Hiveminds Magazine | 5 Reasons Why RSS is Not Easy as Email

volume 5 - Tuesday 31 October, 2006

Web Technology

5 Reasons Why RSS is Not Easy as Email

By Hiveminds ⋅ October 31, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Since the writing of 5 Reasons Why RSS Feeds are Not Popular there have been many that argue against the reasons that RSS is not popular. There is one glaring problem with your rebuttals. You have taken RSS feeds as a technology and used the arguement "this is not the fault of the technology" but more the fault of the website administrator. So to illustrate my points more clearly here is another list of reasons. In this list email usage is compared to RSS.

What I am getting at in the article is that the reason that RSS is not more popular is because of the "personality" of the techonlogy. Though RSS has no real problems it just does not present itself to the general public very well. RSS is also marketed to the "internet savvy", "power internet users" those that may not consider themselves geeks but are only seperated from them by the use of the word "geek". I propose that if you are not a geek on some level that you would not be reading this article much less understand what the content is about.

For those that argue that RSS is used but it is just not known to the general public. I agree with this. It is similar to the fact that the large percentage of internet users use Email. But very few know what protocol is used to send and recieve email. There is an answer to this problem but before that I will go into the details of how email and RSS compare a bit more.

What is missing in RSS in comparison to email is the need to understand and a need for the technology itself. This is explained by Matt Moran in a very lucid comment at another website.

For the average Internet user, RSS feeds are used primarily without their knowledge. They create My Yahoo pages or Google pages using the technology but not knowing the technology.

The reason it is not often adopted is because we are unnecessarily educating them on RSS. For the average user, it isn't about understanding RSS - its about understanding feeds and some type of reader.

I blogged about this two weeks ago but have put more thought into it. I also spoke to a group about it and spoke to several business owners I know. When they see a little orange symbol or something that says "xml" or "rss" it means nothing. "Subscribe to this feed" means they have to submit an email address - so they don't click on it. But if they do click on it, they see XML - eek!!!

I am creating a video that explains feeds and more importantly feed readers (aggregators - another useless term for my wife, the CEO, and others). It will address those meaningless xml, rss, subscribe buttons in visual and non-technical terms.

The real reason that rss feeds are unpopular is because they have no context or meaning. For those who use them, they are valuable - and when others understand them they will increase in value.

My thoughts - for what they are worth ($.04).

Matt

Now to fix this we can first take a look at the acceptance and usage of another web technology that has a high geek factor in its backend creation but in implemetation has a complete and transparent user interface. The most popular is email. Comparing RSS feeds to email is a good thing to do since many are replacing traditional email services like newsletters, mailing lists and newsgroups with RSS feeds. Many companies and individuals are seeing RSS as the future. They seem to think that RSS is an easier alternative to email protocols. But they are wrong in their thinking. RSS cannot take the place of email just yet. The tools and popularity are not up to the levels needed to make such a young technology a good replacement for email.

What happens when you click on an hyperlink that has an email address embedded? Well you might get a nice email client to write to the holder of that address. Very easy and friendly. But think about how nasty and unfriendly it would be if some of the things we take for granted as RSS users and RSS publishers were applied to email.

How popular would email be if to use it you had to:

Add the email address to your clients addressbook before sending an email to anyone.
Choose a protocol POP, IMAP, MIME or SMTP that people will have to use able to recieve your email
Choose the proper ports to send and recieve messages on
You have to right click an icon with POP, IMAP, MIME or SMTP written on it in tiny letters to get your email client to respond. But clicking on it directly takes you to the source code of the HTML hyperlink.
You have to look at the source code of the HTML page to get recipients email address.

The above list may look ridiculous in the context of email but it is a harsh reality when it comes to RSS. Despite the name there appears to be nothing simple about it. There are a few things that everyone that wants to see a complete breakthrough of RSS should do. These are in addition to stop using those silly icons and miniature banners.

Use links with descriptive text and title descriptions.
If you must use icons then complement them with text links.
Actually write leading instructional text before presenting RSS links. As mentioned earlier by Matt, newcomers to the technology may think "subscribe" means send an email address. Remove this uncertainty by giving clear advice.
Give visitors links to free opensource RSS reader downloads. Bottomfeeder is the most active and most cross-platform project to date. It is free, open source and good looking.
Use the word "feed reader" rather than "news reader" or "RSS". "subcribe to feed" is closer to what actions actually take place. RSS is geek speak and "news reader" implies that you will get news from a news site or television channel.

Conclusion

RSS is nice, useful, robust and a whole row of other adjectives. But my focus is mainly on what RSS is not. It is this that makes RSS popularity weak outside of certain groups of internet users. To change this a lot of things will have to happen. Possibly the number one thing that should happen is that RSS should be made to react just as email does within browsers. Being able to create a link to a feed and have it picked up by a hybrid feed reader and email client should not be harder than writing <a feed:"http://www.yourdomain.com/"> in the HTML of a webpage. The unfortunate part about this is that this standard protocol only brings up an error message in most browsers. This would be effective if webrowsers had default association to feed readers in the same manner as they have for email clients. Questions should be asked of the user and parameters set as the result of their answers The action for the protocol should also include a default redirect to a feed reader website in the manner that embedding Flash and linking to Adode does. This link can either lead to the user establishing an online reader account, adding a web browser extension or one-click installing a desktop client. This is one large advantage that the Opera web browser has over the others, a built in feed reader. Hopefully IE7 which has a feed reader will be just as good. Firefox developers would do well to plan a quick implementation of a built in feed reader as soon as possible. The only way that RSS will be come as accepted as email is if it is made as simple as email.