At the moment only geeks and savvy net users are utilising RSS. There is a fairly significant technical wall stopping RSS penetrating the mainstream. While the click-n-shoot subscription options (ala bloglines subscription button on this blog as an example) offer a reasonably simple method to subscribe to feeds it’s still not good enough. If my parents can’t get the hang of it then it’s not going to catch on. (My dad is starting to blog though.)
The Social Customer Manifesto: RSS is going to be the one that is going to have the greatest challenge slogging through the trough to true mass-market (i.e. not early-adopter) usage. Until there is a truly “zero-training” method of publishing, finding, and subscribing to RSS feeds (which might not even be called RSS feeds in a couple of years), RSS will have a challenge crossing the chasm, to use Geoffrey Moore’s terminology.
RSS just doesn’t mean anything, although neither does Podcast, or Blog, or Wiki or Googling or, or, yes well the Internet has it’s own language and, as demonstrated with Googling, netspeak can become mainstream, there is hope for RSS yet. Although I’d like to see “Feed” being thrown around a lot more for this technology. It works better because you can subscribe to a feed from anything and that’s what will happen in the future. People can more easily grasp the concept of feeding content by subscribing to it.
Regardless of the terminology, the technology needs to be simplified. Subscribing to feeds is okay. Creating feeds is possible if your blog software does it for you and blogs are very adaptable, but if you want to feed something else, say headlines from your news site, forum entries, recipes from your newsletter, latest odds from your betting site or new member sign ups at your highschool reunion database, it becomes complex. Can you say you know how to create a feed for your content without using a blog? I don’t know how to, but I know I could do some Googling for it and find the answers, maybe install some software or similar that will create feeds for me. But that process is just too long winded for the everyday. It’s okay for web developers, people that know the difference from FTP and HTTP, but for the layman web guy, that’s not realistic. RSS feeding needs to become as simple as browsing.
Yaro…I really like how you have the quote graphic when you reference stuff — how do you do that?
Hmm, Not even Net Savy people, heck I don’t use it, I can’t work out how the damn thing works (mainly because I have never tried to work it out) But I don’t get the point of it. Thats my main issue.
Why would I want to subscribe to a feed? why cant I just read it using my web browsers? that way I Get to see the images (or does RSS support images? I didnt think it did) and the like.
I gotta admit: I dabbled with a feedreader for a while but I never use it now – I just go online and look at the blogs I’m interested in.
Sure, many people access so many info sources that a feed reader is a useful aggregating mechanism, but most regular net users say,
“Why do I need to use that when I can just go online?”.
Can anyone provide an answer to that question?\
Will
Will and Al – I was saying the same thing a few months back before I starting using RSSOwl which now I use everyday. I guess the thing is now I subscribe to over 30 blogs where in the past if I used a browser I might have only visited say 5 everyday. In my case it’s allowed me access to more information in a simplified format.
It also shows you what sites have been updated much like new email arriving so you don’t visit sites that haven’t changed since the last time you visited.
Of course it does depend what you want to get out of the Internet and if you are a minimalist then feedreading may be overkill for you.
And yes Al, some feed readers support images and in fact will load the full blog as a webpage if you want them to. I prefer just reading the individual posts rather than the full blog.
I think RSS will remain a geek thing – for he most part. Lets face it, using something liek firefox to read them merely means it appears as another bookmark…useless when we all know how many bookmarks we have that we don’t revisit.
I use RSSReader – at least it updates and alerts to updates. But I agree Alborz…for most people its too hard. What we need it a simpler ‘one click’ subscribe method (that works on all readers)
I’m keeping the email alert plugin on my blog – it meets people’s current technical levels I’ve found
I was using feedreader to keep up to date with all the blogs I visit on a daily basis — but have recently uninstalled it…simply because I no longer had enough time to read all the post — and like Al I too enjoy seeing the actual blog..the design, layout…ya know!
I think one good thing that RSS can do is get all the podcast you like downloaded to one place…which you can easily take and download them into an MP3 player — for those who tend to go for their morning walk or jog…or even a drive to work…this makes customizing your own radio much easier…and listening to stuff you want to listen to makes it a lot more interesting
Interesting post Yaro and a wide range of views from the comments so far.
I think for the majority, RSS means and does nothing for them. They have their 10 or so websites they visit and that’s that.
Even making it as user-friendly as possibly I don’t see it being any more popular.
I really see (and initially thought) that rss was for the journalist type (even bloggers). As those types need to get at lots of information in as little time as possible, so as to be able to better write up an article/post.
I myself, am subscribed to more than 120 blogs/news sites via NewsGator Online and it’s a quick browse through the headlines to get what I want – although the other week I didn’t check out my feeds for 4 days and had 1,200 headlines !!!!
I guess the whole RSS thing is in response to information overload but I reckon that the individual has deciced to streamline the information they receive at a personal level, and are going back to basics: they have their favorite sites/blogs and they might come upon a new site here and there … and that’s that.
What all of this means, is that as bloggers or in fact, any business, we have to work even harder to get noticed and build a potential long-term relationship with an individual.
I will introduce RSS to my site for the latest product upload section. This will keep my members up to date without visiting the site daily.
BUT I do realize that RSS takes time to understand, and I guess that 95% of my members don’t fully understand the idea or workings of RSS & XML..
I will have to do a lot of explaining.
I do think the copy and paste link idea with RSS is a bit old and out dated. I would love to see a small orange button next to what ever you want to subscribe to and it automatically finds the RSS reader on your computer and places the site into the reader done…
Firefox has RSS capabilities and with IE7.0 coming out sometime with them also I think you will see them becoming more mainstream. What I see turning people off of them is the quality of the feeds that are available out there. No one wants to search for a feed on “coffee” and come up with a feed about what coffee drink someone had that morning, and the next day, etc.
We used to have a news service attached to our site where people could keep updated on just about anything, international news, business, sports, etc. It became too popular and crashed our server. That meant a rewrite of the code and a new server. It didn’t do much for us in sales as we were still months away from adding our marketing to it we decided to drop it instead as the cost/benifit was too high at that time. At that time though it was bringing in around 1,000 hits per day.