Tom Biro wonders when RSS is really gonna get simple?

by on December 18, 2005

Tom Biro saw that we were getting together with the Firefox team to make the icon common, but is wondering when we’ll get together and make subscribing to a feed very simple.

Well, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? Anyway, the IE team is doing a lot of work on user testing trying to get this as simple as absolutely possible.

I’m actually a lot more worried about other things rather than can an average user figure out what subscribing is for. I have no doubt they’ll figure it out. After all, the home page of the BBC now has two RSS icons. Even the EUFA told me they were seeing plenty of usage of its RSS feeds.

No, the thing I’ll be asking in my next interview is just how manageable have they made the feeds. After getting several hundred feeds myself it just is a mess. People move URL’s all the time. What happens then?

Or, if you have 1,000 feeds, can you have feeds removed automatically if they don’t publish after a certain time? For instance, I’ve removed Eric Rudder’s feed from my list cause he hasn’t published anything for months. Same for Christopher Brumme. Why should your aggregator continue hitting their servers?

Then I’ll be asking about multiple computer usage. I have two computers sitting in front of me. And two more at work. If I read a feed on one, does it mark as read on all? (NewsGator does this, which is why I’m sticking with NewsGator compatible feed readers like RSS Bandit, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire on the Mac, etc).

Does it make it easy to delete or move feeds? Rename them? Organize them into folders? I can’t wait to see what developers do with the WinFS technologies that’ll be out shortly after Windows Vista ships next year.

Longer term, do my aggregators start seeing patterns in my feed reading? Does it compare my patterns to others and suggest new feeds that I might like? Sort of like Amazon notices that people who buy my book also are buying Jeremy Wright’s book?

  • ... there is an univers between you dealing with ten hundred feeds for Mister Bill and the average user who might need to get the RSS stuff into a viewer for job alerts in one***simpleclick. I thought there were much more urgent needs to fill in on this (customer) balance side ...
  • I keep wondering why aggregators aren't keeping track of update intervals and adjusting their polling intervals accordingly. If on every polling cycle, a feed is updated, keep hitting it every cycle. But, if it hasn't changed in 50 cycles, only check it every 25. If that keeps sliding, and you set a threshold, have it flagged when it hasn't updated in x months. It would be more efficient on bandwidth, would still get updates when they happen, but would automatically figure out what's going on.
  • One thing of note that I thought was cool were the "reports" that you can look in the latest few version of FeedDemon, which show you how often you use (or don't use) feeds. I presume something like that could be translated into an "auto disconnect" of some sort.
  • Personally, I'd like to see a big floating RSS icon "flash" in the upper/right corner of the browser window when a feed is available. Something akin to the icon you see in Remote Desktop when the connection goes sour. Something the average can't miss (vs. the tiny icon in the FF address window).

    But here's a simpler question: when will either MS or the FF team release some common icons in PNG format for us web developers?

    I've found 16x16 icons everywhere, and one of my readers found a 32x32 the other day, but if we're all going to be on the same page, we should have some common icon files we can all use at a variety of sizes (16, 24, 32, 48, 64, and 128), and, preferably, in SVG as well.

    Having these will make it easier to integrate RSS in a meaningful way into our sites for the RSS-uninitiated user. Consistency and recognizability are key.
  • what
    Suggestions usually suck.
  • am i right in thinking you mean UEFA not EUFA? (union of european football associations)

    will microsoft's rss implementation in vista allow us to sync with bloglines/newsgator etc? when is there goign to be rss inside the new windows live mail?

    questions questions.. :)
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