RSS - What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Ironically, I found this article through Designorati’s RSS feed!

You’re right that most RSS feeds are blogs and news updates, but when you come right down to it, what’s wrong with that? Just because something is a “blog” doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful source of reading.

The truth is, most of the RSS content out there is geek-related, but here’s a sampling of useful (to me) RSS feeds in my RSS reader (Vienna, an open source reader for Mac OS X):

Slashdot and Digg - With these two sites, plus a smattering of others, I keep up to date on most of the new computer and science related headlines.

Movies.com’s list of movies new in theaters and new on DVD this week

Technorati lets me create RSS feed for specific search results which bring me new blog postings about, for example, InDesign.

Karelia Software’s Sandvox Weblog is just one example of a software developer liberating me from e-mail lists by providing their updates via RSS.

While most web comics are behind the curve, Penny Arcade keeps me up to date with their latest comics and news updates using RSS.

And finally, since you mentioned that CareerBuilder doesn’t offer RSS listings of job searches, I should point out that Monster.com does.

Perhaps none of these are your cup of tea, or not enough of them to draw you in, anyway. That’s fine, though, because you can afford to be patient. RSS isn’t going away, and it can only become more useful as time goes by. Just keep checking back on the RSS scene periodically, and sooner or later you’ll find that it’s caught up with your needs.

Wonkey, thanks for the update about Monster.com! And yes, while I appreciate that all of these things are available (movie listings, comics, etc.) and handy, none of them really help me be more productive.

RSS has so much potential, I’m disappointed that people aren’t doing more with it. You’re right, however, patience is a virtue :)

I’ll have to third that: RSS doesn’t do much for me, either.

Yes, I publish RSS feeds—everything on Designorati is fed through RSS, including every Topic and category, allowing readers to focus on as wide or narrow a focus of Designorati content as they like. My other sites all publish RSS (and ATOM) feeds as well. Still, RSS is a let down.

Three years ago, everyone was saying how no one would ever visit websites again, that the time of content creators deciding how to present their own content was over, that the Internet now belonged to content consumers, and yada yada yada. Of course this was all typical new technology hyperbole (remember how, in ‘96, VRML was supposed to eliminate the concept of pages? How’s that going?), but I still expected something more lofty as the ultimate potential of RSS than serving ads.

Two years ago John Gruber over at Daring Fireball first began whining about the costs of running DF (let’s compare hosting bills, John) and started begging for subscriptions. To add some value to the donations and make them subscriptions, Gruber cut his full-post RSS feeds down to just headlines and kickers. Then, only subscribers would get access to his full-post feed (and a t-shirt). La di da.

I never sent him a dime because I didn’t care to read his stuff in RSS (well, that, and because I don’t like his whiney, month-long annual membership drives). When I read DF—and most sites—I prefer to read the sites. I spend about half my day working in Outlook, Word, InCopy, HomeSite, and TopStyle—each a (mostly) black on white application. Reading news in a browser is one of my breaks from one-bit. I want to experience websites, as the content creators wanted me to (within reason). I own color monitors for a reason.

I own—and use—FeedDemon. And, I’ve tried most of the other RSS tools out there, including FireFox and Safari, Web-based aggregators like PubSub, Feedster, etc., plug-ins for Outlook, and so on. FeedDemon is useful to me because it gives me headlines, but I won’t read articles in it. Instead, I’ll read a headline and a kicker, then jump to the site to read the real content—and to experience someone’s design.

Lucian said:

RSS is here to provide a common ground for websites to present their content, thus allowing it to be promoted with ease by anyone who desires.

That purpose is better fulfilled by Google. :-) Seriously, that may have been its purpose in the beginning, but no one is doing anything interesting with RSS. Ok, Podcasts; that’s interesting. What else? How are sites using RSS to promote themselves on a level playing field? And where is it being promoted? Online RSS aggregators like Bloglines that fewer and fewer people are using?

I like RSS to a point, but it’s a limited technology that is on its way out. RSS hasn’t jumped the shark; it never strapped on the skis and leather jacket to get to the shark.

I wouldn’t quite say it’s on it’s way out, because even though I don’t use it for keeping up to date on my favorite sites, a lot of people do. Heck, a good chunk of my daily traffic for my personal site is through aggregators. Additionally, I use it to keep my del.icio.us linkroll updated, which does save me some work.

I just think it’s a shame that a technology with so much potential isn’t be used in more interesting and exciting ways. I’d like to see it go beyond it’s two popular uses, following news content, and helping pages communicate with each other.