I’ve been saying for a while now, that in terms of “information revolutions” we’re on the brink of the third wave. The first was about simply accessing information , the second about publishing information and the third is about manipulating or routing information (or data).
For years I’d assumed that RSS would play a part in the arrival of the third wave, but where have all the online RSS readers gone? Is Bloglines still “live”? What happened to Rojo? I remember a number of contenders, including desktop apps like NetNewsWire and the like but it seems now that there is only Google Reader left.
Other newsreaders like Rojo used to let me re-publish or share my news, but Google Reader doesn’t. And to be honest Google Reader is crap. Although using browser plugins like Feedly massively improve the experience of RSS it’s just not as automatic or fun as tools like Paper.li or how I imagine Flipboard (I don’t have an iPad).
And although I have more control over an RSS account than what appears in my Paper.li or Flipboard pages, RSS feels more clunky. Images are often still shown as links, sites that post every few minutes flood your news and in general it just feels like you are too close to the technology.
Added to the clunk, is the fact that once you have a few hundred subscriptions in an RSS reader exactly where your news is coming from becomes mystifying. Especially if you’ve subscribed to a few aggregated feeds. It doesn’t feel like you are routing or even in control anymore. RSS starts to feel like an albatross.
As an experiment, I recently swapped my subscriptions (by exporting our subscriptions as OPML) with Andy over at Offmessage to see if someone with similar but different interests would enliven RSS for me. What I found was that amazingly, with almost a completely different set of news sources, the news felt the same. Or to put it another way, even with all of Andy’s lolcats, I didn’t feel I was missing out on any news, it was just coming to me via a different route.
What all of this is saying to me, given the fact that one of my roles is about sharing “best practice”, is that after years of being an ardent fan of the possibilities of RSS, I’m now doubting if it is worth the effort. RSS hasn’t delivered, RSS Readers (and by that I mean Google Reader) doesn’t do what I wanted, it isn’t putting me in control of anything, it isn’t delivering any magic and I can pretty much get “good enough” news in plenty of other ways.
A large part of this ennui with RSS has to be that, my interests are always shifting and I feel weighed down with usability or information architecture stuff, things I was interested in pre 2000. I’ve moved on but my RSS Reader hasn’t and it’s become too big to prune…. AND it doesn’t do anything to help me, it just sits there, spewing crap at me. You’d really think that Google Reader would do helpful things, like categorising news feeds, or noticing the ones you focus in on, or SOMETHING helpful.
Part of the “craft” of creating an enjoyable RSS experience is that feeds have to complement each other, there’s no point having information fire-hoses obscuring the infrequent writer. It takes time to create your own personal newspaper… and it’s almost impossible to create a collection of feeds for someone else, I’ve tried many times.
So there. You might still find RSS useful for you, well done, but given my current disappointment with it, especially from an evangelising perspective, I’m looking for a whole new way of being kept up to date. It probably will be Twitter-based, either that or paper. The walk to the newsagent will do me good.
Actually, maybe it’s just, for me, a death of news per se. If I see another “10 ways to XYZ” article again I think I might lose it. Rather than blaming Google Reader for being rubbish and slowly suffocating all the (better) competition there was, I need to look to myself and realise most news IS CRAP… and spend less time worrying about it.
But if you want to send me your exported OPML file, I’ll give it a whirl for a week and see if I feel news inspired by your picks of the internet. It can’t be worse than Andy’s pictures of cats…. can it? I’ll let you know how I get on.
RSS is just plumbing between news UXs and perhaps not really the problem…like suggesting Gmail is poor because IMAP4 doesn’t filter your messages!
RSS readers were never going to be breakout apps. Try explaining to a regular user that they have to copy and paste strange URLs from orange icons into various apps and they soon lose interest. This was one of the challenges we (unsuccessfully) tried to attack with Ensembli.com.
RSS isn’t the problem, but the user experiences around them are’nt mature. Maybe Andy and yourself have broadly overlapping tastes so your news is generally similar.
Alternatives like paper.li, Flipboard etc are still ‘plumbed’ with RSS – its just more removed from the user’s experience of news. I agree apps like Reader could do more to anticipate and direct your attention, but its not really the death of RSS – simply pushing it into the background.
Where RSS is itself a problem are the very broad interpretations of the standard, leaving app developers to do a lot of the work of normalising ingested feeds…
I’m confused by your criticisms of Google Reader. You know it has a Share feature, right? These days, I filter out most of my own feeds and just read stuff my friends have shared.
Also, they do try to deliver the most “relevant” stuff to you, for example when you first go to the Reader homepage. In the main content area, they are trying to show you the stuff from your feeds that you like the most.
Oh and check out the Recommended Items feature, based on stuff you read/share/like, which is scarily good at delivering stuff to me that I like, from other feeds I’m not subscribed to.
I agree though that the main problem with RSS is that we inevitably add “too many” feeds to our readers, and end up overwhelmed by the noise. I think that this is the fault of the human condition rather than the technology. And bless Google, they are trying to circumvent the human condition with their voodoo, as usual.
That’s a very cool experiment, Tom. I think you could build a fun website to enable exchange of OPML files, it would probably gain traction for a few days before the silicon valley crowd found a newer, shinier thing.
For me, RSS is not dead (nor is the RSS reader) but it is becoming plumbing. I’m still looking for a personalised service that will help me filter and discover great content. Using humans (via Twitter) doesn’t work because the sharers are motivated by self-interest, whereas automated systems like PostRank tend towards recommending mainstream articles from TechCrunch et al.
I still think that there is a place for RSS but that it will be irrelevant for the consumer. We need to get the technology right AND the interface right – oh, and the marketing too, we’ll need that.
PS. You’re welcome to my OPML but it does contain a lot of lolcats.
@TomDS
By re-publishing I don’t mean explicit “sharing” I mean automatic re-routing… Let me try and explain. I have, in the past, when trying to explain the very concept of an RSS Reader, created a news site for someone (say in Healthcare) that is essentially an RSS aggregator that was open to all and didn’t need a login (and of course wasn’t personalised).
It was only once someone saw a page with relevant content in that the penny would drop. And also, because many people don’t want the bother of finding quality RSS feeds and maintaining them, this online aggregator would “bridge the gap” between someone who was an avid reader and geeky enough to find the orange icons and people who aren’t. Rojo used to do this wonderfully, Google Reader doesn’t at all.
But going deeper than that, Google Reader still feels very lame. The UI is AWFUL and as a service, I can imagine that Google are making no money out of it, and so quietly shut it down. And as I say in my next blog post, there’s nowhere to jump to. I vaguely remember that my desktop-based RSS reader, NetNewsWire used to balk on over 200 feeds, which is why I stopped using it.
I imagine I haven’t learned many of the Google Reader features and that I am as bored with NEWS IN GENERAL as I am with the shoddiness of the tools to read it… I always felt an RSS Reader could do MORE than just be a reader somehow…
@Imran
You are right, RSS isn’t the problem…. I am
At very least, by now we might expect a news reader to..
* Have “social news” – stuff the people I’m connected to are sharing / bookmarking
* Discover “magic news” – recommended by some AI magic
* Provide tag-based news, based on my own personal taxonomy or collection of tags.
* Have features a bit like Yahoo Pipes for mushing/prioritizing news.
* Look beautiful
* Realise we all change over time
* Strip out the crap
… I guess it’s the last one that’s the killer.
@AndyMurd
I think there was a site to “Share My OPML” once… long gone… but what’s strange is actually doing it and seeing how different an experience reading “other people’s newspapers” actually is.
I wonder if I pooled OPML from you, TomDS, Imran, Andy etc I would have the benefit of it being “personalised-ish” without it becoming a generic tech news site.
I think deep down, I’m becoming more interested in LESS NEWS… more artsy stuff, stuff where I have to go and think about it for at least a few minutes rather than just enjoying the hurricane mindlessly.
There… that’s it. It’s not an RSS I need is it? No idea what it is though… only that it’s somehow LESS.
RE Comment 7: What you need is a PA who spends all day trawling through the web, finding stuff you will like
If Google Reader could sift through my 600+ new items and only show me the ones I will want to read, that would obviously be ideal, but is somewhat challenging from a programming perspective
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