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Do "real people" use RSS?
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Or do they prefer to subscribe via Facebook, Twitter, Email etc? I know that if I myself click on an RSS link in Chrome and am presented with a wall of XML and am confounded, a non-nerd must be totally baffled, to the point of thinking the site is broken. I myself have no idea where to access Firefox's "live bookmarks" once subscribed, and have never been arsed to find out. Safari gives me an option to "subscribe my mail", but it is not at all obvious, and I have enough spam already. I've no idea what newer versions of IE do.I know I can cut and paste URLs into things like Netvibes, but I'd wager large swathes of the public have never heard of RSS readers.Collectively, they do not fall into the "don't make me think" school of usability. Quite the opposite.Is there any sort or research on user attitudes to RSS feeds?
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I know one of the guys at Hi5 and when I asked him about it—in relation to something else we both were working on—he said they did a bunch of user testing and found out that the vast majority of normal users don't even known what RSS is, let alone know how to use it. It's similar to how the majority of people don't even know what a browser is only taken to the nth degree because it's very niche.I bet the non-tech-savvy crowd would prefer e-mail, mid-tech-savvey crowd would prefer Twitter or Facebook, and only us nerd of nerds would go RSS. Then there are just those people who prefer to visit sites the old fashioned way.
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My 'evidence' is purely anecdotal but I tend to agree with the guy from 'Hi5' in as much as average Joe has no clue what RSS is or how to use it. It's a total mystery.If someone has heard of it they don't really "get" what it is nor see the benefit. Indeed as stated above the tech-savvy crowd would probably also prefer a different medium these days.In short, RSS is pretty much dead in the water despite it's usefulness for aggregating info into a single "reader".I think that where RSS is useful is for us developers to easily display content from other sites - aggregating industry news etc. but that's really about it and with the increasing use of good APIs even this use will eventually become consigned to the mists of time.
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My girlfriend didn't know what RSS was until I explain to her that she could subscribe to each fashion blog she follows instead of wasting time visiting bookmarked sites each time to find new posts.I think that instead of displaying RSS on the site, we should opt in to let our visitors "subscribe" to our feed. It's a more common word. And acronyms just scare people off most of the time (if they don't know what it means).Opera browser does a good way of formatting each RSS feed nicely for display: I think other vendors should learn from them.And I disagree that "RSS is dead". Google reader makes it some much easier for people to use RSS and apps like Reeder for iPad and Mac are just there to prove that RSS is a still much needed bit of web technology.
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I agree RSS isn't dead. It's just niche. The issue is that people don't want to think about the technology. They just want to use it. If everyone who visits a dozen sites could get updated automatically and in one place they would. It's easier. But most people don't know how that works.The question is how do you deal with people who'd love RSS but do not know what it is.
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I would add Flipboard to the list as an app which uses RSS in a way which works for "real" people.Google Reader may also turn out to be just a stepping stone towards something within G+, I imagine.
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That is a good point Tim. Although I don't use an RSS reader much I do consume RSS feeds via Flipboard.
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I'm definitely with Tim on this one. More and more we're seeing new applications covering the more difficult to understand technologies available. It seems to be the natural thing for the web, layers of abstraction away from something techy/geeky/complicated and making it available to a larger audience who always seem to think of the application rather than the technology. For example my mother in law used to think that her internet was soley controlled by yahoo as that was her start page, then she'd type in the box and yahoo would take her there. Urls meant nothing to her it was all got through Yahoo.
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Flipboard is great, but I haven't quite figured out how to get it to behave more like an RSS reader, which is sad because I vastly prefer the way that app presents content.In the end I get the idea I'm going to have to roll my own, which I might do as a technical exercise.
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In my experience, most of my clients don't know what RSS is. Feedburner's 'subscribe by email' functionality is one way to make it easier for non-technical visitors to subscribe to a feed. Not as a replacement for RSS, but as a second option for visitors who want to subscribe to receive content updates.I think RSS is awesome, and personally I love Google Reader, but it never seemed to catch on with a non-technical audience.
