I'm an RSS addict. Once you have an RSS reader set up, it's easy to get addicted. But RSS is still a fringe technology, used by a small percentage of the population. Why? Because it's broken. Getting better, but still broken.
The broken part has nothing to do with the competing standards -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 (which has nothing to do with 1.0), Atom, et cetera. That's behind-the-scenes stuff and users don't need to care.
The broken part is the subscription mechanism. It's too complicated.
The new round of Web browsers promises to fix that, and Firefox 2.0 actually does. Internet Explorer 7 claims to have two-click subcription capability, but Microsoft has screwed it up, again. Here's what I get when I try click on an RSS icon in Internet Explorer 7:
Apparently this is what passes for usability these days on the troubled Redmond campus. "Internet Explorer requires you to have MSXML3 SP5 or greater in order to view feeds." Huh?
This makes me think of a whole series of additional acronyms, most of them representing obscenities.
What I should see is what Firefox 2 shows me. It transforms the XML feed into a formatted preview and adds a subscription tool at the top. It offers me a choice of popular Web-based readers, or any RSS reader application I've installed on my computer, or Firefox 2's built-in but primitive RSS reader (a dropdown menu). Select, hit OK, and off you go.
I don't understand why Microsoft is so screwed up as a company.
Buying anything from Microsoft is like buying a suit of clothing, then discovering the next day that one pants leg is sewed on inside-out, the zipper is in the back, and the jacket has three arms, and if you don't immediately acquire and install 39 upgrades, a horde of pickpockets will steal your wallet and your car keys.
You have to wonder whether they actually use any of their software.
On the feed side, most of the blogging platforms have finally gotten around to implementing feeds as a standard feature, but it's not well explained to the bloggers. According to the Pew Internet and American Life project:
"Nearly 6 in 10 (59%) say they do not have an RSS feed for their blog content, and close to another quarter (23%) say they do not know if they had a feed, or did not answer the question. It is worth noting that bloggers are not behind the curve when it comes to this new technology. In a general internet-user survey conducted in May-June 2005 only 9% of internet users said they have a good idea of the meaning of the term 'RSS feeds.'"
Comments
Invisible RSS
close to another quarter (23%) say they do not know if they had a feed
I'd tentatively suggest that this very not knowing might be a good thing - once a technology becomes seamless and invisible to its users is the point at which it gets mass adoption. Who, for example, knows they use SMTP every day? For this reason some publishers have simply abandoned the jargon and called their RSS something else - the Guardian for example simply calls them webfeeds. Users of AJAX-based personalised homepages especially may well be unaware of their RSS use - look at Netvibes or Pageflakes and there's a bunch of feeds on there without a whisper of RSS. Sure, Microsoft has broken its RSS implementation but there's smarter people than that giving people access to RSS in ways that are seamless, invisible and therefore, possibly, more suited to the mass market.
Safari
Steve, not sure if you have tried Safari (it's a Mac browser, so it isn't broadly used), but its RSS capabilities are quite good. In fact, I keep using Safari instead of switching exclusively to Firefox because of how RSS is built in.
You're right about MS
Steve, stopped by to see the space. Very nice. Very clean.
You're right about MS. There are still quite a few who get defensive about ol' MS, but the sad fact is that IE7 is still doing catch up to Firefox and Safari. Numerous problems for many, including myself, just after install -- frying registry items. I will never again install a MS upgrade until it has been tested by many other real-world users first. And I don't think much of their beta process.