Feed discovery
One of the larger obstacles to adoption has been the lack of a consistent, user friendly mechanism for identifying and subscribing to feeds on the web.
Actually, I think it’s because RSS is a power-user feature and of no interest to the average user. For example, my wife has tried using it several times in many ways, but she has no interest in:
- Getting a list of articles that could have just been the page itself
- Mixing two or more sites together
- Being alerted for updates to pages she’s going to visit anyway
- Only getting excerpts of articles (for those feeds that don’t contain full posting)
Basically, she knows where she wants to go, doesn’t need to be continually updated, and doesn’t like extra steps between her and the site itself. I’ve found that this is not all that uncommon. RSS users are the types who want new information continually on their periphery and I don’t think that is a mass-market use. We’ve already seen that most users only visit 6 sites regularly. So why should they use RSS?
(After a bit of interviewing, she admitted that the one application of RSS that she might be interested in was Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. But as far as NetNewsWire, Safari RSS or Flock RSS, it was a no-go.)
