place, and maintain a permanent record. However, Friendfeed seems to be lagging behind since the acquisition by Facebook, and I'm considering switching.

I don't really care about the whole social aspect, I just want to merge multiple feeds, and access them from a single place. Service-specific logic is not strictly necessary, support for plain RSS would be enough. But there are some other requirements that are not satisfied by most simple RSS aggregators I've tried (eg. Yahoo Pipes).

• It should be very simple to add new sources, and retroactive import would be great.
• Copies of entries should be stored, as most feeds don't preserve the past (this is crucial).
• Everything should be exportable in a reasonable format.
• Output readable both for humans (HTML) and machines (RSS) would be nice.
• Once configured, it should work without any manual intervention.

Do you know a service like that, or do I have to code it myself?

Answer 1

If you are willing to forego the convenience of a one stop solution, you could create such an archival system out of two components:

• get a Pinboard archival account to your name. It’s called an “archival” account because it does, in fact, store the full page linked to by your bookmark, including media, and indexes it for full-text retrieval. It also archives your tweets directly.
• get an ifttt account and set up connectors storing you activities as bookmarks in your Pinboard account. ifttt is a service making it very simple to create connectors between web services of the kind “if new status post on Facebook then create a link on Pinboard with description = status”.

You will end with a system steadily adding to a list of links (with descriptions and tags set according to your ifttt configuration) whose targets are archived by Pinboard. Pinboard offers both an RSS feed of additions and export of bookmarks as well as of archived data.

Note the Pinboard archival count incurs a fee – but you haven’t specified “free” in the question.

Answer 2

I use NewsFire for that. It has all your requirements.

Answer 3

You should also have a look at Vienna

Answer 4

I use FeedsAnywhere. It's very minimalist, but you can customize many account and display settings.

Answer 5

I'm surprised none of the answers mention Google Reader. Really easy to use and very handy if you only have basic needs. It also has decent import/export functionality, but the ability to easily access all my RSS feeds from anywhere - including my mobile - is great. There's even an Android app (probably iOS too), but I find the site is more than good enough on its own.

Answer 6

Take a look at tumblr. They have built-in support for Facebook and Twitter, and allow up to 5 other general RSS feeds. Read about importing feeds.