What's Wrong with RSS Aggregators
This is Russell Beattie from Yahoo's (their penultimate blogger) best post for 2005. Maybe its coz I'm in the RSS game. Maybe it's because I agree. Maybe it's because I use RSS very similarly to how he describes and I'm selfish - I JUST WANT IT FIXED ! He's also very honest about his employer and the industry, and having worked for large portals myself (MSN and Telstra in Australia) I also get the smugness of showing a graph with 10 times the market share than number 2. But I've also done my startups. And now Im doing an RSS one. So near enough is not nearly good enough if I want freedom and respect.
The dirty truth in RSS is, even though acording to feedburner, there are over 2000 RSS Readers, most are really bad. In fact, of web based readers, I dont think any are any good. And I mean any. It's why I work in the space. If you look at MyYahoo and I have used it daily (with other readers since Dec 05) it only has headlines in text, not sortable, delivered by site, with no-refresh or filters. Its embarrassing, because Yahoo do everything else in RSS really well "Add to my Yahoo" is everywhere. (except maybe in Yahoo search results !) Bloglines or Newsgator are no better. NetNewsWire is good for Mac (but an app) Rojo is alot better, the list goes on. Microsoft's latest attempt with ajax on start.com is closest to what I like in an RSS reader : Smart, fast, sortable feeds, tags, but let me get on with my reading. Quickly. AD A.D.D. Look it up product developers, this is your target market, people who want information, new information, for them yesterday, and the market at the moment is split in two : Advanced early adopters (lunatic fringe acc'g to podcast411) and innovative mainstream, who dont know its RSS but get value out of it. Functionality needs to cater for both. (with the biggest challenge with RSS being the signup process which scares off 90% of potential market)
I totally agree with alot of Russ' points, especially for someone trying to like the Pheedo report says, mainline 400 feeds in 10-15 minutes each weekday morning ("give me all new items from all sources I haven't read ordered by time, and make sure you fetched the last feed 60 seconds ago" - "I'm not joking" says psycho entrepreneur. (director yells "cut" on "Web 2.0 : What went wrong" mockumentary/vblog/podcast) Adam Curry talks about DSC addicts that go to dailysourcecode.com and press refresh waiting for a new episode to arrive. (I did the same at curry.com to get his closing address + it was worth it)
So I've decided to 'distribute' or RSS (really simply steal) the whole article : "With the appearance of My AOL, Microsoft's Start.com and Google's RSS home page it seems that My Yahoo! has some company in the "RSS Home Page" space. These competitors are right to jump in as according to FeedBurner, Yahoo! is currently enjoying nearly 60% of the aggregator market. Though it's nice to see that mainstream portals are jumping onto the RSS bandwagon (lead by my employer), the problem is that all of these services generally suck. Why? Because they all break a very simple rule: You should only see an RSS item once. If I go to a page and see the weather for the day, that's it. I don't need to see the weather again until it changes drastically or tomorrow. After I've seen it once, it's noise. If I see a news story headline, that's it, I don't need to see it again unless there is something new. It's very simple. There's too much information out there in the world to constantly have to search for updates on my own customized news page. New information should stand out, and old information should go away.
The way all these "Box Aggregators" are set up, you have all these boxes on the page with different feeds in them. At a glance you have no idea what is new and what is old, nor do you have any idea when things were updated relative to each other. I don't necessarily subscribe to the "River of News" method, but honestly, I'd rather have that sort of basic interface than a bunch of boxes which contain 90% old news and don't scale beyond a few dozen feeds. Of course my beloved Bloglines seems to hit the sweet spot, though the interface could definitely do with another refresh and some more accurate functionality. I love the fact that I'm able to click on a category and get all the new items for that category in one long list - which could be 200 or more stories - there's no latency in scrolling. I love that once I've done that, those stories go away. I've seen them, I don't need to see them again! Though if I want to, I can view items from a set time period in the past and they reappear. I wish this worked better (sometimes the dates seem to be wrong or I get ENTIRE feeds from some blogs) and I wished Bloglines had a better concept of sessions - even if I had to log in more - so I could just say, "show that last click to me again, I changed devices and missed the updates."
Read marks and session management is the key to aggegators IMHO. As a person who scans almost 400 feeds daily, I can tell you this is the only way realistically keep up. Even aggregators made for the general populace, who may only keep track of a dozen or so news sources, not providing this functionality is just wasting their time. Though actually, I think that many people start out with a small list of feeds and just keep adding to them. Why not give them a scalable solution right away? While I'm on the topic, I have to say how AMAZING Bloglines Mobile is yet again - this time on my PSP. The PSP is a perfect Internet tablet - it turns on instantly, connects in seconds and really makes browsing enjoyable, not just possible. Though sites with a lot of JavaScript and frames and tables either don't work or are just cramped, Bloglines Mobile just looks and works amazingly - again, scrolling has no latency so it's so comfortable to sit back on the couch and keep up with my feeds reading them on a great big portable screen. Last year at Camp Foo (which I didn't get re-invited to, waaah), I told Mark how great Bloglines Mobile was and I'm still impressed with it. Now that the PSP is out, they need to add back in the "enclosures" link (which is missing from the mobile version) as the PSP is a great Podcast listening device as well. Hopefully these are all first generation services and we'll see a quick progressing to more useful versions. Seriously, all this stuff looks just like Netscape's original use of RSS on its home page back in 1999, no? RSS is so much more than that now."
The dirty truth in RSS is, even though acording to feedburner, there are over 2000 RSS Readers, most are really bad. In fact, of web based readers, I dont think any are any good. And I mean any. It's why I work in the space. If you look at MyYahoo and I have used it daily (with other readers since Dec 05) it only has headlines in text, not sortable, delivered by site, with no-refresh or filters. Its embarrassing, because Yahoo do everything else in RSS really well "Add to my Yahoo" is everywhere. (except maybe in Yahoo search results !) Bloglines or Newsgator are no better. NetNewsWire is good for Mac (but an app) Rojo is alot better, the list goes on. Microsoft's latest attempt with ajax on start.com is closest to what I like in an RSS reader : Smart, fast, sortable feeds, tags, but let me get on with my reading. Quickly. AD A.D.D. Look it up product developers, this is your target market, people who want information, new information, for them yesterday, and the market at the moment is split in two : Advanced early adopters (lunatic fringe acc'g to podcast411) and innovative mainstream, who dont know its RSS but get value out of it. Functionality needs to cater for both. (with the biggest challenge with RSS being the signup process which scares off 90% of potential market)
I totally agree with alot of Russ' points, especially for someone trying to like the Pheedo report says, mainline 400 feeds in 10-15 minutes each weekday morning ("give me all new items from all sources I haven't read ordered by time, and make sure you fetched the last feed 60 seconds ago" - "I'm not joking" says psycho entrepreneur. (director yells "cut" on "Web 2.0 : What went wrong" mockumentary/vblog/podcast) Adam Curry talks about DSC addicts that go to dailysourcecode.com and press refresh waiting for a new episode to arrive. (I did the same at curry.com to get his closing address + it was worth it)
So I've decided to 'distribute' or RSS (really simply steal) the whole article : "With the appearance of My AOL, Microsoft's Start.com and Google's RSS home page it seems that My Yahoo! has some company in the "RSS Home Page" space. These competitors are right to jump in as according to FeedBurner, Yahoo! is currently enjoying nearly 60% of the aggregator market. Though it's nice to see that mainstream portals are jumping onto the RSS bandwagon (lead by my employer), the problem is that all of these services generally suck. Why? Because they all break a very simple rule: You should only see an RSS item once. If I go to a page and see the weather for the day, that's it. I don't need to see the weather again until it changes drastically or tomorrow. After I've seen it once, it's noise. If I see a news story headline, that's it, I don't need to see it again unless there is something new. It's very simple. There's too much information out there in the world to constantly have to search for updates on my own customized news page. New information should stand out, and old information should go away.
The way all these "Box Aggregators" are set up, you have all these boxes on the page with different feeds in them. At a glance you have no idea what is new and what is old, nor do you have any idea when things were updated relative to each other. I don't necessarily subscribe to the "River of News" method, but honestly, I'd rather have that sort of basic interface than a bunch of boxes which contain 90% old news and don't scale beyond a few dozen feeds. Of course my beloved Bloglines seems to hit the sweet spot, though the interface could definitely do with another refresh and some more accurate functionality. I love the fact that I'm able to click on a category and get all the new items for that category in one long list - which could be 200 or more stories - there's no latency in scrolling. I love that once I've done that, those stories go away. I've seen them, I don't need to see them again! Though if I want to, I can view items from a set time period in the past and they reappear. I wish this worked better (sometimes the dates seem to be wrong or I get ENTIRE feeds from some blogs) and I wished Bloglines had a better concept of sessions - even if I had to log in more - so I could just say, "show that last click to me again, I changed devices and missed the updates."
Read marks and session management is the key to aggegators IMHO. As a person who scans almost 400 feeds daily, I can tell you this is the only way realistically keep up. Even aggregators made for the general populace, who may only keep track of a dozen or so news sources, not providing this functionality is just wasting their time. Though actually, I think that many people start out with a small list of feeds and just keep adding to them. Why not give them a scalable solution right away? While I'm on the topic, I have to say how AMAZING Bloglines Mobile is yet again - this time on my PSP. The PSP is a perfect Internet tablet - it turns on instantly, connects in seconds and really makes browsing enjoyable, not just possible. Though sites with a lot of JavaScript and frames and tables either don't work or are just cramped, Bloglines Mobile just looks and works amazingly - again, scrolling has no latency so it's so comfortable to sit back on the couch and keep up with my feeds reading them on a great big portable screen. Last year at Camp Foo (which I didn't get re-invited to, waaah), I told Mark how great Bloglines Mobile was and I'm still impressed with it. Now that the PSP is out, they need to add back in the "enclosures" link (which is missing from the mobile version) as the PSP is a great Podcast listening device as well. Hopefully these are all first generation services and we'll see a quick progressing to more useful versions. Seriously, all this stuff looks just like Netscape's original use of RSS on its home page back in 1999, no? RSS is so much more than that now."
posted by redbarren at 6:52 PM
<< Home