Over at E-Media Tidbits Rich Gordon admits, cautiously, that he’s been “underwhelmed” by RSS. Cautious is wise – get too straightforward about this little format and you risk all sorts of harrumphing from its high priests.
He links to Lance Arthur, of glassdog.com, who is apparently unconcerned about brickbats. He gets stuck into both the syndication format geeks, and the authors of the feed readers themselves. It’s an entertaining read, and his overall message – that the RSS world has got a long way to go to be appealing to normal people – is spot on.
“For all the endless (endless, endless) stink that has been raised about syndication protocols, very little mention has been made of the applications that actually use them. Which is too bad, because each and every feed reader currently available sucks. While you nincompoops have been arguing about diesel versus gasoline, the car has been put up on blocks and is shot through with rust. Maybe next you can fight about aerobic versus anaerobic glycolysis during the production of pornography, instead of just watching the movie like the rest of us.
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But the problem with feed readers has nothing to do with their basic functionality or their underlying protocols. It has everything to do with their authors’ utter failure of imagination. The only thing that feed readers have managed to this point is put a pretty face on the raw data they receive. Golly. Thanks. Tell that 1973 green-screen sitting next to you I said hello. Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and… do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!”
Lance goes on to make a number of interesting suggestions for how readers could improve. There are some quite techy suggestions – Bayesian filtering, for instance, plus some features he wishes for which do exist in some obscure readers (actually, maybe they’re all obscure). Some come close to some kind of auto recommendation, which I’m not wild about – as I’ve noted before, auto recommendation can endanger your worldview if used improperly, and so should be used for entertainment purposes only.
But all this ties in with another piece of weekend reading – over at BoingBoing, they’ve linked to an old Tim O’Reilly interview on “alpha geeks” – the people who, on seeing there are no tools available to do something, go off and “roll their own”. Tim’s pretty much the curator of a big collection of Alpha geeks who write his books and, as such, he realises they’re at the vanguard of innovation. By watching them we learn a great deal about where technology is, and could, be going, he says.
But, ultimately, if a technology is to reach as many people as it should, it needs to be taken from the Alpha geeks and placed in the hands of people who understand the needs of a wider group that can create something more broadly appealing. RSS, and content syndication, has yet to really make that jump. Could the nasty politics of its little world have been the cause of its stunted development? And can anything be done to help break it out, from the content side?
I believe Safari will incorporate an RSS reader in the next version of Mac OS X. This will certainly put RSS ‘in the hands of people who understand the needs of a wider group that can create something more broadly appealing’ – that is, Apple.
Nick – good point. Safari RSS will have a dramatic effect on the RSS world, I suspect. It’s just a shame we’ll have to wait so long for it…
Well maybe Apple can be persuaded into releasing a beta of the modified Safari, assuming it would work under earlier versions of OS X. Like they did with iChat AV, or indeed the original Safari.
Mmm… my problem with feedreaders is that they suck. They suck memory. They suck CPU cycles when updating and frankly the organisation of said feeds is horrible. Looking for a better solution. Please help.
It may not do any more than other feedreaders but *Newsfire* for Mac OS Xlooks damn good.
If memory and CPU cycles are the problems why not use a web-based reader such as *News Is Free*? Whatever their shortcomings using readers has got to beat the alternative hands down.
I’m with Nick. The pages rendered by RSS readers (at least on a Mac) that I’ve tried are reader-unfriendly. If I’m using it for blogs, it’s gotta be as appealing as the original to be usefukl.
For the moment, I prefer to file blogs in categories on the toobar and open them all in tabs and read that way. It might not have the immediacy of RSS, but reading is more pleasurable.
However, I’m hopeful, as one or two others have mentioned, that the new ‘Tiger’ Safari brings RSS to a new level.
One other thing. I haven’t tried it yet, but the latest edition of Firefox incorporates RSS with a ‘live bookmarks’ feature.
http://www.mozilla.org/product.....marks.html