David Emery Online

Feed

21 March 2006

RSS* is now almost completely pervasive in the online world; I utilise it everyday, and everyone I socialise with does to.

Except no-one else does.

It’s not pervasive at all outside my social sphere.

So why the disconnect? It’s a great technology, allowing the user a lot more flexibility in there use of a sites content; and it vastly speeds up the time it takes to keep check on even a small number of sites. Obviously, one of the main reasons is simply one of time – it’s a new technology, and most people are way behind the curve. RSS uptake is growing all the time, but as it stands right now I’m not sure if it’s really going to become “mainstream”.

One of the key issues with RSS is usability. It’s currently far too hard to discover and subscribe to feeds. The big browsers are slowly but surely integrating feed reading, and with that comes many improvements including badging and other interface elements. The user interface in these cases have really got a lot better.

However, there are still a few things that the browser makers can’t fix, but lay on our shoulders instead. These things are all things up to the feed publisher, and really vary from feed to feed (there seem to be no standards or guidelines here):

1. Offering too many feeds
2. Republishing posts too often (usually due to the original article changing)

The first one I come across all the time; when subscribing to a feed by using Bloglines, for example (my reader of choice), I often get a list of about 5 or 6 different format feeds for a single site; normally consisting of a RSS feed, an Atom feed, possibly a comments feed, a FeedBurner feed, a Full Text feed, a partial text feed, etc, etc. Which one should I use? There’s no way of telling. What I want to see is just one choice. Just one feed. Any feed reader worth it’s salt will know how to parse both RSS and Atom. Reduce the confusion, and help your readers – simple really.

The second one is just annoying. When you change the content in a news item, typically most CMSs will also update the RSS feed. While this is fine normally, some CMS also update the feed when a comment is added to as well, and also frequently for no obvious reason at all (although I’d hazard a guess that a typo had been fixed or something similar). Firstly I think updating when comments are added is just flat out wrong. Secondly, I think content creators should think more about when an edit justifies an update to the RSS feed (or more specifically, a change to the posted date).

All the technical changes in the world won’t change these pair of basic flaws. They may be minor, but they really start causing issues when you read anything more then a handful of feeds, and in the long run are really going to put people off.

*By RSS I do of course refer to both RSS and Atom – the naming confusion really isn’t helping much either.