twopointouch

Went to a networking event last night: Beers and Innovations in Soho. The pretext for the event was to discuss the future of RSS, with presentations from Richard Edwards of MyZebra, Peter Nixey of Webkitchen and Ivan Pope from Snipperoo.

Thanks to the ‘beers’ aspect, my notes get a little sketchy after the first speaker. Richard said that the way to approach the problem of evangelising RSS is to think about the benefits for the user, not the technology. Talk about ‘never missing a feature or an offer’, not ‘feeds’.We need to lose the little orange button and the name RSS because they mean nothing to anyone but geeks. They serve to keep the technology niche.

Peter talked about his DeepTag project as a way to simplify getting the news from the people we care about and doing real social networking in a way that sites like del.icio.us don’t allow. It appears to be a combination of various different Web 2.0 services wrapped with RSS and concentrated around friends and family.

Ivan said that the ways in which people want to use the web are incredibly diverse. The media model of the future is about assembling the stuff you want. He likened his RSS reader to a magazine that rebuilt itself every few minutes. But it could do more to be user-friendly: people shouldn’t have to deal with XML or OPML to make their personalised magazines. He doesn’t think that innovators have anything to fear from MySpace – the AOL of Web 2.0 which will start to die as soon as it starts to lock out.

The ensuing discussion fell largely into three camps: (a) I don’t care about RSS; I just want my stuff when I want it (Thayer Driver, Chinwag, among others); (b) RSS brings accountability to marketeers and editors because their success is directly measurable through the number of Feedburner subscribers you acquire and keep (Sam Sethi, Techcrunch UK); (c) No it isn’t. Feedburner stats fluctuate wildly, and you can’t tell if anyone reads the stuff you’re pushing out, no matter what your subscription figures say (Ian Forrester, BBC Backstage). Then everyone got drunk and we all ended up hugging.

What do I think? I use RSS every day for reading blogs and I love it, but it doesn’t provide a complete newsreading solution. Mainstream newspapers and most magazines in the UK don’t currently offer full text feeds, just headlines and a taster. It’s not easy to deliver display advertising in the format, which is how they make their money. And any site with a paywall or registration (WSJ, ft.com, for example) aren’t going to offer a full text feed any time soon. Evangelists think these problems will just go away: that market forces will ensure that only those publications that allow full feeds will survive. This may happen in the long term, but that ‘long term’ may take a long time to come.

I completely agree that ordinary people don’t know about RSS, don’t care and that they shouldn’t have to. If it’s going anywhere, it needs to be utterly de-geekified.