I'm pleased to see renewed interest in RSS (web feeds generally). But my concern is that, for first time users, the onboarding process is too complex. There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.
A plug for my own answer to this:
I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.
Hey, looks like you had a very similar idea to me!
https://www.youneedfeeds.com/
Though you've gone for the 'simple one-pager' approach where I tried to sell people on it via a full site.
I was going to do a visual revamp sometime soon, hopefully include more readers etc but time has been an issue.
I chose 'web feeds' since it covered both RSS/ATOM and avoided the need to define their acronym meaning.
My view stats were very low last time I checked, but I haven't done much in the way of promotion either. (I did look into keyword advertising but that was prohibitively expensive.)
I'll probably try for another round of organic promotion once I do the site overhaul.
>There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear.
You are 100% correct with this. But not only that is the problem. There are too many sites that don't offer obvious RSS feeds. Like YouTube. I don't have a google account, but I still want to follow some channels. What would be the best way? Right RSS, but YouTube doesn't offer that really obviously. So here is how you follow a youtube channel with RSS:
1) Klick on a YouTube Video from a channel you want to follow
2) From there click on the youtube channel (Doesn't work if you directly click on the channel from the serach)
My favourite rss reader NewsBlur (no affil, just very happy user) allows subscribing to YouTube channels just by entering its URL - no need to digging for RSS feed :)
I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.
My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user.
In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user.
Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p
PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)
> RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user.
I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed.
I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc
Browsers used to have RSS built in — I forget when Safari removed its reader. But you’re right about that button... something that glows when a feed is present.
The current UX, at least on my iPhone, is that I go to a site that looks like it _probably_ has a feed, and then I use the share sheet to push that URL to NetNewsWire. Then RSS auto-discovery takes over.
But there are a growing number of sites that look like they _should_ have feeds (posts on the front page arranged chronologically) but don’t. And the user experience is simply terrible when you attempt to subscribe with auto-discovery and it silently fails.
The problem is getting that in-browser glowing button on mobile. Browsers are too locked down.
I think history has shown us that there's no use in hoping from change on the browser or OS side. Unless new competitors come in, it seems the majority of people are stuck with Chrome / Firefox / Safari.
On top of that, a big problem with they are walled gardens as well. Some support exporting easy enough, but we've seen firsthand what happens when big readers (google reader, etc) go down.
That being said, I think our best hope is to create an open-source, web-based reader.
raw feeds are one of the last bastions of freedom on the internet, and we can't afford to keep building them on bad foundations.
If I had to imagine it from the ground up, I'm picturing a desktop-esque environment running straight from the browser. almost like google's environment, to be honest. There could be full-blown search, email, news, etc; but they are all intertwined by the ability to 'subscribe' to any of these results, and have them piped right into your homepage.
Sort of like smichel said above, a true front page of the internet, but your front page.
Yes, but just having that button isn't enough. Consider: I'm someone who understands the benefits of RSS, and despite seeing that button for years, I rarely clicked it, and mostly wasn't sure what to do after I did click it. Because that button showed you the feed, but the browser didn't really have a centralized reader built-in (that I remember, anyway, and if I couldn't find it then you bet the average user can't, either). There's a big difference between just showing the feed and having an "Add stories from {{newspaper}} to my home page" button.
unfortunately, I think browsers will continue to be locked down for the foreseeable future. given the locked-down nature of the app store as well, I think our best bet is building an open source, web-based RSS feed.
What’s unusually about the feed ecosystem is that it was once popular, and now it’s present but nobody really understands it. Like, Wordpress sites are 30% of the web and they have RSS by default... but are the site owners really aware? It would be a hard push to get any of them to change.
And, for most technologies, the existing users are the best word of mouth evangelists. But here, the existing users have their own favourite apps, and if you change anything too much then they won’t evangelise.
So (imo) growing the ecosystem means finding ways that respect that situation.
uh, I think "abstracting away concepts" is the base for enduring cluelessness and thus dependencance.
Still the UX has to be excellent. As you wouldn't abstract the fact of a sharp edge off a knife. Still the grip has to be very different from the sharp edge. It's 2 things that have to balance to make sense. The worse limits the result.
No user ever is bothered with Atom spec technicalities, is it?
Would you mind letting people know about the ATOM format as well? The sentence
1. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS)
is wrong. It is not "a.k.a. RSS". It must be "What is Really Simple Syndication (a.k.a. RSS)?"
ATOM, in many, but not all cases, is superior, since it allows for easy extensibility. Should people be made aware of Feed technology, I would love them not learn to associate it with RSS, but understand, that there is also ATOM, which even has derivates, namely OPL and ODPS. There also exists a PubSub type API for ATOM.
Great work. This should be extended to podcasts and images would be nice as well. At the end, maybe there is no way anymore to get non-technical people interested into these technologies if they can get their news from a preinstalled "news-app" and "podcasts" from spotify.
I myself just wrote a little script to turn youtube channels, playlists and searches into video feeds that I can subscribe to in my podcast player. I love rss.
Illustrations would definitely help, you’re right. It’s in our issues list, and I have some ideas about simple ways to address that. Issues list is on Github incidentally https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds
Podcast: I’m not close enough to this world to know. Has podcasting answered the discovery question by centralising directories, or are podcasts still discovered “in the wild”?
A plug for my own answer to this:
I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.