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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.
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.
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.
/. RSS feed, but most people read it from the front page. Why? because they can't be bothered with RSS and a regular web page works just as well.
/. readers prefer to reload the front page every 30 seconds, instead of waiting for the RSS feed to get updated, despite that the RSS version should theorically bring them new stories faster.
Exactly. For example, there's a
But I think the real flaw in RSS is the very concept it implements, the "push technology". People don't like information to be pushed at them. They want to retrieve (pull) it themselves. That's the same behaviour that explains why people don't like ads shoved in their mailboxes, and prefer to ask the salesmen about this or that product: the pitch is the same, but in one case, the information is asked by the customer first. That's also why
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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?
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.
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.
It's amazing how much is plagiarized from AP, Reuters, etc...
It also amazes me how so many self-important bloggers can talk about "replacing the MSM" with a straight face. This goes especially for political bloggers on the left and right. A casual perusal of Technorati or memeorandum on any given day is enough to see how much blog content is editorializing on stories published in the MSM. What the hell do they think they'd have to talk about without the MSM?
That's not to say I haven't found blogs worth keeping tabs on, nor to suggest that I don't think there's anything valuable about the blogosphere. But we are a long way off from so-called "citizen journalists" being anywhere close to the league of professional journalism.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
When I first started using RSS, I subscribed to yahoo, cnn (about 4 of their feeds), and abcnews news feeds. I was thinking, "I'll get multiple perspectives on major stories, and make comparisons". Ahh, the starry-eyed idealism of ignorance...
Then I learned the truth. The spin happens at journalist-time -- the talking heads (or the writers behind the talking heads, whatever) get their news from the same Associated Press feed, and spin it their own way. In internet-land, there's no talking head -- just the AP story (and inherently the bias of the original AP journalist).
If you're looking at AP news stories online, everyone is just reposting the same exact story verbatim anyway. And generally non-AP topics don't get covered by many different perspectives.