When was the last time you used an RSS Reader?
I was chatting with some of my peers via email (!) last week about RSS, Twitter and how we get news.
We’ve all noticed that most of us are nowadays using Twitter as the main way to keep up to date.
One of my colleagues likened the situation to what happened to Betamax when VHS arrived: Betamax was better, but VHS won out because that’s what everyone started using, despite the fact that Betamax was better.
This made me think of the audio quality debate when mp3 arrived on the scene. Audiophiles decried mp3′s poor quality, but it won out because of the convenience of the format.
I wrote:
On the the betamax:vcr analogy. It’s not just network effects. I’d say there’s a convenience factor. So I give you another analogy: mp3 vs. cd-quality audio. Like mp3, info streams [such as Twitter] are convenient. Whereas like cd-quality audio, rss readers offer higher fidelity. But convenience wins. (Think I’m actually paraphrasing vinh here)
The paraphrase that I referred to was Khoi Vinh’s post on the convenience of mp3s and the concept of high definition.
The convenience of Twitter and similar streams of updates is that you don’t have to manage them. You don’t have to keep up. The stream just slides past. RSS readers offer higher fidelity in that you can get more detail on each post, you can organize your feeds, etc. But it looks and feels like you’ve got to keep up. That’s more work that I don’t need.
I also added:
Actually, it’s only RSS as an end user format that is disappearing. Under the hood RSS is everywhere still. I wonder if things would have turned out differently if the dominant interface style for the most common RSS readers did not look and feel so much like email?
And today Dave Winer posted a few choice words on the email-style interface of Google Reader and similar feed-reading software.
A final thought. On Friday, I had a colleage ask me, "What’s RSS?" Which again reminded me that RSS is simply not a user-focused technology. It’s not for people — it’s for powering sites and services online. For everyone excepting few hardcore info-junkies, it’s just not a factor.
Posted via email from Peter Smith’s Posterous
What's a spaghetti test?
i agree with most points.
I would add that now with Twitter and the like, RSS “takes its place”, the lauded, continually relevant concept of McLuhan, who pointed out that things don’t disappear, they simply occupy a more appropriate position, given the conditions.
So, this is where I would branch into a discussion about Feedly, about Thomson Reuters Calais, and the medium and high-end uses RSS readers can play now that RSS reader categories can be rendered publicly viewable by Feedly, et al. From to uncommon, but not unused.
if I may, last sentence should read:
From common to uncommon, but not unused. oops.
Food for thought!
I still want to use RSS (via Google Reader) as it allows me to look at little more deeply into a variety of sources as curated by others or by myself. Really, it tends to happen “on and off”.
Over time, I have to admit that Twitter has become my favourite “radar” allowing me to scan more efficiently (although this is not always true: Twitter is quite chaotic!) as I try to make the right choices with carefully chosen curators (i.e. the people I follow).
I also want and sometimes succeed in looking at research on my own. For instance, if I look for specific White papers.
In the end… most of the time, I need to remind myself of Clay Shirky’s words: “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”
Thanks Guylaine and Morgen for stopping by.
I suppose that a more accurate title for this post might have been “RSS is Not for Most People.”
Me, I’m still using Rss a lot, but just not in the classic sense of plowing through a 1000 feeds a day via Greader or Bloglines or whatever.
I’m more exploring things like stitching together feeds of various canned searches and targeted blogs to achieve a topic-specific stream of info that I’ll then pipe into Twitter or whatever. The days of see blog, like blog, grab it’s feed and add it to my reader appear to be over for me.
And I’m not the typical user that I had in mind anyhow. I’m in that minority of info-junkies. Lucky for me pondering these things is part of my job description, but I have a feeling that most people (i.e. who’s business isn’t web) don’t really give a hoot one way or another.
P