Friday Feb 3 2006 - 4:13pm
RSS is 90% Awful
by Zach
under rss, standards, usability, web
with 16 comments
This title probably comes a surprise to you given that huge link to our RSS feed on the right of the page (if you’re reading via RSS you’ve just made my point #3 for me), but I hate RSS. Seriously, I’ve always thought it was a crappy idea. The first time someone explained the concept to me I asked “What’s the point in even designing a website then?” No one’s ever really answered this for me, but Brian and Sean are convinced RSS is the greatest thing invented on the internet in the last dozen years, and I can see why the idea of it is attractive. 
Having access to all the websites you’re interested in at the tips of your fingers along with notification when they update seems pretty useful. So on Sean and Brian’s advice I finally ventured into the big bad world of RSS. And I was sorely disappointed. Here’s why.
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The Mental Model is wrong. I’ve tried some of the most popular RSS readers (or “aggregators” in RSS slang) I could find, from Google Reader, to BlogLines and from SharpReader to ThunderBird. None of these came anywhere near an enjoyable user experience. After realizing that it was different things I hated about each of these, I came to the conclusion that no one could think of a good way to present all this data in a meaningful way. Some used folder based viewing, some used “river of news” and some used e-mail like features. None of them worked very well.
If big shots like Google and Mozilla are throwing resources at this and can’t even come up with an effective interface metaphor I think the basic idea might be wrong. The worst of the bunch was SharpReader, which basically just gave me a list of my bookmarks in the left pane and a list of the recent articles on the top of the right. If I clicked on one, I could view the content of the article minus formatting or context. It’s like a glorified version of Bookmarks only with a lot of downsides and nothing really redeeming. Wow! The future is now!
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Full Feeds vs. Excerpts. Some sites have full text of the articles they publish available. Some have excerpts of the articles to give you a hint of what it’s about. Some have both for no particular reason. What’s the advantage to having excerpts of your updates instead of the whole thing? It forces people to come to your site and view your pretty web design and advertisements. Why not just e-mail all your users when you update? Because that’s not very Web2.0
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It eliminates context. I’ve been a part of a number of websites in my day, and read a hell of a lot more, and I think all these new RSS fanatics radically undervalue context. RSS is by definition content. But by putting it in an XML document you remove it from its natural environment. I don’t mean this in a facetious way, I mean that expectations the content creator may have had in mind with regard to style or location on a website are no longer valid. The content and the context (i.e. style, location, navigation, interactivity) is part of a cohesive whole and breaking the connection weakens that whole. Sure, the information gets there, but you’d get the content of Romeo and Juliet if you heard someone reading it in a monotone.
To be accurate, I don’t have anything against the actual RSS standard, though I’m told there’s some sort of nerd-catfight going on over different versions. I just disagree with the way it’s implemented in almost every case.
You’ll notice that I only declare 90% of RSS to be awful. The other 10% is Safari RSS. I’m sure no one is surprised that Apple has come up with a great way of integrating RSS with their browser. When a website you’ve subscribed to (and by “subscribed to” I mean “clicked the blue RSS button in the URL bar”), a number in parentheses appears next to the bookmark title indicating how many new items there are. Folders that contain multiple subscriptions just sum their contents. When you want to see what’s new on the site you just select the bookmark and you get the nicely laid out Safari RSS page. This isn’t quite ideal (I’d rather you at least have the option to be taken to the site itself), but it’s a hell of a lot better than everything else I’ve seen.
Apple seems to have embraced the idea that RSS is a glorified bookmarking system to great effect. At a glance the user can tell if there’s anything new at their favorite site and visit it without having to leave the comfortable interaction of their browser.
I’d rather Safari integrate the stylesheet of the host site or just load the archive page, but I’m not sure how technically feasible either of these would be. With a little bit of work on both the browser and web designer end it seems completely feasible however. Something as simple making sure to populate the homepage tag and making that an option for default view. Really, the only good use of RSS I can see is as a way to alert readers when a site has updated, and RSS is an over-complicated and over-engineered solution to this problem.
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The one topic you don’t directly touch on is the ability to syndicate material from one website to a host of others, the original point of RSS if I’m not mistaken. I think at one point RSS stood for “Really Simple Syndication” or something, although it seems to go through names so often I can never keep track. By now it probably stands for “Digital Versatile Disc”.
But RSS is great for jamming my del.icio.us bookmarks into the sidebar of my blog, or giving me Yahoo! News updates on my Mac’s screensaver. And I would love to have a handheld device that simply shows whichever RSS feeds I tell it to, sorta like a pager, and nothing more. My cell phone has almost come this far with Google Personalized Home Mobile, but it still has a way to go.
I have to agree with you on your major points though. I guess I would have given it a slightly better score.
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Speaking of RSS, the RSS for this site doesn’t work for me. I used the little button on the side and added it to my Goole Homepage but it just says:
“http://feeds.feedburner.com/alwaysBETA
Information is temporarily unavailable.”
I like the way Google Homepage does RSS because it doesn’t actually have any of the articles there; it only has links to them. So if I want to read something I do go to the web page and see it in context.
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Personally I think it’s all subjective. You make some great points. So, I applaud you for at least laying out a well-thought out ‘argument’ (and I use that term very loosely) for your case.
There are RSS readers out there that would address your point regarding context. I’m fairly certain that you can use Thunderbird to actually load up the permalink for a feed item in the ‘preview pane’ section. Which, unless I am misunderstanding, would greatly diminish the issue of context, since you would be reading the article just as the author originally intended.
Full Feeds vs. Excerpts? Personally, an ‘excerpt’ only feed … I usually drop it pretty quick unless the author is fantastic at writing excerpts and I can trust them to really let me know if I am going to want to read the full article based on the excerpt or not. I think the major driving force behind doing it is because many authors and advertisers haven’t found a decent method to monetize their feeds, so as you said, they force the user to their website so they still can get the potential ad-revenue. As google and yahoo step up their relevency advertising for feeds, I think we’ll see more publishers offering full content feeds (with the addition of advertisements in those feeds as well). This sort of … kills the purpose of RSS/Atom/XML if you ask me, but, I know it’s pretty much inevitable.
Point 1 (the model) is where my original comment really comes into play. I think that’s a very subjective point. You’re not wrong for having it, but for as much as you seem to think it’s wrong … I seem to think it’s right. Personally, I’m using feedlounge these days for my feed reading, and I love it. I follow hardly any websites that don’t have feeds now. We’re all trying to find ways to deal with ‘information overload’ these days. For me, feed readers are a great way to do that. I can easily see what’s updated, and as long as I properly categorize my feeds, I know what I have time to read and when. For instance, there are some blogs that … are perfectly acceptable for me to read from work. I do lots of web design, so blogs discussing that are furthering my knowledge in the field. However, the latest rant from my near-extremist political friend on his personal blog … maybe not so good for work, so I leave it until I get home, heh. It works for me … doesn’t mean it has to work for you though.
As for the Safari stuff … honestly, you got a little close to being an apple fanboy (I say that in jest, I promise). Firefox for some time now, and from the looks of it the new IE, support this as well. With Firefox you can also install the Sage extension and you get a little more robust features you might see come into play in some pure RSS readers.
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(aβ Member)
Matt,
Zach sort of is a apple fanboy - a fault we try and overlook. Seriously, never talk to him about BBEdit.
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Hah! Well, since he doesn’t know me or anything, I didn’t want him to take my sarcasm as a flame since that’s definitely not what I was aiming for.
6
good post.
i agree…
i first utilized RSS in 1999 using a service from moreover.com.
that service was simply grabbing news headlines based on categories i selected that fit the site(s) that i was publishing. easy, fresh and automated content! loved it.
as time passed…. i tinkered with taking RSS to the personal realm and subscribed to some interesting feeds and used some crappy software apps to manage them.
quickly i realized that i loved RSS for its syndication and re-syndication power…. but i did not enjoy it as a personal content subscription technology.
fast forward a bit and i started using RSS strictly to send and receive ‘Alerts’. This made sense to me… i enjoyed going to web sites (that didnt suck) and being a web developer/designer, i too felt guilty and unsatisified if i didnt go to the web sites for the content.
Alerts told me that new content was here or there etc… and i would go check it out.
the app i used for alerts was much lighter and simpler since its only purpose was to alert me, not to get me all the content and glorify the experience of pulling content out and into the app.
fast forward a little more and enter podcasting and vodcasting booms, which i am very much a part of. RSS 2.0 using item enclosures to virtually attach media files suddenly was a big deal and convenient way of making rich media channels. In truth, it’s XML at play of course but RSS 2.0 flavor was there and made sense to adopt it for the open media revolution.
yes, this means that it is useful for a new breed of ‘media aggregators’, which could fall right back into the argument posed here…. complicated apps to glorify bookmarks of audio and video etc…
when going to a web page with the audio and video works too.
i actually share that sentiment to some degree here as well, which will lead me to my last point. but before that, i will say that media aggregators provide benefits to users who truly want the features that they provide… mostly download management of audio and video files from subscribed channels. As larger videos start to utilize BitTorrent and RSS and people have their puters synched with TV devices… then it starts to get really innovative and useful…. not to mention making it easier to sycn media onto portable media players like video iPods and PSPs… cell phones etc.
However! let us keep in mind the basic users… the basic audience… the basic content consumer. How should they jump onto the RSS bandwagon ? I think…. EMAIL!
I’m a geek… basically an evangelist for a culture that RSS is very much a core technoogy of. I use all sorts of tools because its like my job to… I need to understand all aspects of all technologies and before i can form personal preferences, i need to have tried everything available.
So, considering that…. I first and foremost recommend RSS subscription handling that forwards the entire item/post to your email address inbox. Just like a regular old newsletter subscription. Yep! Screw web 2.0-correct techniques… or maybe this is web 2.5 “back to basics”.
If gmail is web2.0, well, there ya go. because my RSS subscriptions go right to my gmail account where i use labels and filters for each channel. The email subject is… you guessed it…. the title of the content post/article. The from name? yep…. right again… its the name of the web site or blog. The messages are delivered in html format or text…. so i can get all images included in the post right in my inbox… and if their is an RSS enclosure (media attachment) there is a link to that file as well, which i can click to play.
I dont have to shift my focus to another app or another site… I am in gmail doing email… why not stay there to manage and consume all the content i am subscribed to? makes sense to me…. works for me.
So, RSS is a beautiful thing. Need to see it from multiple angles to really appreciate it. One of those angles happens to be how to benefit from it without adopting the surrounding technologies that try to make you feel you need them… when you dont. The other key point is… re-syndicating content onto other web pages- Huge help!
Cheers,
Sull
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Well, I myself have been using the internet since, around, 1991 and I’d supposedly be a perfect candidate for RSS, as I was already used to seeing content without much context back in those days (unless you count ASCII art). The interfaces currently being used for RSS displaying (except for Safari, probably) are not that much different from Usenet and Mail readers I already used back in the days I knew REXX.
Still, RSS doesn’t manage to grab my interest. I’ve tried it since the first proposals (as I did everything Winer did) and thought the idea was cool because it would let me browse my news sites very much like I used to do in NewsWatcher.
For some reason this never caught my interest. I think this is because I’ve learned to see the Web and websites differently than the other “information providing” agents in the Internet. I have no issue with having no style in mail, irc or usenet (to pick three that provide content as well) but to me a website is part of a person’s personality (mine, using one of the most common WP themes out there, is probably a bad, if accurate, pointer to my own) and I enjoy seeing what people have done to them. I enjoy reading the New York Times in their mock-newspaper design and I enjoy getting epilepsy attacks from Wired’s design.
Newspapers are probably a good analogy too as they have always been dancing between having a space-maximizing style vs. showing information attractively and concisely. I’m sure I could point to several websites where the author’s writing would be different in a context-deprived environment (like an e-mail or usenet) that it is in their own webpage and a lot of this comes from the design of it, one they feel comfortable in.
I myself have read what I write on my website(*) through RSS and I don’t like it one bit (or at least, less than I normally do) but, most importantly, I recognize how much I rely on some of the specifics of the place I wrote it in (be it layout, references, internal routines, etc.).
Content, purists say, should, by rights, be able to live stripped of style. This may be true of specific kinds of content (for example, news feeds from international agencies, or stock information, or sports data) but to me this applies, precisely, to impersonal content. Blogs are one of the most personal forms of expression on the internet(sadly AOLers chatting over IM is another) and in them form and function do not follow each other but are the same thing and, in the same way, content is as part of the whole as the style that surrounds it.
I just discovered alwaysBeta and the thing that made me stay more than a couple of seconds was the style (and the wonderful lightbox implementation). The writing clinched it but the style was what grabbed my interest and I don’t think I’d put it in an RSS reader. To me that would be like… well, reading a quote out of context, really.
I’d really like to be able to subscribe by mail, though, to receive updates..:)
(*)I’ve had a few, all of them awful and made up of recycled stuff but all of them mine and, in the same way your Honda Civic is the same as everyone else’s out there, it’s still yours and you feel comfortable in it.
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(aβ Member)
Eduo,
Thanks for the nice comments - We’ve actually thought about the whole RSS vs email thing before, and we’re not sure what to do. On one hand we agree that the more options to “subscribe” the better, but we don’t want to clutter up the page with too many options (which is why Feedburner rules).
However, there are services that let you take an RSS feed and automatically email you when they are updated. I’ve tried RssFwd before and it should do the trick. Let me know what you think.
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RssFwd is exactly what I was referring to
I run this service for the videoblog community over on vlogdir.com.
It ROCKS!
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All other details aside, I can’t imagine how I could keep up with the 72 websites (and growing) that I’m currently ’subscribed’ to without RSS. In fact I arrived at this very page courtesy of my subscription in Bloglines.
11
(aβ Member)
I can imagine a day sometime in the future when websites no longer have frontends at all. ALL content is delivered through a reader system, so all there is is a script that generates a feed and a content backend. As soon as you can comment from your RSS reader (coComment is the first step in this direction), they you will literally NEVER have to visit the actual site, and so site frontends will gradually die.
As a web designer, I really don’t like this vision of the future. What will I design then? My own RSS Reader? Who will use it? The backend? Who will see it? To a certain extend, RSS is the death of individual style of presentation on the internet.
On the other hand, as JJ says, it would be much harder to keep up with my current consumption of material if I didn’t have my trusty feedreader. Maybe keeping commenting capabilities out of readers is the only way to stop this data-only future?
I know what we need! More beautiful designs! Quick everyone, become a web designer!
12
(aβ Member)
Style is meaningless!
When content is king, you will be first against the wall. Sorry.
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JJ: I personally would hate that day in the same way I’d hate if there ever was a day when books looked all the same, were made all of the same size and the same kind of paper and they all used the same typeface at the same point size.
When every single magazine and newspaper is made to the same template (a drab one, preferrably, as content should be king, is said). When every music concert and theatre play is made in the same monotone voice by the same kind of actor (probably an electronic one, as content should be king and delivery is nonimportant).
While at that I can think that every person that says content should be king could be forced to extend this to mean we all should be used the same pants and shirt (men and women alike, too), as style is meaningless anyway.
It would probably be a good idea to all learn to talk uniformly as, as I said, delivery is a form of style and should be discarded too. (BTW, I know some of the comments were not completely serious, but I still thought I’d have to say something)
I’m neither a style nor content defendant but I’m all for choice. RSS allows that choice. RSS is here to stay (whatever the actual format) and I’m glad of it. People can add RSS to their pages and use it if they want, whatever the style of the author. Me? I have no problem opening 38 tabs every morning with a single click. I have them ordered by importance to me and as there are always interesting links in each of them I click these links into new background tabs. For me my future web navigation is always to the right of the current tab. To the left are things I’ve decided deserve a second look. I really like this method as it’s very similar to the way I read magazines or newspapers. It also helps me get in the mood of each website accordingly (something that is being missed in the discussion. I don’t read and react in the same way to something written in the New York Times to the way I react to something written in Slashdot or a personal friend’s homepage. Style conveys the mood and tendencies of the author and this is a HUGE part of content).
I too have an opinion and to me using RSS is like reading the news or receiving stock information from a telex machine like those used by agencies of old, where all news or stock information came from a single ticker tape. The ones that had the glass bubble on top. You know them.
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Interesting points you raise and it is something that affects me personally, as most of my RSS subscriptions are in fact to design-related websites. As a designer / developer myself, the last thing I’d want to see is the death of individual websites, or the obsoletion of web *design*.
With regards to my own personal RSS use, the fact that I’ve visited these websites at least once to subscribe means I’m often subconsciously reading the feed within the context of that site. When I read Shaun Inman post about Mint for example, I am picturing www.shauninman.com and www.haveamint.com. I do read the text within that context, but also within the context of how I perceive Shaun based on my previous readings.
Despite having the same presentation in my feed reader, I still perceive Shaun Inman’s posts very differently to how I perceive the posts of Molly Holzschlag or Jeffrey Zeldman. I don’t feel a need to be immersed in their websites every day to know their style as people, because their writing and commentary conveys that to me. I would agree though that having experienced their websites does contribute to my perceptions also.
That’s just how it worked out for me anyway, it is of course different for everybody as you say.
I’m only really a newcomer to RSS but I’m now reading daily content from 73 websites that I otherwise may have never revisited. For me, RSS is currently an invaluable tool for keeping track of news, information and general gossip, as well as allowing me to devour a lot of information very quickly. Convenience+
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(Trackback)
alwaysBETA » Fine, You Win. RSS Sucks.
[…] Back when Zach wrote RSS is 90% Awful, I told him he was crazy and that I’d write a post titled “Zach is 90% Awful” and destroy him with my debating prowess. Sadly, I have been fooled by overconfidence and blind faith in RSS as “the wave of the future”. What prompted my final collapse in defeat? This is what Brendan’s post on scanning software usability looks like in Bloglines (and presumably in any RSS reader that doesn’t pull styles for display). Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this would happen - I’ve been using Bloglines for quite some time now and I’m well aware that it doesn’t get styles, but for some reason, it’s never been a problem before. Which got me to thinking - are people “dumbing down” their style to make it accessible for RSS readers? […]
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I agree. In most situations the context is very important… As artists sometimes say: the medium is the message
I used a reader once and deleted it–I decided that I would rather go direct to the source…
The reason I have an RSS feed in the first place: search engines. I want robots to get what they need quickly, without any HTML surprises.