The title and content of this blog entry pretty much sums up what I’ve been mulling over for the past week.
And it’s definately one of those “I wish I had posted that” type posts.
10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time.
Posted on January 23rd, 2004 at 6:36 pm and filed under Web Standards.
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The blog of Chris Owens, a twenty nine year old web designer, developer, project manager and amatuer photographer currently residing in Daisy Hill, Bolton, Lancashire, UK.
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Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen January 24th, 2004 at 6:02 pm (Permalink)
Alas, it’s disappeared, but lockergnome has a link to a rebuttal at http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/item/20028.
I’m sorry to impose on your blogspace to say, the rebuttal’s the article I wish I’d written. The main reason I think so is that the signal to noise ratio on the email channel has passed the critical limit. Nobody opens an email that isn’t from a friend or a list they signed up for, and sometimes not even then.
RSS is the closest thing to “push” technology that people will accept any more.
Chris January 24th, 2004 at 7:33 pm (Permalink)
Valid argument going on there, please note thought that I wasn’t agreeing with every point made.
I guess I should have been clearer in my post about what exactly I don’t like about RSS?
The points I have a problem with is:
1. No real sense of history.
2. RSS content is not user friendly.
For my 2nd point, I am in no way implying that XML/RSS should, or indeed isn’t user friendly. I think the point I would have made would have been that: People who I have shown RSS feeds to have all pointed out that it’s “boring” because it’s just text (I pointed them to some feeds that have links/images etc and this point became less of an issue). They also commented on the “history” problem (which I agree with), and some also made the point that it’s no better than email… which leads me onto your point about email signal/noise.
The spam causing the problems with email *needs* to be sorted out I totally agree. I mean, I don’t have a real problem with spam thanks to filtering software and other little tools… but novices and non-computer literate people, especially those that plaster their email addresses everywhere must have one hell of a problem.
Its just a shame that spam has got so bad, so much so that people don’t really like parting with their email addresses anymore… which is a damn shame really as email certainly has many positive aspects that make it an ideal communication medium for the web.
If the current problem with spam wasn’t such a problem, how many of us would actually be using RSS? — I know I would prefer an email every time a site is updated. Instead I have to open another piece of software.
This is turning into a blog entry in itself, and I have to go get ready to go out… so I’ll leave it here.
Lovely to see you on my blog anyway Bob… I’ve bookmarked yours and will check it out later. :)
- Hope you can make sense of what I’m trying to say above, I typed in a hurry.