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More Signal - The Official Fliptop Blog
by Doug Camplejohn on Jan. 13, 2010
There have been a bunch of stories proclaiming RSS is dead, but I think they’re dead wrong.
RSS is just a building block technology, like HTML or SMTP, that has gotten even better recently with additions like Pubsubhubbub and rssCloud.
The problem is that it’s in your face as a consumer experience, when it should just blend into in the background.
Ask ten of your non-technical friends what RSS stands for and you’ll probably get ten shoulder shrugs. Ask them to name an RSS Reader brand, and you’ll still get the majority of them throwing back blank stares.
The fact is, the RSS user experience is generally lousy and has never cracked the mainstream. At the end of the day, it’s really about building a better subscribe experience. Here are a few things I think are broken and need to change:
1) The tag “RSS” – It’s really a way to follow or subscribe to content, so let’s call it one of those instead of RSS. We don’t write “SMTP” next to the email icon, or “LPD” next to the printer icon d0 we?
2) The subscribe experience. On some sites you still see the XML code when you click the RSS icon. On most others, you go through several pages that take the user away from the original site with each click. It’s confusing and ugly. I should be able to easily subscribe to the content I want without having to leave the website I’m on.
3) The 5th InBox. RSS also requires you to buy into the notion of signing up for another inbox. I already have email and SMS. Most of us also check updates in Facebook and/or Twitter. RSS demands that you add yet another “inbox” (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.) instead of delivering updates to the places you’re already checking throughout the day. That may be fine for aggregating items I want to read when I get a chance, but when that Craiglist item gets posted I want to know about it right away
4) No filtering. Does this sound familiar? I signed up for an RSS reader a while ago and added a bunch of feeds. After a few weeks I found myself checking it less often because it wasn’t my primary inbox (see #3 above). When I logged in a few days later, I saw something like “732 unread items” and just got depressed. Eventually I just gave up. Part of this problem is that I couldn’t filter information down to just the news stories I wanted. Ultimately I want to subscribe to just the information I want – my favorite cars, bands, sports teams, etc. – and filter out the rest of the firehose.
Needless to say, we’ve got a few thoughts at Fliptop on how to improve the subscription process and have a lot of exciting things planned for this year. Stay tuned.
