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Of Internet Users, Only 4% Knowingly Use RSS
yogikoudou writes "Recent research conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos reveals that while 12% of surveyed Yahoo users know what RSS is, only 4% of surveyed Internet users use it (PDF) (and know they use it).
Podcasting is also reviewed, with the conclusion that 2% of surveyed people use it.
The increasing number of blogs should go with an increasing number of syndicated readers, as they are now an important part of the web." I've said it before, I'll say it again- if RSS was called SpeedFeed every user would have to have it.
i'd feel like i was on drugs with speedfeed, course firefox rss extensions are as good as drugs :o
Complements of RSS!
4% know what the heck RSS is, is a lot.
All these Web2.0 companies thinking they're targetting the general Internet public with their RSS, podcasting etc... mashups are only targetting the high-end users of the Internet, and these are the users that only sign-up once, try it for a min or two, then dump it and move on to the next greatest thing.
I hit a couple of dozen news websites daily. Every RSS feed is different, some give titles some give summaries. Why use it.
I have tried I usually find it more cumbersome to read RSS then click on the link to articles i want to read than going to each website doing a much more through san of everything shown and opening what i want to read in tabs. There is nothing RSS provides that can't be had faster with other methods.
Maybe i just haven't found a good RSS reader yet. They all seem to me to be lacking something.
But that is only my opinion. I don't do podcasts either though I can see where those could be useful. Of course I don't listen to portable music so they don't help either.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I've said it before, I'll say it again- if RSS was called SpeedFeed every user would have to have it.
There are a number of acronyms that can be just as "sexy" as marketdroid made-up name. Think MP3, PC or IBM. Maybe the truth is that much of RSS is hype? Either that or there's SS in the name and it's too nazi, but I won't say it because I fear Godwin's wrath.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
... most people don't know their RSS from their elbow.
Why isn't RSS subject to spam? Because in RSS, the recipient pulls the information from a known server, whereas in e-mail an arbitrary sender sends the information to a known recipient.
Now in the era of RSS, recipients have to check two places: e-mail and RSS. Thanks to e-mail spam.
I dumped it because I was suffering from information overload. Seeing all the shit happening in the world was just increasing my stress levels. Also, so much of the information is duplicated it just wasn't worth getting. It's amazing how much is plagiarized from AP, Reuters, etc...
In my opinion, the problem with RSS adoption is not the name. It is the fact that employing RSS is really a pretty fundamental change to the way people use the internet.
Most people are used, I think, to giong online and surfing over to their usual bouquet of sites and checking those. The content provider effectively has to "pull" the content consumers in to the content.
RSS on the other hand, is "pushed" out to the recipients. Sure, people still have to surf to the site to get the feed URL, but it's still broadly a push content strategy.
I realize this doesn't sound like much of a change, but for many less sophisticated internet users, the concept of having the news come to you rather than having to go to the news is not familiar.
As an additional point, I suspect that dedicated RSS users will tend to have tens and often hundreds of feeds to sift through. Most people just don't want or can't handle that much information. As a consequence, it is not al that attractive to them.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
To me it seems just as bothersome to load an rss reader as it is to load the websites in a browser, ive never understood the massive hype surounding RSS. Granted its slightly quicker to load slashdot articles from the Live bookmark in firefox, and having news headlines popup in evolution or on my xbox media center is kind of nifty but pointless.
How many are unknowingly using it?
-- - e.m.p.t.y - --
A lot of newbies/non-tech users unknowingly use RSS though, which is what I guess yahoo was hinting at. All the big portal/search companies have their own blog/news syndication scheme that makes it easy to subscribe to sites. (Example)
Why is this surprising? Everyone knows where to find the news they're interested in, and blogs are only read by people who blog themselves, i.e. a *very small* percentage of internet users. Noone else finds blogs important; bloggers hyping blogging is just one big circle jerk. For anyone who is not either a blogger or a news junkie, RSS has little to no use.
I know a lot about technology, having started with Fortran and PL/1 in 1969 and PCs before IBM broke open the current era. But RSS is still not easy enough to use. I use 3 browsers (IE, Firefox and Opera) and unless RSS is integrated intelligently into the browser interface, I won't use it.
For most news I use the Chicago Tribune, radio (NPR and local all-news station) and a little bit of television. I love the idea of podcasting but have not actively used it. Blogging seems lame--the signal to noise ratio is poor unless I know the writer in another arena.
I am white, male, 55, married with grown kids, lower middle class h.s. chemistry teacher, evangelical Christian who is not a Republican.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
I know about it but don't use it because I'm not prepared to hunt down another application in order to use it. I also didn't upgrade my mac to tiger just to use Safari RSS.
Jonathanjk.com
Am I the only one who doesn't get the (great) appeal of RSS? I've tried it in various forms (Firefox Live Bookmarks, Google Homepage, RSS plugin for Firefox...) serveral times and I always end up forgetting about it. I really only read three web-pages every day and I like to scan the entire pages, so RSS is a waste of time in those cases as the various methods of using RSS only let you see, say, 20 headlines at once and my main news page, for example, has hundreds well organised in various sections.
The new Gmail implementation is vaugely interesting as I sometimes see something I wouldn't have otherwise seen (such as Google blog entries and stuff from other news sites I wouldn't normally visit) so I guess as a random selection it makes some sense, but not as a dedicated homepage/plugin etc. that I would deliberately load up frequently.
So I really am not suprised by the 4% figure, the only thing that is suprising is that anybody else is suprised:)
// It had been Fat's delusion for years that he could help people. --Philip K. Dick, Valis
When there is high speed internet connection and an excellent set of web browsers, why would some one use RSS ?
RSS has its advantages in places where people access the net using dial up connection. It loses its purpose where people jump on the net for pure entertainment and killing time.
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Pointcast got hot, then Microsoft and Netscape both brought out their variants on it, built into their 4.0 editions. Everyone in Internet marketing was talking about "push" (I tech edited "Marketing Online For Dummies" which came out in 1998), but it died.
Now, this could probably be due to the fact that it was not based on XML, but had a few semi-HTML markup language variants depending on whether you were producing your content for Pointcast, IE, Netscape, etc. The people I've talked to who are hot on RSS claim that the XML and standardization of the RSS specs make this a different ballgame.
I don't know. I'm still expecting Microsoft to "embrace and extend" so that RSS forks and RSS reader makers are scrambling to adapt to all the tags Microsoft introduces.
But in the end, RSS is basically the evolution of "push". I don't understand what's going to drive consumers to adopt it any more than they adopted the channels concept in IE4 and Netscape 4. Perhaps growing adoption by publishers will help push consumer adoption. But after watching all the hype rise, hit a crescendo, and then drop off into a whimper with push, I'm still not going to pin my hopes on RSS achieving widespread consumer adoption.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The whole thing just confuses the crap out of me. If I want to see what's on a site, why wouldn't I just GO to the site and see?
I hate when I hear people talking about how great RSS is because frankly, it's nonsensical as far as I'm concerned. My own web site uses RSS because it's part of the package. If I had to put any thought into making it work though it'd be off. Fortunately for whatever fraction of that 4% of Internet users who understand and use RSS who actually read my site (both of you) it's all automatic.
And 4% of a billion is still a number I'd like to see on my next paycheque. I hate when people use percentages to make numbers seem artificially low.
Happy New Year!
Since I've added "Add to Google" to my blog, I've seen the number of RSS users go up dramatically. We'll see if it lasts, but it seems Google will be one of the main ways users learn what RSS is.
My Google "custom homepage" offers blank feeds about 50% of the time, though, so I'm not sure if it is the best solution, but it is definitely a start.
But how many uses Firefox' features for RSS, knowing it as a live bookmark, not as RSS? FF comes with RSS feeds preinstalled, so I guess alot use them, if unknowindly.
That's the interesting point, and as I've heard ff has ~10% market share, I'd bet at least 10% of users use it in some way. Granted, it is mainly the more skillfull users, but neverthless.
How is this for slashdot? How many people uses slashdots feeds? How many % of the hits on slashdot.org comes from the feed?
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Poor RSS. They mean well. It's almost too bad that there's no need for it. It's a rehash of that "push vs. pull" tech we heard so much about. It's obviously going nowhere, few people understand how to utilize it, fewer people use it, nobody needs it. Unless the RSS feed is from my bank account, showing me withdraws in real time on my cellphone, I don't see myself using it either.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
I am white, male, 55, married with grown kids, lower middle class h.s. chemistry teacher, evangelical Christian who is not a Republican.
I am a pink, male, 30, too smart to be suckered into marriage and reproduction, upper middle class, self employed, keeps to my self dedicated atheist, who is conservative, but not Republican.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
For example, what the hell is up with firefox's use of LiveBookmark? Why is it such an unmitigated pain in the ass to add an rss feed to firefox? What is the problem with firefox's current (1.0.7) implementation of bookmarks? Okay, I guess I'm bitching here a bit about firefox, but its default implementation of rss is not yet there yet. That, and that alone, is the reason why only 2% of users are doing the rss thing.
Besides that, for some sites, clicking on a feed displays a menu with very little information. Slashdot is a good example, I can read a list of article titles via the rss feed (this article still not available), but you know, as with slashdot, I go there and scan the list and read the articles that I'm interested in, increasingly very few.
I don't know how to implement these things to improve the experience for the user, including myself. Someone with more experience in user interface design will surely have more to offer than this.
ps. The article is still not there.
Salut,
Jacques
RSS just isn't handy for news sites, but it becomes really handy for tracking for very good blogs that update seldom and/or irregularly.
and people still wouldnt use it widely. I'd venture a guess that those who do use it only have a couple of well chosen feeds.
Personally I use it for anything but news or website update notifications. I use it to monitor bug lists and trouble ticket lists. The integration with Firefox makes it nice.
Yes, these complaints may be Firefox-specific. I haven't gone to the trouble of finding, installing, and configuring a dedicated RSS reader.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
RSS is just too technical for the average Joe to understand, much less care to use it.
Second, the majority of RSS feeds are junk. Most give you a really short headline with nothing in the way of content. You still have to click to read the full story, so there isn't much draw to it.
eTrade SUCKS
What the hell are you talking about? No website I've ever used has sent out updates via email. I don't know what you're smoking, but it ain't tobacco.
They should have called it Fastfeed. There is a lot in the name.
I've said it before, I'll say it again- if RSS was called SpeedFeed every user would have to have it.
Naw, just the meth users would have it.
resigned
Now I know. Cause it has an SS in it. And this is also why I won't, and no one ever will, call you an ASS.
I tried some RSS readers an got pretty overwhlemed very uickly by the amount of info.. I switched to RSSFWD and it works much better for me now: http://www.rssfwd.com/rssfwd/ You can easily let the site parse the RSS fro you and then send you an e-mail. No clunky RSS reader required.
I set up a couple of keyword subscriptions to subjects I like in PubSub http://www.pubsub.com/, and then linked to the RSS via RSSFWD. Now I get a few interesting e-mails that are filtered to a folder and I can read when I get a chance.
For sites like Slashdot that I frequent, I just visit the web page. I only use RSS to find info that I might have otherwise missed.
I was actually worried that people went around using the idiotic term "podcasting" on a daily basis. Now I know that it will never be more than some bullshit marketing.
They should have surveyed on a slashdot poll, then it would have either been overwhelmingly in the other direction
(or towards Cowboy Neal)
Video Production Support
It's one of those "oh wow" factors that a small percentage of the population get really excited about.
It collects "Web Clips" from sites you visit, so you can subscribe without ever knowing thing about RSS.
I personally don't like any of these RSS aggregators, Firefox's livebookmark feature is quicker and easier.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
...of Internet users, only 4% knowingly use ARP. However, 99.99% of Internet users do use it.
Seriously, WTF is with that "knowingly" in there, the majority of "Internet users" wouldn't know their ass from their elbow, let alone whar RSS is or what it stands for.
After some digging via Google, I found a little-known way of coding their Purchase Circle URL's so the data is delivered as CSV (comma separated values). I wrote a script that translates that data into an RSS feed (with my Amazon Associates code embedded in the product links) and then set up CaRP to cache that data and re-format it to HTML for use in my pages.
Start a happiness pandemic
Bloglines offers a Subscribe to Bloglines bookmarklet, so I can easily subscribe to any website I visit.
Another RSS service is SuprGlu which will take all your feeds and put them on a web page for you.
What, me worry?
Some comments here wonder what value RSS provides? RSS offers much more than syndicated news feeds, it helps control your information overload. Two examples follow. First, Dr. Dobbs article shows how to build your own RSS with Ruby to track information when certain events occur. Dave Thomas writes artcles and books about Ruby. He says "You can use RSS to collect and summarize information from your projects and from your life" in the Dr. Dobbs article.
Second, Yahoo maps documentation says, "The XML used by the Yahoo! Maps Simple API is based on geoRSS 2.0." Here is another link about GeoRSS and worldKit, a map built using shockwave flash. You publish your map content, and GeoRSS for every point you want on the map.
IMHO, GeoRSS is becoming a de facto standard, becoming part of many blogs, and content managment systems, like Plone. and, BTW, Good luck with all your adventures this New Year.
Software freedom...I love it!
It's not important. A related example: Of all the people who use SSL (or even TLS), what percent do so "knowingly"? Not alot, and who cares?
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
many percent hates pdf..
And, actually, the old Netnews protocol does the same job. More efficiently, using less bandwidth. Netnews is even a true peer to peer distributed system.
...what the other 96% is ignorant of? Competitive Advantage! Survival of the Fittest! If they want to get their news and info the slow way, that's their problem. Here's on for ya: "Let them read newspapers!"
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
...what you get if you leave in a tampon too long?
Find free books.
As he/she said. 5 years ago it was the norm. I used to run a pretty popular site 5 years ago and was met by torrents of requests for an email newsletter, and obliged. It was a powerful marketing tool, as you could have a stale database of 10,000 users who may have forgotten about your site, but would get reminded weekly that you were still around.
As grandparent said, spam filtering caught it by it's tail and it died. I sort of liked it at the time.
what happens if you don't check daily? you'll miss out on alot of news.
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It SAVES TIME :-)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The best way I've found for reading RSS feeds is using an RSS-to-email gateway. This way any new articles are automatically delivered to my inbox, and filters put them in their own folders. Whatever computer I'm on, I check my mail (IMAP; using either webmail or a client) and I get all my mail and all my news. One stop for everything. Articles remain unread until I've dealt with them.
This works great. If I visit a site I find interesting, I subscribe to its feed. If it's ever updated, I get the update (or at least notification of the update) sent to me. And I can read it all from the comfort of my chosen mail client.
Probably only 2% of World Wide Web users know what HTTP is.
In Soviet Russia, its 96%?
I didn't. It's great for low bandwidth feeds, but try adding a few news sites. in the 2 weeks I used it I hardly did any work. I much prefer to trawl my favorite sites a few times a day.
Does it really matter if we miss a few stories?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
It's a solution in search of a problem. It's not very technologically advanced...wow...XML-ize a list of titles and links associated with those titles. Wow. It's just hype, and the hype is wearing off...and everybody knows it. Soon it will be supplanted by a more comprehensive system not based on and limited by 'blog' gayity.
Blar.
I use Atom on my site.
What in the hell does this have to do with the sophistication or, as you probably meant, "leetness", of the user? I'm thoroughly familiar and interested in all the latest technology (why would I be reading Slashdot otherwise?). I've known about RSS for a long time. I've tried out several RSS readers. You know what I found? This technology is worthless to me. Sure, you may like it, but I don't. It has nothing to do with sophistication.
Know how I browse the internet? I open up Firefox, and have it start up with just a handful of different tabs: e-mail, CNN.com for the straight news, Fark.com for the bizarre news, and my LiveJournal Friends page, which list every single blog I give a shit about (all my friends who write only for their own friends, not attention-hungry self-important idiots whose opinions are no more useful or knowledgable than a random message board poster). This collection of tabs is enough to start my day, and they're all easy to navigate and load fast (this is the year 2006, I have broadband). When I finish with these tabs, I go off to various different interest sites in other tabs (Slashdot, Digg, IMDb, etc), close out of them when necessary, create new ones, etc. All in all, I get all the information I both want and need in a speedy and efficient (for me) manner. There's absolutely no purpose for me to use RSS.
Frankly, the statistic cited doesn't shock me at all. I know a lot of people who are thoroughly tech and web-savvy, and none of them use RSS either. They have their own reasons, probably. But for me, the fact that my browser can open individual sources of information in tabs eliminates any need for me to load up some extra RSS reader. So don't try to pull this "more sophisticated internet users use RSS" bullshit.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
Was simply how many computers I would need it add. I'd install it on my laptop, but then be lost when I'm at work or on my desktop, then be overwhelmed when I get back on my laptop.
And I hadn't found a good online syndication place that gave me as much flexibility of a desktop reader. Most don't even have read/unread ability, which basically just shows you what's new.
Then I took feed on feeds, and highly customized it to my liking. Now it's a lifesaver.
But using RSS to check CNN.com or BBC is pointless, as you're wading through so much junk that you don't need/want. And I think that most people probably use it incorrectly and get discouraged by this. But using it to 100 check places that are essential to you but might only get updated once a week is a huge timesaver. And saves me the hassle of getting 100 e-mails/week about these notifications.
Up until recently (well, the introduction of the iPod is still in the realm of what used to be considered 'recent') the term 'Pod' has had nothing but negative connotations. Think about it:
In traditional geek lingo, a 'pod' is a term for a person who is devoid of intelligence or basic humanity (comes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers - a great yet campy cold-war era horror/thriller). Pods, Pod People, "he seems like some kind of pod", and so forth. When I hear the term 'podcast', it immediately evokes the idea that the info therein is directed at Pods, or created by Pods. Apparently, they are directed at iPods, but since I don't own one of those, I obviously have no use for a Podcast (logical?).
Consider that the iPod presents a method of isolating oneself from the other humans in one's vacinity. In doing so, it dehumanizes the user and all others around them. Not to put too fine a point on it - but humankind exists today because traditionally, as human beings, we were willing to interact with the others around us.
Despite the inherent confusion, I've come to feel that the terms iPod and Podcast are very well chosen, but from the perspective of dark irony.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
It's not just a coincidence that if you subtract the market share of Microsoft from the whole internet, in practical terms you're left with little more than 4%. With this in mind, it's not likely that people at large will find RSS until Microsoft make it part of the next generation browser. It won't even be called RSS in that either, since the name doesnt inherently lend itself to memorization, and it's not particularly descriptive. When IE7 rolls around, RSS will just be a button that lights up if a page supports it, but other than that, people won't be bombarded with terms like podcasting, which is just a crap way of saying someone has put MP3's up for you to download.
-Steve Gray
And I'm telling you, that was hardly the norm. I've been active on the web for a lot more than five years (back to Mosaic 1.0 here) and I've NEVER seen a website that depended on email to alert people to updates. It's been a feature on some, but it's never once been something I or anyone I know has ever used.
RSS is *NOT* a replacement for a feature that few people ever used.
Oh, wait...maybe it is! Considering how few people use RSS, that is...
So many people saying it's useless... Sure, I *could* check 200 odd webcomics, blogs, podcasts, forums, and news sites every day only to find that only one or two have updated -- but it's *much* easier to have them all merged with a single "unread items" list.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
180n is an example of something I call WebRSS using big M news media sources. Basically it's skipping the learning and going straight to the presentation. Removing and adding sources is still on the agenda, but you can see what I'm getting at.
I set up a feed to the RSS from Slashdot when it was first available. The problem was that so many new articles get posted here, it was immediately a chore to scan all the titles for discussions of interest. I gave up in less than 24 hours, and reverted to scanning the customised home page for new articles and using the message system to check for replies to threads I was interested in. And that was just with one source; try hooking up to the BBC News feed for ten minutes and see if you can keep up! :-)
On the various bulletin board systems I follow, Slashdot being one, I find a good messaging system is invaluable: they tell me what I really want to know immediately but can't see straight off the home page, which is when someone replies to a comment I've made (ideally, with further options to pick up things like replies-to-replies in subthreads I've participated in, or other replies to comments I've replied to as well). They don't add further clutter I don't want. I doubt any simple "dump every new title to an RSS feed" approach will ever rival the power of a moderately good messaging system.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... and you want to nail the coffin? :-)
70 different apps means 10 times more than the number of browsers, or the number of newsreaders.
(newsreaders as in "usenet newsreaders", since the term itself more and more is perceived as... "RSS aggregator" nowadays
Hervé
a page where I counted them more than one year ago (indeed there are more, now):
http://sainct.ouvaton.org/uniwakka/RSSforMac/
Herve S.
In more shocking news, only 2% of the users reported that they were aware that they were using IPv4.
Why should the users care ? The technology and labels should be transparent to the end user.
Really. I can easily think of several sites (primarily focused to developers) that used email to notify of new content. Saved going to their site and searching for the new stuff - just read the email when you had time to do so.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
RSS and sites like Google news, realistically make the concept of separate websites redundant. There's not really much point in slash code anymore, slashdot, fark, digg, etc etc might as well be just another blog and all blogs might as well just be one big RSS feed. All news sites might as well join in too and that goes for pretty much any site out there thats news based in any way. Pretty much everything else can go on Wikipedia and the rest can go on AmazonBay. we can make do with three websites for the entire world: one giant categorised RSS feed, one encyclopedia and one online auction and shop.
So why haven't we? (not that I want to).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
There could be 2 billion apps. Who cares? It's obvious that few people use them. RSS is NOT the next big thing, it's the next dead thing.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
yeah, right.
If you Slashdot it, Digg it or Blog it, eventually you find yourself rereading the same subject matter in multiple places.
Has the time come for an AI driven Metablog, the one blog to rule them all?
I am suggesting that the duplication of stories is reducing the filtering value of blogs and that tools need to be created to collect RSS feeds into a single customised feed for the user to scan. In the same way that sites like Digg rate stories the Feed Filter (or is that Filter Feeder?) can rate stories at the meta level by their accumulated scores over multiple sources. It should also be able to find the link to the original information and present this link to the user so that they may click through directly. Each RSS feed story could benefit from more meta data been associated with it too.
Sorting out the economics of this in a fair and reasonable manner may be tricky as a Metablog would bypass the individual blog layer and thus reduce their advertising income.
Are we anywhere near to having such functionality in feed readers? What are my smart filtering options now and what do you see happening in the future as blog redundancy accelerates out of control? What tools do we have now and which are still to be created to assist in the knowledge management aspects of blogs? What are your preferred ways of archiving and retrieving stories that were of value to you?
--
http://dan.3-e.net/
They like hearing the sound of their own voice.
Podcasting is also reviewed, with the conclusion that 2% of surveyed people use it.
In Canada, we here far too much drivel about this podcast and that podcast being pimped by the CBC.
Fact is, many reporters use their Podcasts as a tool to syndicate their content to other media properties.
The trouble with this is, it is just more of the same stuff; nothing new.
Now that I think about it, you've proven my point. If there were only one aggrigator and people used it, I'd say it were successful. That there's more than 70 and so few use any of them... well, thanks for proving my point I guess.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
Do we have stats on how many users don't know what RSS is, but use it nevertheless? How many know RSS not by name or technical function, but by the idea of I want to do X, and if I click on button Y, I can do it?
It's probably not true in this case, but a technology only reaches it's maximum exposure when most people use it without knowing it. When it just becomes something to be taken for granted.
I guess I don't use RSS feeds in the traditional way. Google has a 'customized google homepage' that you can turn on - I have mine on, and customized. It has several sections: search history (on google), GMail, RSS feeds of many different international news sites, and stupid stuff like quotes of the day and stuff like that turned on for fun. As I open Firefox about 504040404 times per day, and my homepage comes up for me every time (umm, of course), it's very convenient for me.
I found RSS readers tough to scan quickly, and adopted a different approach for my daily news ingestion ... I set up an RSS aggregator for the common sites I wanted to see, including Slashdot, and wrapped a new site around it so that others could use it as well.
http://www.mynewswatch.com/
Enjoy.
I use Thunderbird as an email client and RSS aggregator and have found that it allows me to quickly view many sites at once. Sure with RSS you may have duplicates, but I consider that to be one of its strengths. Finding dupes quickly seperates the original websites from the trash. Original content matters, RSS just makes it easier to find. I use to spend an hour each day going through emails and web-sites, with RSS I spend even more time reading the information that interests me, without a prolonged search.
PS Thunderbird is not perfect, but it packs a wallop with Email and RSS.
The reason this is so low is probably because the majority of Mom & Pop internet users does not know how to get an RSS feed to their computer. If AOL adds some mega big RSS reading mechanism, then the technology will be readily adopted. Your 'average' internet user does not know the technologies underlying how that webpage gets to their browser(thus the abundance of spyware and virii in the wild, but I won't go there more than this little jab). I know some may hate their service, but Yahoo in my opinion has done this right. I get every feed I want from News to shopping deals to my sports teams latest info all on one page along with my personal calendar, my spam email account, my weather, and my TV listings. This one stop shop has greatly reduced the amount of time I spend navigating across 20 some bookmarks to get information. I just wish RSS was a little more flexible to where I could be the one to determine how the 'query' was being done to get the articles. The fact that most RSS syndicators pre-feed their news actually requires me to go get more content than I want.
Yep. The other 'programmer' trend was also customised emails depending on tastes. I programmed a few different CMSes for some sites which allowed users to choose what they were into, and then got sent an email containing what they liked. They could choose to get this daily or weekly or monthly. That was good fun to code, but would never want to do it again.
I keep track of them in Thunderbird, and I've got a lot from pages that dont update constantly, but I would like to be notified when they do. The gaim updates page, Firefox, Google blog.. RSS didnt work as well for regular news such as Yahoo, but for those I can just check the homepage.
What I find so useful about rss feeds is that I don't have to go visit all the websites. I don't have to open up my bookmarks. I don't have to navigate to subpages for specific content.
With RSS, I simply load up my feed reader (Newsfire on OS X - its great) and it grabs everything without forcing me to do anything. Many of you are pointing out that with just lists of headlines in the news feed, you might as well go to the website to see the same thing. That is true, but for me it is easier to open up 1 information point and get ALL the headlines than go to a bunch of sites for the same thing. For me it is is just much more efficient. AND it provides a consistent interface - I just see the headlines. No dealing with crap designs on some sites.
Also, I happen to be looking for a new job now and 2 job site search engines (indeed.com and simplyhired.com) allow you to search all the other job sites and then save out a custom RSS feed based on your search criteria. This saves me a ton of time because I don't have to manually do a repetitive search. Hits just come straight to me. Its great.
The best thing about RSS is that once its set up, you no longer need to remember to check stuff. Now, this is great for non-tech people. Slashdot readers are probably more interested in control and immediacy than the average person. And setting feeds up with Safari is very easy. Any site with a feed is detected and shows an RSS logo in the address bar. Click it and (by default) it will bookmark the feed in safari or if you've changed your default reader, it will launch that app and bookmark. Simple.
-matt
I think 4% of web users don't know they use HTML every day.
Most Internet users don't know or care exactly what protcol they're using. (And there's no particular reason why they should, although a basic understanding of IE's security flaws would be useful.) I'd expect to see similar figures for DNS, UDP, and IEEE 802.3.
Web2.0 is overhyped, but not just because of users' ignorance. People can use GMail and Google Maps perfectly well without understanding what XMLHttpRequest is or how JavaScript differs from Java.
...RSS isn't really all that useful, except for monitoring people's web pages that are hardly ever updated. And if they are hardly ever updated, then why do you want to monitor them, anyway?
RSS/ATOM gives you a wide range of crap, ranging from "nothing but an HTML link to something", to "the entire article dropped in in an easy to read format, causing you to never, ever have to visit the site that it came from".. depending on what site you subscribe to.
I have slashdot and fark subscribed on one computer.. and I realised.. why even bother? Slashdot and Fark are updated 10-15 times per day, and their RSS feeds are completely and totally useless. About the only thing I actually -use- RSS for is to monitor two of my friends sites that are hardly ever updated.
This is why RSS/Atom isn't being used, because it doesn't HAVE much use.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
The other 96% use it but don't knew they are?
Breakfast served all day!
Well you had to delete the newsletter when you were done reading it or if you didn't want to read it.
With RSS you just let the old news expire - no need to actively delete old headlines or micromanage the information.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Look at the figures here: four percent of yahoo users know what RSS is. Without the browser that has 88% of the marketshare not even supporting RSS, this means that we can completely discount almost 90% of the market as not knowing what RSS is because they can't access it. The remaining twelve or so percent ALL KNOW what RSS is, and four percent or around ONE THIRD of that amount use it regularly. This is actually a widely used technology amongst people who can access it.
Wait until IE7 comes out and people upgrade; I'll bet about a third to a half of people use RSS regularly then.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
Well that should be close to the amount of people who knowingly use a browser.
Versus using "Internet when I d-click the Blue E picture".
Hey. I happen to agree that RSS is to hard.
My last company (Rojo) is an online news reader and I just think it's too complicated. Same with all the RSS aggregators. They're meant for a minority of the market (power users).
My new company, TailRank, is designed for people who don't care about RSS. They just want to be told what's hot in the blogosphere.
We'll have an API soon so that aggregators developers can integrate TailRank into their products. This should allow for the best of both worlds for many people.
Kevin
I don't understand hostility to RSS. To me it's one of the best things that ever happened to the Internet. Setting up RSS feeds is not difficult, and obtaining them isn't either. If most people don't use RSS feeds, is that really such a big deal?
And, actually, the old Netnews protocol does the same job. More efficiently, using less bandwidth.
That's great, but if you're arguing that nobody uses RSS because the demand is artificially being driven by content producers, what makes you think netnews is better for real-world use, given that most Internet users in 2006 don't know what netnews is either?
"Now, you can shove your crap right onto user's machines, when you want to." It's about making the Web into a broadcast medium.
Push technology *was* about making the Web a broadcast medium. RSS is not. PointCast and Backweb sucked eggs through a straw. I was tasked with evaluating push for an organization that had a lot of money to spend on cutting-edge Net technology. In the end the single biggest thing that killed push for us was that the apps were absolute resource hogs. It was virtually impossible to get anything else done while they were running. Something that should have been lightweight and nonintrusive became something you had to manage every few minutes.
RSS is a means by which I can quickly skim through a wide variety of information sources that I set up according to my own needs. I actually have more control over how I obtain information using an RSS reader like NetNewsWire than I do by moving from site to site in a browser. For one thing, there is far less extraneous visual crap to manage. If I already know what a site is offering, I don't want to have to see the marketing language on the home page every time I simply want some new information. I can always bounce over to the site and explore further.
I wouldn't call RSS perfect, but it allows me to obtain news and opinions from sites I like about the topics I am interested in far more efficiently than I could if I bounced from website to website in a browser. It's nothing like broadcast, which is about shoving the whole damned thing in your face. RSS provides flexibility and puts power in the hands of the user.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Well that's one way to define "push", but from a technological standpoint; "push (E-Mail)" and "pull (RSS)" are two different beasts. With Intercast being perhaps the best illustration of "Push".
It's also good for things like Bugtraq and Firefox's Bugzilla.
Slashdot is 'speedfeed' enough for me.
Ask yourself, "Do I need any more of a diversion for my eyeballs to look at other than slashdot and work alone?"
...and many of the posts here, I still don't know WTF RSS is and how and why to use it.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I think McDonald's already trademarked that.
I had the problem of different summary lengths for a while, but found out that Safari 2 has a slider that controls how long each article will be. I have it set to show the title and the first line of the text. This lets me see a little of the article and then I can click on it to read more if it looks interesting. I never did like the separate RSS readers - they never seemed to integrate well, but I have loved having Safari handle both web pages and RSS well.
I actually find that using RSS in Safari makes the web much more maneagable and consistent. Instead of bookmarking pages, I bookmark the RSS feeds. This way, it tells me how many new articles there are and when I click on it, I get a consistent format with the RSS data from each website. For slashdot, I have groups of RSS feeds, so I only have to click once to see all the new articles from Slashdot. It saves a lot of time since I don't keep refreshing the page to see what has changed - it simply tells me how many and marks them as new so I can look at them.
And, you can even search all the RSS feeds in Safari. There are several pages I track that look for good deals. I'm currently looking for a good, big, fast external hard drive, so I load the RSS feeds from several online deal finders and search through them. This takes seconds compared to minutes of opening and looking through each of those sites.
You should try Safari on the Mac and see if that is what you are looking for. I've been using it for several months and barely ever go to the front page of any websites anymore. Safari tells me how many articles I have not looked at from groups of RSS feeds and when I click on it, it opens it. It's quite easy to use and does what I expect. Very simple and it saves me time.
I'd be willing to bet that if google was to do the same poll, the percetage would be a lot higher. Of the time that I spend at my PC, probably 75% is spent at netvibes.com skimming through rss feeds.
From an msdn blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2006/01/01 /508494.aspx
"Slashdot has got itself into some sort of frenzy about the number of RSS users, referring to an October study sponsored by Yahoo (PDF).
They claim (and Robert Scoble repeats the claim) that according to the study only 4% of internet users are using RSS.
I have news. It's not true.
I know, because I blogged about the research months ago. The study actually showed that 4% knew they were using RSS, while 27% were using RSS without realising it. I quote (from the study):
"27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology."
"
Actually, I believe the best use of RSS is for infrequently-updated blogs. My own blog I update once a week or so; I estimate -- from anecdotal reports alone! -- that about a quarter or more of my traffic comes from people using RSS-like systems. And this is for a lit-related blog, hardly a domain of super-tech-guru knowledge -- people use things like my.yahoo, I don't believe many use a local machine application.
It seems silly to use RSS for sites like slashdot or people who write a post or more a day. You can't keep up with that, so you end up having to "manage" your RSS inbox rather heavily. On the other hand, it's a great way to keep track of the less updated blogs; instead of having to load up a whole bunch of sites over and over waiting for new content, you can just be alerted when something new comes up.
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As I see it, RSS is useful for delivery of content that is in an article form, much like submissions on /.. But in order for RSS to be more widespread, it needs to be seen as much more than a news/article delivery system.
Microsoft has attempted to do this with Simple Sharing Extensions, which allows for the multi-direction syndication of content. Read the FAQ.
Where I work, I wrote a reporting system that was to automatically deliver hourly stats on employee performance on an hourly basis to managers on the last working day of the month. Since the aggregation of data that the report utilized was submitted by a number of people, I just wrote up a quick web interface for them to submit their data with. On the hour, I had a cronjob recreate the RSS feed with the new data included and voila, instant report.
Since it was delivered via RSS, it was a trivial matter of using XSL to export results to other formats such as text/html/etc.
Can't spell slaughter without laughter!
I, too, am one of the people having given up using RSS, and just reading stuff from the websites. Finding a lot of other /.ers have done the same has enabled me to enter the New Year feeling uber-cool. And slightly smug.
I had no idea what you were talking about, I had to look it up... Just thought I'd help others.
I wasn't a fan of RSS until Safari 2.0 came along. I have all of the sites I regularly visit that provide RSS feeds bookmarked in my bookmark bar. I then have Safari highlight all new articles for the day. Each day when I get home from work I just drop down to "view all RSS articles" and have a complete list of everything I can skin through real quick. Maybe 10% of the stories I click on; for the rest reading the summaries is good enough, just to get a feel for what's going on.
The problem isn't that RSS sucks, it's that nobody has really put it into an interface that makes it logical to use. Apple has come close to this, but even the way I read RSS feeds requires a bit of tinkering that most people aren't going to explore. Firefox's RSS capability are useless to me.
If there are two sites covering a similar subject, the one with RSS will win my readership. I seriously can't imagine browsing without it.
Web sites should use RSS. It's for syndication of information. The whole point is to take article listings from your Harry Potter fan site, and show them on my Harry Potter fan site to enhance the user's access to relevant information. A user reading an RSS feed just seems kinda silly to me.
Now, that said, if someone were to create a feed reader that didn't take the approach of "make the XML look pretty", one might have a revolutionary product on their hands.
I just use watchster instead. It's like an RSS reader on a web page. http://www.watchster.com/
"I'm not a cool person in real life, but I play one on the Internet". Galley
It's mostly just a marketing/sociology trick. By giving the community a common enemy and a sense of shared persecution, you solidify the feelings in an individual to want to belong to that group.
The only blogs I've ever felt deserved any credit where the ones that pop up after an event. The blogs after the tsunami, the ukraine elections, or Katrina, really gave the internet something that the MSM couldn't. Someone that is actually there on the ground, has been, and will continue to be after the cameras have moved on to something else.
People complain about Firefox "live bookmarks" and rightly so. It's crap.
Opera, on the other hand, has an almost perfect implementation of RSS. It is integrated with mail and news in the Opera M2, so RSS items are treated just like e-mail. You have unread and read items, you can use filters (including smart filters), you can do with RSS almost everything you do with e-mail.
You can set up smart filters that would bring together Usenet news, items from your mailing lists, RSS items from a number of sites. It's trivially easy.
You can use RSS from a lot of different sources to monitor unique and rare news. You can subscribe to Yahoo/Google searches, news searches, delicious and technorati/feedster feeds, etc. If you have unique information needs, it's hard to beat RSS.
You can also use a bunch of innovative services such as BuildMyFeed that allow you to get RSS from sites that don't support it. How cool is that?
Or, if you like to, you can also crap like tagclouds and other stuff to really push the envelope with infoconsumption.
But personally I am just happy that I can easily get what I want where I want and when I want. Much better than visiting dozens of websites each day.
P.S. RSS is also a great tool for NOT keeping up with the news. Since you know that you have all those news available in your mail reader, you don't have to check them right now. For example, I no longer need to check Slashdot or something else compulsively. I can just open it whenever I have some time to kill, look through 50+ items, open the ones I am interested in and ignore the rest. No browsing needed for that.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I think an interesting point was missed. Although 4% knowingly use RSS, we also found that 27% are using RSS without even knowing it.
I talk more about that in my blog post here: http://www.scottgatz.com/blog/2005/10/07/research- rss-crossing-into-the-mainstream/.