A few years ago, I wrote about my new-found enthusiasm for RSS feeds and readers. Now that RSS is almost in danger of becoming a mainstream technology, I think it’s a topic worth revisiting. My personal definition of mainstream is when my long-time drinking buddy starts arguing about it down the pub. This happened with blogging about the middle of last year, so RSS shouldn’t be too far behind.
The gist of my original column was that as RSS matured, it was in danger of succumbing to “feature creep” and losing the simplicity that made it such a useful tool. So has that happened? Of course it has. I’ve only got to open my current favourite reader (the freeware Feedreader) and browse through the dozens of sites I monitor to see that RSS is in total chaos from a user’s point of view. Some sites just give me the headline and a one-line summary, others give a longer extract. Some even give me the entire story, with pictures, web hotlinks and even embedded YouTube videos. There are multimedia RSS feeds that direct your reader to a file rather than a web page, and how these are handled depends on the reader software. And, inevitably, adverts are starting to sneak their way in as well.
Although I love simplicity, I actually don’t mind some of these new features, except that I have little or no control over them. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, what you’re going to get is totally unpredictable. And users don’t like unpredictability. Especially those who are trying to work out what the big orange RSS button in Internet Explorer 7 does.
IT Week readers will be very aware that this is always what happens when no one owns the standards. According to Wikipedia, there are currently eight versions of RSS from 0.90 to 2.0, in two development branches, plus a relatively new entrant in the form of the IETF’s Atom syndication format, whose goal was to sort out RSS incompatibilities and inconsistencies. Atom syndication has become widespread, so now when you go to a site you’re often offered a choice of feed formats. Of course most users haven’t a clue which to choose.
Despite all this, I continue to subscribe to all these diverse and bizarrely formatted feeds because it’s still so much easier to scan several hundred headlines from 50-plus sites this way than to visit each site individually. But it should be my choice – not the syndicators’ – how much or how little content is presented for me to view in the feed. For some sites I only want a brief one-liner, for others I might want the associated pictures or links or even the full-text article. I get that now, but for the wrong sites. Granted, some sites do offer a choice, but they’re the exception.
User-driven innovation – an old and much-maligned concept – is the key to alleviating these gripes: find out what users want and work out how to give it to them. But it seems that the user is actually still very much a back-seat driver in the Web 2.0 juggernaut.
