RSS, 8-track Tapes, and Use Cases

I really hate the expression “RSS is dead.”  When I think of technologies that are “dead”, I think of 8-track tapes. I haven’t seen one since I was a kid when my parents played Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in our fake-chrome with fake-wood-tone-accent stereo. Yeah, I’m glad those days are over (though “The Lonely Bull” was pretty catchy).

If you think this opening paragraph seems a little lost and missing the point, you totally understand my position on statements like “RSS is dead.” RSS is a way of conveying information electronically. It’s not stuck in a giant plastic case like that Herb Alpert tape; it’s just a way to format data. It’s not dead. It’s used in tons of places. I will agree, however, that the use cases for RSS have changed.

If you roll back the clock a few years, people tried to keep up with changing data on the web by visiting web sites. As the number of sites and content updates increased, it became harder and harder to keep up. RSS provides a way for someone who produces content to publish updates so that a machine can go do the checking for you. The machine can bring only the new pieces of content back from lots of places.  It was a good idea. It’s still a good idea. But not every human on the planet uses an RSS reader. And NewsGator switched its RSS reader clients to use Google Reader as the backend service. And Bloglines shut down. Doesn’t that mean RSS is dead?

No.

It means that many people find that an RSS reader is not the best option for their information needs.  Some of this is due to the way readers were designed. People had to learn new terms like “feeds” and “posts”. They had to figure out how to subscribe to feeds. But the other part of the challenge is that RSS readers could easily lead to information overload. You pick a few feeds. You get some good news. You pick a few more feeds. You go on vacation. When you come back, you have 500 unread stories. And even if you cared about most of the stories for a feed, you would still have to weed through all of the ones that weren’t helpful. 

For some users, this is still a good tradeoff. Their use case is one of heavy information monitoring with the need to make sure they don’t miss anything. RSS readers work well for this. But this is not the typical use case for the majority of users. For most users, getting some good information at the right moment is very helpful. But that benefit is not worth a lot of effort to configure, and it’s not worth a lot of effort to maintain. 

On top of that, social services like Twitter and Facebook have become highly efficient mechanisms for pointing people at content. If you follow the right people or add the right friends, you will often get very timely links to very relevant information. Your social network is acting as a huge search engine constantly filtering information on your behalf. 

So when we started designing the RSS capabilities for Social Sites 2010, we decided to focus on meeting the most common use cases first. Typical users just want to get a little bit of news that matches their core interests. So in Social Sites 2010, you just put in your news interests. Behind the scenes, your company admins control the content that’s being aggregated. As a user, you get news events in your activity stream right along with all of the other microblogging, questions, ideas, document uploads, and other kinds of events. The screenshot below gives a quick example.

We’re still experimenting with the look and feel a bit here.  But you can see how news is just mixed in with other items. And expanding a news event gives you a story summary that you can choose to tag, note, or pass on to other users and groups. So even if you don’t want to track any items personally, your colleagues can filter and deliver the best news to you with ease.

The RSS capabilities in our latest News Stream module for Social Sites 2010 extend well beyond this, but we are really excited at how we’ve matched the underlying RSS capabilities with the most common use cases. Some of the other cool capabilities of this module address use cases like pushing high-quality, highly-targeted fresh content onto portal pages. As you probably suspected, none of these capabilities look anything like a classic RSS reader. 

At the end of the day, statements like “RSS is Dead” are really shortcuts for a more complicated topic like “the original implementation of RSS reading is not seeing huge growth but the core concepts of the technology still have a lot of value.” That’s not exactly a catchy sound bite. But at NewsGator, our mission is to fit technologies with use cases, and we’re looking forward to leveraging RSS to add a lot of value to our newest products. RSS is not dead. But I think my parents might be willing to part with that old stereo and a few of those 8-track tapes…