Getting RSS To Go Mainstream
posted Sunday, 5 February 2006
There are lies, damn lies, and RSS adoption statistics. In an insightful post this morning Dave Winer, writing in response to an item by VC Fred Wilson, paints a clear and elegant picture of how to make RSS use, and hence adoption, "brain dead simple" for most folks. I have written in the past about the enormous potential of RSS as the "Unix Pipe of the Web," and I have no doubt at all that it will become the information lingua franca for the Web 2.0 era. However, Robert Scoble answered Dave that in a recent talk he gave that 80% of the people there already claimed to be using RSS. Unfortunately, that was clearly an expert crowd and others have noted that mainstream adoption is far lower. Real answers on RSS adoption are just hard to get for now.
One thing is clear though, the easier it gets to use RSS, the more people will use it.
So Dave, who is in a position to know as the creator of RSS 2.0, posits a couple of basic things that would make RSS adoption "bust out." One is to make RSS feeds incredibly easy to find. The point being that they're easy enough now for people in the know, but still not for the average person. And the second is to create a centralized public subscription service that allows people to find and track all their feeds regardless of platform or location. And be guaranteed to able to export them as an OPML reading list in perpetuity.
To this last, I would like to add the emphasis that it should be an open, centralized public subscription service. We already have good public subscription services, but there is little guarantee that you can pack up and go to another service if you want to or need to, and proprietary add-ons to RSS abound. I'm sure this is what Dave meant but it needs to be emphasized.
The good news is that I suspect a major step in growth of RSS may very well end up being Windows Vista and it's extensive RSS support. And while it only solves the problem for Windows users (and those that actually upgrade to Vista), it will put a robust RSS database and an OPML view in front of everyone that uses Windows.
This event alone will probably put RSS in the mainstream public consciousness permanently. It would then presumably pave the road and build the widepread demand for just what Dave describes, an open and centralized public subscription service. Because, in a Web 2.0 world, people just won't want to have their RSS data and OPML feeds locked up in their PC or by any vendor or platform.
And if a big player like Yahoo or Google doesn't build this and build it right, I would expect serious startup action in this arena.
In any case, as the Web moves more and more towards favoring consuming pure information in lieu of prepackaged web pages, and management of all personal information moves increasingly online in forms like del.icio.us, Netvibes, Eventful, and Live.com, (to name just four good examples out of a galaxy), RSS will move to the center as the way this information will be knitted together. Let's just make sure it's really simple to do.
Is RSS the end-all-be-all of feed formats? What happened to Atom?links: del.icio.us
