Tribe.net Offering RSS Feeds

Tribe.net, a social networking site with a classifieds model, is now offering RSS feeds of its discussion threads, the company said Monday. It’s the first step toward syndication of the site’s classified ads for jobs, apartments, vehicles and events.

The move combines two hot current trends, social networking sites and RSS technology. RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, is becoming more mainstream as major sites such as Yahoo offer content aggregators for the technology.

The Tribe.net content now available for syndication is discussions — posted conversations between members. These discussions deal with subjects varying from small business to ballroom dancing and myriad others. Unlike typical RSS feeds, which consist of linked headlines and a small amount of text, these will include the entire discussion plus the photos of members that appear next to their posts.

The next content to be syndicated will be classified listings similar to those found in hardcopy newspapers. To post a classified listing, one must be a Tribe.com member, which involves registering on the site.

“Right now our service is free. But we anticipate turning on pay-per-listings. We will allow users to pay for notice — if you’d like your ad to be at the top of the list or in bold or up for a certain amount of time, you’ll pay more. We’re going experiment with certain pay models depending on how widely you distribute your classified. If you post it only with your friends it might be free but if you listed with the whole network, it might cost more,” said Paul Martino, founder and CTO of Tribe.net.

RSS distribution would be key to broadening pay-per-listings’ reach, and value.

“The classified ads will be syndicated. That way they will be seen as widely as possible,” said Martino.

“We’re going through an intense user education” to alert members of the new syndication service, he said “We’re messaging moderators to help them explain to users. We have a corporate blog through which we communicate with users and we’re also using that.”

Beefing up its classified offerings, last week Tribe.net partnered with CareerBuilder.com to give consumers access to job listings.