Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don't Mix

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline "Bloglines On Life Support". And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon - very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky - in fact, it's one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I'm referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS - the "it's useful, it's kind of interesting, but I don't really get it and it's hard to set up" argument. It's a good argument - and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it's not great, and there's probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn't real time. Probably because what we think of as "real-time" didn't exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn't that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it's the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn't meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn't designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it's not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It's simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it's unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I'm not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it's built and we want to use it for getting information - not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can't do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane - a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That's what we're trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won't have to know a thing about how it works, they'll just know that it does work.

On that note, we'd also like to use this post to announce that we've been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall'09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you're going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can't wait to show the world what we've been building.