The Importance of RSS

unfoldedorigami writes "Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati has got Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search. Hale thinks this is the reason behind why they've become so interested in feed reading and the procurement of revenue from them."

Comments

Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[metlin]

One solution would be to provide a single point of web-based RSS feed reader of sorts, where people could not only add their bookmarks, but also just log in and read their favorite feeds.

Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.

A sort of Google-news for RSS feeds, of sorts.

I mean, they could move people from other webmails to Gmail, this shouldn't be too hard, either. Build a nice system where people can add in their feeds and read them on the web in a non-cluttered, nice, manner and people _will_ use your system.

That would give them more power to search and catalogue user preferences - although from a Big Brother perspective, that isn't necessarily a good thing.

I sense a good opening for a web-application!

Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[jason718]

Something like Bloglines? (now owned by AskJeeves)

Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[Jugalator]

Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.

I think Google Fusion is going to do this "soon".

From the FAQ, bolding in reply mine:

11. Can I add other news sources or feeds?

Not yet, but stay tuned. We chose the currently available feeds for this beta release of personalized homepages in order to give a good sampling of content from across the web. Right now you can choose from among leading U.S. news feeds, international news feeds, technology feeds, and non-tech/non-news feeds. As we continue to improve this feature, we envision enabling users to add almost any standardized feed to your personalized homepage.

With "standardized feed" I assume they mean feeds following the RSS and/or Atom standards.

Anyway, in this case, you'd have your RSS feeds on your main Google search page if using this feature.

Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[ShieldW0lf]

This is really funny, in a shake your head in disgust kind of way.

The reason that people turn to something like RSS is because it lets them get to the meat faster without the extraneous crap. Searching through google results exposes you to it, searching through your various favorite sites in your bookmarks exposes you to it, etc. RSS does not, and therefore people gravitate towards it.

Advertising IS extraneous crap. If you put it in RSS feeds, people will no longer have the motivation to use it. You'll be breaking the tool.

It's such a joke. A new information-location technology comes out that is more effective at filtering out crap, the public jumps onboard because they don't want to see the crap, the IT guys jump onboard because that's where the people are and try to make a profit by forcing the public to waste their time looking at someones crap, and the people leave for greener pastures.

Thing is, people came to recognize that it's not the technology that was important, but the providers of the technology... they're the ones you trust (or don't trust) not to betray you, break the tool, and waste your time.

Google didn't rise to prominance because they have wonderful technology... lots of companies have wonderful technology. They rose to prominance because people came to trust them to filter the crap and give them what they're looking for better than their contemporaries.

Now, google is a big publicly traded company. They shove some crap in your face when you do a search, carefully weighing just how much crap they can get away with. They corrupt and poison the very infrastructure of the web itself with their "replace key words in content with div-pops and links to advertising in a way that obfuscates the fact that is advertising until you have already been exposed to it" technology. I can't speak for others, but while flash ads and banners merely annoy me, this particular technique actually makes me angry as hell.

While there is a large amount of inertia to overcome, this sort of shit will eventually spell the end of their relevance, because people will eventually come to realize that it doesn't really matter what the technology of the moment is, they will come to know that google is going to pervert it and waste their time in the name of profit.

This happened to sites like yahoo and msn and that provided the opportunity for google to rise to prominance. Now it's happening to google and providing an opportunity for another to rise to prominance.

Not a moment too soon if you ask me. If I never see another IntelliText link slip through my adblocker, it will be too soon.

Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[Baricom]

Advertising IS extraneous crap.
Yes, but it also pays the bills. If the web content companies don't advertise, what business model should they use?

They corrupt and poison the very infrastructure of the web itself with their "replace key words in content with div-pops and links to advertising in a way that obfuscates the fact that is advertising until you have already been exposed to it" technology.
Are you claiming this is Google's idea? I've seen this, but never in association with Google. You later put a name to it - "IntelliText [sic]" - but IntelliTXT is run by Vibrant Media, which doesn't appear to have any ties with Google. Please provide a counterexample.

Amusing

[NanoGator]

I like how Slashdot posts a story about the importance of RSS, but their own RSS service will ban you for 3 days if you just look at it funny.

How about ...

[Numair]

Search being the new search? Seriously; these online search engines haven't improved much in the past 5 years (yes, it's been 5 years since Google started growing by leaps and bounds, became the Yahoo default, and amazed us all ...).

Yeesh

[Otter]

...Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search.

"Y is the new X" is the new "Hello! 1993 called and they want their X back!"

I doubt it will replace search engines...

[pthor1231]

I mean, come on. RSS feeds are useful for stuff that you check daily, hourly, etc. This is usually stuff you are familiar with, and would know how to find in the first place. On the other hand, if I want to find something out about a subject I'm not particularly familiar with, I go to google and search.

the important of RSS is..

[Anonymous Coward]

..that it's just pure content without any layout or crap. In other words, it makes reading web sites as easy as it was in 1995.

Of course, at some point they will start putting crap in RSS feeds (they are already putting ads in the feeds.. I agree with Dave Winer: isn't the feed an ad ALREADY??), and someone will re-invent it all over again.

But for now it's a great way to just read content without crap. Say, that's a good slogan: "RSS: content without crap".

Seriously...

[jd]

RSS is pretty crappy, as it is a point-to-point protocol. What would be good would be if websites sent out multicasts when an update occured, as then all interested parties could monitor for that and we wouldn't get system overloads.

(Slashdot, if I understand correctly, limits RSS because massive monitoring kills the network and servers. But if they only transmitted a single multicast on an event - such as a FP update - or every 30 minutes, the load would be negligable and yet everyone would get instantaneous updates.)

In the end, RSS is a dead-end technology, because the network will always expand faster than any given pipe, which means point-to-point will inevitably fail in the end. It doesn't scale.

RSS is good, yeah, but only as a stop-gap until ISPs can be pressured into enabling technologies they should never have disabled.

Re:Seriously...

[danheskett]

The technology you describe is basically Really Unsimple Syndication, where as RSS is really simple.

RSS is great because it's simple. It sucks under load, but the uses are myraid.

Searching can be one time, subscription can't.

[dmorin]

I think a key difference between subscription and search is that you may have use for searching for one thing, one time. As a matter of fact I'd think that this is by far the most common use of search. Maybe you hit google news everyday to check for "Free porn movie downloads" or something, and that you can subscribe to. But how about when I just have a one-time question, like what's a "xenops"? Google's perfect for that and I can't see RSS being a big problem.

Generic RSS subscription (where you just click the "syndicate this site" link or little orange button) is not very useful as a replacement for search because you don't get to customize anything. Unless the blog in question offers categories, then you're stuck getting whatever they push onto the feed, even though the strength of RSS is supposed to be that you're pulling the information over.

Instead, you want to go with an RSS subscription that gives you some measure of control, specified by you. But what? A search term? I watch news.google.com for "Shakespeare". And I get every hit -- shakespeare fishing rods, shakespeare references in businessweek, and some football player named shakespeare who fell off a boat and died. Not what I want. At least something like a delicious theoretically goes one step above, because by having an army of monkeys tagging URLs by the thousands, you're assuming that you've attached validated meta data to each link. When I search delicious for things that are tagged Shakespeare, I might not only get exactly what I want, but my odds are much higher that it will be what I expected.

Ask, and ye shall receive (by multicast)

[dsandler]

RSS is pretty crappy, as it is a point-to-point protocol. What would be good would be if websites sent out multicasts when an update occured, as then all interested parties could monitor for that and we wouldn't get system overloads.

Right on.

We're working on exactly that here at Rice. FeedTree (paper) is a newsfeed distribution system, built atop the self-organizing Pastry overlay and the Scribe multicast algorithm. Scribe is self-organizing and low-maintenance; everyone shares the load of distributing new bits of news (i.e. no polling stress at the publisher), and it all happens in a timely fashion (i.e. no polling delay at the client).

We're working on a public (open-source) beta. Check back soon.

OpenSearch

[image]

Actually, the convergence of search and syndication is what led A9 to create OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a standard for search results that, not coincidentally, is built as an extension to RSS. In just a couple of months a few hundred sites have adopted it -- seems like there is a market there. (Disclosure, not that there is a conflict of interest there, but I am the lead for the project.)

And it's not just for A9 -- anyone can use OpenSearch to syndicate their search to anyone else. One example of a search aggregator other than A9 using OpenSearch is OSFeed. And example of a search engine that can be accessed by anyone is AWS OpenSearch, which lets you search Amazon via RSS.

So in other words, when done well search and RSS are highly compatible.