The anti-RSS hype

I fully believe the glass is more than half full for syndication, this is a medium that companies need to prepare for, it’s really another medium.

Also, the YAHOO Syndication report (which I read and analyzed several times) shows that users use about 6 feeds, not 1-2 as stated above.

Once this triangulates with location (GPS and mobile feedreaders) we’ve got incredible opportunities for information accuracy. It will happen

I’ve put my thoughts about this (sorry to link away from your site Robert) I’ve been thinking and analyzing rss, it’s absolutely an opportunity that needs to be planned for –it’s coming.

(there are several links in this post to my thoughts on RSS)
http://jeremiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com/2005/12/syndication-conference-sf.html

I do follow several hundred blogs (not every one daily, it varies) in a browser – largely thanks to Bloglines, several ‘Planet’-style aggregated sites and Firefox’s tabs.

I am a fan of syndication, and believe it will grow in popularity, but growth in PC since 1978 isn’t a particularly convincing argument. “I LOVE this thinking.” Yup. Platform shoes, mirror balls, streaking, pet rocks – all those 1970′s things we couldn’t live without today…

Hi, in 1976 myself and 6 other programer/anl were about 2 thirds done in converting a new by county from paper docs. to disc and tape drives. Our NCR computer was in a 40′X 50′air conditioned room useing Cobol and Neat 1/2/3 to get the job done. Now I am retired and stop dreaming about the problems of the county and the college. I know how things have changed, we had a 300K NCR and thought it was something else.Well I just wanted mto comment on that, thanks, James

While I do read a lot of blogs and other feeds in my normal bloglines, I also have a second computer on which I don’t access my bloglines account.

It is the time I spend at work and ‘just’ skip through about 5-15 websites via bookmarks. While I do have a justification for reading those at work, I finished that experiment after nearly 3 months of trying.

It drives me nuts to try to click through just them not only for the having to parse every side thing but also for something I have not heard about a lot in these discussion: The disappointment when a site you like still has no updates.

Does not happen that much with an RSS reader.

What about Podcasting and Video casting? These “surveys” seem to be slanted towards the use of RSS via just a normal web browser interface and ingnore the fact that plenty of people use RSS for non browser based content as well.

Gray-

Regardless of the content that the RSS points to (sometimes RSS is just a ‘wrapper’) it could include anytype of content it points to from podcasts, images, text, links, videos, or whatever’s next

I describe RSS as a Medium. (like email, websites, or even a newspaper)

It will be interesting to see if users continue to use tools like bloglines, and other indexers,

I got a chance to check out the new MS Outlook, it has feeds build right in. that’s another example that RSS is going mainstream.

I wonder if feedreaders will be embedded in regular desktop applications, that it will be seamless.

Interesting topic. One of my early 2006 tasks is to educate a group of people at work and my family about RSS, why feeds work, how to set them up and use them.

It took me about a weekend to figure it out and I had to try every available aggregator on the Net before finally settling on Bloglines. I’ve been working on trying to write out procedures as well as a document explaining RSS. The magazine/newspaper subscription analogy works to a point, but it’s not going to be clear enough for some of them who are just now acclimated to email.

I love RSS. It reminds me of the old Compuserve days when I’d send my forum reader out to pick up my messages from all of the forums I participated in or moderated so that I could read, answer and otherwise deal with them offline to save the connection charges. Now it’s not about connection charges, obviously, but it is still about time. It’s just faster to load them all up in the browser and scan though everything in one place.

BUT, what I hate is the acronym that no one understands and the terminology. It’s much easier to explain “click the ‘add to My Yahoo! icon” than it is to explain what a feed is, what an aggregator is, and that it isn’t limited to the major sites…that’s a chore!

And imagine how much more quicker it would be for you to skim them all if they were all partial feeds!

Actually, just spent some more time reading your post and the Slashdot/ Yahoo piece: Microsoft should buy you some glasses Robert because the report says only 4% of people are aware they are using RSS but 27% of people use it, or as they call is “an unaware RSS user”. Try reading the report.

The question is do you really want blog updates to be *pushed* to you? I for one dont think so. Following blogs or news feeds does not rank at the same level as receiving e-mail notifications for instance. At least not for me. Even though I follow several blogs, when I have time and inclination I prefer to visit couple of blogs that I actually feel like reading at that time. Using an RSS reader adds to my information overload. And this is pretty much the sentiment echoed among the Slashdots comments as well.

I have read /. for a long time (not to mentioned subscribed to their RSS feed, heh heh), and until this article (and a lot of the comments) never realized what a bunch of old school un-visionaries hang out there. There is a pervasive no-business sense attitude throughout the comment thread. The fact that 27% of users actually do use it (it doesn’t matter at the end of the day whether the users know what the underlying technology is) validates its potential straight away. It’s funny though, despite most of the commenters in that article being RSS naysayers, there are a ton of good business ideas spinkled throughout, and I think that’s where RSS will really make its impact as an aggregate (no pun intended) technology used in conjunction with many other applicaitons (podcasting is probably the best example of this today).

Only 743? I guess you really did trim your feed list!

743 feeds is a lot of stuff to read sure. I personally read around 250 and lets remember that most people do not update daily while some update five times a day.

To commenter number one, yes many people do only read two or three feeds a day but perhaps they should look bigger. Before RSS feeds I used to read 10-15 newspapers omline, now I still read that many but I also read a couple hundred other “news” sources and I am sure not alone.

anyone that has found a list by way of OPML or otherwise will agree that it is much better to have too many feeds and just look at the ones that interest them on a daily basis than be out of the loop not knowing what is current in the feild that you are interested in whether it be news or just opinion

I totally agree with scoble on this, but for different reasons.

Instead of reducing the RSS to a simple “news aggregator” that allows some freak geek to catch up daily with 743 websites (sorry scoble! ;o)), i goes exacly in the opposite direction. I don’t see RSS as a one-to-many channel, but instead my bet goes to a massive-one-to-one delivery of personalized messages.

The message itself could be anything: a feed with personalized recommendations from Amazon, information from his baking account and credit card charges, vehicle maintenance information from his car maker, information extracted from Yahoo Finance with his personal stocks. And, obviously, the good and old plain static content too.

All these fancy functionalities are currently available from our banks, car markers or favorite bookstores, but the problem is that they all come in different shapes, sizes, colors, forms, frequencies, and usually behind clumsy usernames and passwords. But this is not what the average user wants in the long term. He wants to be able to consolidate everything in a portable manner, accessible through multiple devices and with a consistent interface.

This is exacly where the RSS fits is and allows users to have a single platform to receive all types of messages, and – here’s the best part! – everything under an *open* platform, not tied to a specififc proprietary tool, specific vendors or pre-determined devices.

In the end of the day, it’s not about THE SITE delivering content; it’s about THE USER receiving the information he/she wants.

I see a great road for rss. Maybe not in 2006, but certainly in the upcoming years. And I hope by then to be making fun of those who said that having 743 feeds is non-sense… lol.

Well, by my count, it’s currently 780 public blogs according to http://www.bloglines.com/public/bytehead/

Evidently I’m strange. Of course, I tried aggregate reades a few years before. On dial up, it really sucked, as all of a sudden, page loads would start crawling, because the aggregator decided to grab all of the updates, and proceeded to suck all my available bandwidth away from me.

Which is probably one reason why I’m really hooked on Bloglines, and web-based aggregators. I’m not sucking all that bandwidth through my system. Updates that I don’t care about, not my bandwidth/problem.

RSS isn’t really a solution to anything. Its just another format for serving data similar to HTML.

For the guy talking about refreshing slashdot all the time, what do you think your RSS reader is doing? In fact it likely ends up using more because its going to refresh even if you wouldn’t because you got distracted or such.

The magazine example is similarly flawed. The news stand is still checked everyday, its just someone else doing it for you. If you are going to teach/give examples they might as well as be correct.

The problem with RSS is the fact that you are still hammering the server to get the information, I suspect if RSS grows that the servers will end up taking on increased load and suffering because of it.

The real solution will have to come from some new protocol. However, this will be hard as it likely won’t be standardized and things like firewalls/routers won’t play nicely.

We keep thinking of RSS as a way to read web pages efficiently, which it is, but that won’t make the average person use it. In fact, the average person probably shouldn’t even care what RSS is, but they should see the benefits of it.

I think of RSS as the news crawl on the bottom of the screen on CNN, only when a topic interests me I can click and find out more. Or a stock ticker that shows me the current price of my stock. Or the headlines on my newspaper.

RSS is already on the way to solving other problems. Technology really becomes useful when it is so well integrated into our daily like that we don’t even notice it. A couple of years ago a survey might have shown that less than 4% of people used DVD players or iPods. Clearly things change.

Zorm, RSS is not a protocol per se, but machine readable metadata. In my case it is about one quarter of the size of my web page.

Yes RSS can potentially lead to more hammering on your server, but it can also reduce the load because I can see the headlines at a glance and read only what interests me. You can also provide partial feeds to cut the load further (though you will make Robert unhappy).

RSS can potentially lead to better we searching given that the metadata would be searchable versus current web pages that are basically blobs of unstructured text.

Also in the future we may move from a pull mechanism to a push mechanism, whereby we only push changes to those who are subscribed. Amazingly, RSS as it exists today would still work in that situation.

RSS is not perfect, but it is a shot in the right direction.

“Yahoo and Ipsos did that found only 4% of users are using RSS”

Let us shutdown the all RSS feeds for a day and see how many Websites are down / inadequate / useless.

Sigh. More Medium is the Message rot talk, same ole tired script. Like a lower top-40 hit song played over and over, until you are sick of it. And 743 Web sites? No, rather maybe 40 websites, and 703 (mostly redudant) blogs.

Christopher: the blogs I read are not redundant. It’s pretty obvious you’ve never even tried reading the ones I’m currently subscribed to. If they get redundant more than once in a while I unsubscribe.

Hey, if you like using the browser more than a news aggregator, great. For me, though, I’ve found it’s about 10x more productive to read things in an aggregator.

I’ve recently switched from Bloglines to NetVibes [http://www.netvibes.com/] — kind of like a more flexible Personal Google ‘desktop’ (eg. collapsing sections). But it feels clunky! It desperately needs a more flexible gui. And more ‘modules’ (widgets, to anyone else).
I find it an easier way of handling 25-odd, low-volume, web/tech feeds a couple of times each day than Bloglines.

My high-volume news and “must-know-now” feeds stick on my igoogle desktop (again, an inflexible, cruddy layout) — alongside an ever-increasing stack of useful tools.

And it’s suddenly occured to me that I might be able to do the same thing on a ProtoPage…
Wondeful times!

The Slashdot crowd only finds this study three months after it was published? Amazing.