The only problem with Kroc's rant is that RSS auto discovery and UI wasn't removed from Firefox. It was moved from the addressbar to the Bookmarks menu.
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
151–160 of 197 posts
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#152RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.
I know many customers who, before rss, had to open websites by hand, copy the relevant news articles from the websites and then compile this articles into a company newsletter. Work which sometimes took days before is with rss a matter of hours (they still have to read the articles and decide which are important enough for the newsletter). So, "real people" may not have this problem, but more than one company has.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#153RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what’s ‘new’. Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.
It's something real people want. To say it's not is ignorant. People don't 'need' ESPN to consolidate sports news, but they will pay out the ears to have it. Plenty of people use RSS to get the newest info from multiple sources. It is a useful feature to have, regardless if it was RSS's original purpose
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.
Most of the time you can copy the site's URL into Google Reader and it will try to find the proper RSS feed. It works for blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress, at least; not sure how it does it.
I enter the site name and it works too. Google is good at data parsing :)
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#155I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
Same. I star articles from Newsrob (which syncs to Google Reader) and use a script to fire up articles / unstar while drinking my morning coffee. (Explanation and script bookmarklet here: http://bit.ly/hb0YMU )
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#156I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.
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Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a lot of TiVo conversations like this ten or eleven years ago. Lots of people who never used the technology would tell me why it didn't make sense to them.
Is TiVo still big in the US? (It doesn't exist in the UK). We have various hard disk based recorders, and sky plus etc
TiVo itself isn't huge, but pretty much everyone has a DVR these days.
I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was, but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#158I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad. Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
I don't use the browser's RSS feature either. I only use Google Reader's web app to subscribe to feeds. When I want to read the articles, I do so on the go, with NetNewsWire or Reeder on iPhone or iPad. Before this blog post, I hadn't even noticed that Chrome doesn't have RSS built-in, so I won't miss it in Firefox 4 either. It would be nice if Mobile Safari had a button to add feeds to my Google Reader account, but…
Bookmarklet:
javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain='http://www.google.com';if(b&&!document.xmlVersion)%7Bvoid(z=document.createElement('script'));void(z.src='http://www.google.com/reader/ui/subscribe-bookmarklet.js');void(b.appendChild(z));%7Delse%7Blocation='http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/'+encodeURIComponent(location.href)%7D
edit: it will, unfortunately, take you to Reader if it finds a feed, to give you the option of subscribing. So it's not quite Instapaper-like. But, better than nothing :) I get a lot of use out of it.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#159RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most users. The article readily points this out. And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader…
The concept of RSS itself, like any other piece of technology, is not something users should understand directly. What RSS lacks is a simple, friendly concept to act as its public face. The ways people have explained RSS in the past have been daunting, unappealing, or inappropriate for the web. "Subscription" is the most common term used, probably because it is a reference to the underlying technology (publish/subscr…
Good ideas. Even though the article severely exaggerates, I agree that the browser is the ideal integration point for rss from a ux point of view, but the implementation needs to be totally reimagined for it to appeal to a mass audience.
Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine. And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS. What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts…
You might be interested this in this article: http://www.steverubel.com/instapaper-20-turns-every-rss-feed...