RSS Adoption

Make it simple and make it work well. This is a product development mantra that I believe strongly in. Elon Musk, Michael Moritz and others are very product centric in their view of successful tech companies. If the product works well, people will not only use it but also virally recommend it to their friends. Pay Pal and eBay are two examples of this.

As you all may know, I am a big believer in the future of RSS. It is the future of the web. Consumers decide what they want and how they want it delivered to them. The web comes to you, you don’t go to the web. While RSS is already everywhere on the web (drives MyYahoo, built into Safari, etc), few people realize it. Firms have done a horrible job integrating RSS into daily online functions in a seamless, intuitive way. To add a feed to MyYahoo, your average user has to perform unnatural acts of contortion (find a feed you like and just try to figure out how to add it to your MyYahoo home page).

For RSS to benefit everyone, we have to do better as an industry in simplifying things.

Microsoft had a clean opportunity, with the release of IE 7 (beta), to change this. They have added a "feed subscription" button to the menu bar so users can go to a feed and simply click on the button to add the feed to their favorites. However, it simply gets dumped into the folder. I would have hoped that they would have built a reader (three pane option like Newsgator or Netnewswire) so that you could put the feeds into folders, folders would indicate how many new posts had hit each feed and, like email, you’d have three panes for folders, posts and preview of individual posts. But, no. It is dumped into the folder and gives you no indication of number of new posts, no previews, nothing…

Even worse, when you view a feed in IE 7, Microsoft strips off the original style page and slams their own style page on top of it. Unfortunately, in doing so, they strip off the links that a service like FeedBurner have there which allow you to subscribe using the reader of your choice and force you to only subscribe so you can read it in the IE 7 reader (which, oh yes, is horrendously lacking). Microsoft at its best.

I don’t care so much that the formatting has changed from my original design (let the reader chose what they like best). I do care that they try to force the reader to use IE 7 versus the reader of their own choosing which has all of their other subscriptions in it. The reader is dysfunctional, at best, and forces users to have subscriptions all over the place if they want to use IE 7 (unless they jump through hoops). Let me know if any of you who play in the RSS world are as disappointed as I am.