RSS Needs to Come With the Cup

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a follow-up to my earlier post about RSS …

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What if the only way you could get a cup of Starbucks coffee was to bring your own cup? Sure, we could do that and some of us would. But the majority would of us find it too difficult to always bring a cup with us to get our coffee.

That’s how I see this RSS thing.

I still have to bring my own cup in order to get it filled with website/blog updates. I don’t mind bringing my own cup. But for RSS to go beyond reaching the few and into the many, we cannot expect others will be cool with bringing their own cup. RSS needs to come with the cup. Dig?

Comments

[Jeff Clark]

I assume you mean that people will need to download their own aggregator in order to be on the user end of RSS -- with Bloglines or whatever being the cup.

But what about Live Bookmarks in Firefox? Seems like the cup is already built in.

[Howard Mann]

I most certainly Dig! ;)

Like I wrote about the word "blog" a few weeks ago, the whole way it is explained to the masses has to change. "Just subscribe to the RSS feed" is more vague to most than "read it on the blog."

All these articles about how XYZ Co. has added RSS to this and that cannot mean anything to the majority of PC users who look at you crazy when you tell them to "right-click" something.

To further your Starbucks analogy.. Give me a virtual Barista to serve up my personal newspaper any way I like it.. Just by asking for it.

[RichW]

It's an interesting point, even for those of us who prefer better coffee (and how I wish you'd stop bringing them up at every opportunity!).

When I'm explaining RSS in seminars, I'll show the process from creating a blog post through it showing up on a users Y! or an MSN welcome page.

The usual question I get is, "Yeah, that's neat, but I've already got a ton of stuff on my page that I already don't read (or, my page is already too crowded). Why do I want more?"

An odd thought - what if RSS was actually the thing that kept email relevant? Auto-whitelisting of feeds or tags to the client? Sounds backwards, but still, everyone gets email and they usually don't think about it. And it works well for those who receive feeds that way.

Then again, a Y!-type entry portal based on tags, not sources, might be the thing... del.icio.us still seems to esoteric for the masses.

Interesting topic. I don't think the answer is Firefox, however. That still seems like work.

[Jim Seybert (on FoolsBox)]

Quick note - I'm not a tech-savvy person and it took me about 5 minutes to grab a copy of NetNewsReader and start using it to collect RSS feeds.

I can say without hesitation that were it not for my RSS reader, I would not be following even a tenth of the blogs I read (including Brand Autoposy). You have great stuff, thought provoking, but I don't have time to seek you out. The RSS reader does all the work for me.

I'm not getting why people are making a big deal of this. Setting up a reader is easier than setting up an email account.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Jim ... that's just it. Most folks on the other side of the chasm don't know how to configure an email account. POP3 and SMTP is gibberish to a lot of people.

And I'm afraid to say this but ... five minutes is four-and-a-half minutes too long for the masses.

RSS has to become so easy to use that the masses don't even know they are using it.

[Alvaro]

Funny enough I use services like

http://www.rssfwd.com

to forward RSS streams to my email account. Sure it sounds going backwards but I've found that the best way to get blogs on my Blackberry.

[Mark Howell]

I think the real analogy is that people have been trained to GO TO STARBUCKS (or Peet's, Deidrich's, etc.). True, they don't have to bring their own cup. But they have to GO there. Bloglines and other readers are the GOING there part of the experience aren't they?

mark

[Ethan]

I charted this out here.

I'm not quite getting this "cupless" analogy. Reading your clarifying point, if people can't bother to learn how to set up email, why fret over their inability or unwillingness to use RSS? Simply put, are such people in your target audience? (I hate to cut it that raw, but there you have it then.)

The combination of TiVo and DirecTV may be a better example of "transparency to the user". No setting the VCR clock (it is done automatically by DTV), no tapes to buy (hard disk recording), no weird controls to learn (VCR-style controls built into the remote, one-touch recording). Stuff like the "subscribe in BlogLines" and similar items are closer to one-touch subscription, again, if that is what you are driving at.

[Betsy Palmieri]

John, thanks for the comment and for continuing this conversation.

I respect the viewpoints of your readers posted above, but to Rich and others I would say it is a big deal (relatively speaking) to learn how to use RSS because it truly is part of another language. There are a lot of voices out there who just don't have the vocabulary mastered and it is hard for them to learn it. Especially older people. And not because of inertia or lack of intelligence. Heck my mom got her PhD in her '60's and my dad taught himself French in his 60's. But learning computer-related things for them is probably more akin to learning Chinese than to learning French or some other Romance language.

So why worry about it anyway? Are 65 year olds part of your "target market?" Maybe not. But could including them in the conversation lead to better ways of doing things? (Kind of ironic isn't it, sort of the '60's youth movement in reverse.) I liken it to the steady increases over the decades in measured human speed. Steriods aside, a good argument has been made that 100 meter dash times have gotten faster and faster over the years because the pool of competitors has broadened.

Sure, some people won't have an interest in RSS and how it can connect you to the world. But some people will and what a shame if they just get too frustrated with all the jargon, with pinging and feeds and html, and give up.

[Gabriel Salcido]

To make things worse, some readers ask:

What's the difference between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom?

Like going to Starbucks and reading that you need to take your own cup and it has to be either Plastic 1.0, Plastic 2.0 or Stainless Steel 1.0...

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Microsoft is slated to bake in RSS (whether they will call it that is another controversy) into their next OS (Vista). I expect you'll see that RSS and readers integrated in all kinds of ways soon enough.

See also http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/rss/

[bradford.singleton]

Im not sure how many mac users are here but apple's safari web browser has a great RSS reader built in, It is also intigrated with an excellent RSS screensaver.