Wednesday, October 17, 2007

RSS: Underappreciated but Essential

RSS is like TiVo in many ways. Both are favorites among tech savvy consumers who find them indispensable, and both have fallen far short of their potential so far. But just as a groundswell of knockoff DVRs is growing the market for the automatic recording of TV, RSS continues to grow in popularity as part of the mashup and Web 2.0 information delivery shifts.

The backers of RSS and TiVo haven't done a great job of marketing. TiVo hasn't made clear its advantages -- never be forced to channel surf or miss a favorite program again -- while RSS continues to be something users must know about and actively seek on a page.

Robert Scoble estimates about 10 million people are using RSS feeds today, but he doesn't count all of the folks who are unknowingly participating through aggregation pages.

Between the customized pages of Google, Yahoo, AOL, Flickr, MySpace and Yahoo, and the hundreds of widgets, RSS adoption likely several times the 10 million Scoble guesses.. If you look at Google's customization page, you'll see that 3.5 million people have add CNN headlines to their Google page alone, and those headlines are delivered via RSS. There's a big difference between people who use RSS readers versus people who read things delivered via RSS.

Before long we should see about half of all web users adopting RSS in some capacity, and Yahoo is determined to increase that number. Publishers and marketers need to do more however. RSS feeds are still way to hard to find, including the orange buttons, and the browsers don't are likewise to subtle in encouraging adding RSS feeds.

Marketers could also do more to promote themselves via RSS. Amazon.com etc. should create RSS feeds of new relevant products, and they should take a page from the portals (literally) and allow customization on their home pages.

The internet itself, Facebook, and the iPod all once had only a few million users too. If you want a savvy readership today and bigger audience tomorrow, then spread the RSS love.

Posted By John Gartner at 09:56 AM
Permanent Link: RSS: Underappreciated but Essential | Comments (1)

(1) Comments on RSS: Underappreciated but Essential

I agree with you that RSS feeds are important. But I don't think there is enough information out there for people to realize they are out there. Thanks for the great post!

Comments by JC Carvill : Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 05:19 PM

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