Comments on: I Don’t Want No Stinkin’ RSS (or Why Normal People Don’t Understand Feeds)

By: Getting Wider Adoption For RSS » Eninvent

Getting Wider Adoption For RSS » Eninvent — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 06:51:13 +0000

[...] Wider Adoption For RSS Aaron Brazell has a to-the-point explanation of why people don’t understand RSS, and why they probably don’t “want it.” To wit: RSS is not mainstream because [...]

By: Vincent

Vincent — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 19:03:14 +0000

I agree with Gomer!

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:27:17 +0000

Heh, Brian. Are you talking about this entry of yours? Actually, every entry I've written on BH have had similar headline structures. :) I did notice that yours looked similar to mine the other day though. :)

By: Brian Clark

Brian Clark — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:03:58 +0000

Hmmm… that headline structure looks awfully familiar for this topic. :)

By: RSS - are the masses ready for it?

RSS - are the masses ready for it? — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:44:27 +0000

[...] Main main Aaron Brazell says People don’t want the stinkin’ RSS, in large part because they don’t understand it. He has a point. I guess I view RSS as being easy because it’s easy to me. But we all know that things that may be easy to someone in a technical field is not so simple to regular people who don’t work on computers for a living. Those are the people who have to be reached in order to make RSS even more accessible. [...]

By: Gomer

Gomer — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:47:56 +0000

Yes, I have often thought about this same thing, when will rss adoption become mainstream.

I see a few things causing this. First, the message has not gotten out properly. Right now, people have a hard time understanding the difference between a forum, a chat room, a blog, and rss. I have spoken to people who have read blog but don’t know what rss is, or that they can keep updated with the blog using rss and a reader. There is much confusion out there and the message has not gotten out clearly.

If I were the big-boys like Yahoo, I would design a simple commercial, about 1 minute long showing what rss is and how they can use it in My Yahoo. There would be about 10 million light bulbs going off in people’s heads and they would think Yahoo is just wonderful (and that they invented this).

I have told friends and family about rss and readers and while they think it is very cool, none of them use rss on a daily basis. For some reason, they just prefer surfing around and looking at stuff. I can’t figure out why.

In a way, I think rss needs to be made easy for the masses and I don’t think that has happened yet.

By: Grokodile

Grokodile — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:18:15 +0000

Heck, I think we need to realize half the population is still afraid of computers. Why don’t we work on getting them comfortable using the Internet, able to run their computers for more than half a day without catching a virus, and for the love of God let’s get them to stop forwarding chain mails and chaim IM’s.

Thump!

That was my forehead hitting the table in defeat. I know it will never happen. Hey, look at it like this…

As a programmer, I used to tell people that only some percentage of the population could ever be a programmer. Some percentage of that could be a C programmer. Some percentage of that could be an object oriented programmer. This isn’t exactly true, especially with the dearth of tools which make any idiot a programmer since they can cut and paste things they have no hope of understanding into a somewhat working system, but you get my point, right?

Hello? Does anyone care? Click…. bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

By: Michael Clark

Michael Clark — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:03:26 +0000

I thought RSS feeds would open up in your feedreader. Or is that only another subtle advantage of Safari and NetNewsWire? Wow, you’re right. IE 6 on Windows XP shows an XML page. Wow, and Firefox under XP handles the RSS differently if the RSS link is a regular link in a page, or is referred to in the page header (it created a live bookmark).

By: Devin

Devin — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:11:50 +0000

Haha, someone said I’m right… I’m documenting this!

But seriously, I think we’re in violent agreement. When we say we have a file extension for RSS that’s only half true. When I think of a true ‘extension’ I think of something that’s linked to a program. As mentioned in my comments, XML is too abstract for the average user to use. Just have a .rss load in my Firefox/IE bookmarks or open up FeedDemon and I’m set.. I’ll be subscribing left and right!

Thanks for the write-up, Aaron.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:36:05 +0000

I agree that it is easy, but the adoption is what I’m referring to. Yes, more companies are adopting it and I agree that this will help propel it. IE7 should help that too as most people still use IE and once Windows Update pushes it to everyone then more people will have “on the desktop, so to speak” RSS reading capability.

However, when an average reader clicks an RSS link (because users still see links as things to be clicked) they see mumbo jumbo. It means nothing to them. And translating that mumbo jumbo into “Go get a free bloglines account” is a tough thing to get an average user to grasp. In my opinion, of course.

Awhile ago, I had a plugin installed at Technosailor that was preventing users using IE behind corporate proxies from viewing my site. I had a dozen emails on this and before I could figure out what was the issue, I was telling people to subscribe to my feed or go get a bloglines account. More than one reader balked not knowing what the heck was involved.

So my point is that, while RSS is fairly straight forward for us it’s not necessarily a bonehead decision for the average mom or pop.