The comments in Fred Wilson’s post about RSS say it all:
The RSS user experience is so terrible that it should be relegated to invisible plumbing like any other web standard.
I get so much more joy from reading my Twitter friends or looking at my Tumblr stream than from using a feed reader.
This is because:
- My Twitter friends surface the awesome and filter the noise. Google Reader just dumps all 999 new BoingBoing posts in my Reader “inbox”. Twitter even makes sites I dislike, like TechCrunch, useful because I only see the posts that are worth a damn.
- RSS Readers strip links of their “social capital”, “link economics”, or whatever you want to call it. Meanwhile Twitter amplifies the social capital of passing links around. My friends’ tweets add a bit of context, analysis, and most important, fun conversation.
- RSS’ usability FAIL: with Twitter or Tumblr I can follow or unfollow with one click, and that one click is always in the same place. Subscribing to RSS with Google Reader (and other readers) requires many clicks and redirects, and that’s after I figure out how to set up Google Reader as a “default feed reader” in my browser. Then I have to categorize the feed, etc.
- Pruning feeds is crucial, but RSS readers make it hard to do so. In any case, nobody likes spending time “managing” their RSS feeds.
- RSS is “one to many” and “broadcasty”. It doesn’t encourage participation, feedback, and sharing like Twitter and Tumblr. Following a person on Twitter feels like following a person, not some newsbot.
- When I click the RSS button in my browser URL bar, I usually have to decide between RSS, RSS 2.0, Atom, Comments RSS, and who knows what else. Don’t make me think!
- Even the name “RSS” is user hostile. “Follow” is so much better.
- Most RSS readers look like email clients, and really, who wants to spend time in Outlook?
The shortcomings of RSS are so bad that these days I tell new bloggers to use Tumblr instead of WordPress or TypePad. The ease of Tumblr’s “follow” button outweighs all the fancy widgets and plugins that mainstream blog software offers. (The UI bloat and difficulty of WordPress and TypePad are a problem too, but more on that later.)
Notes:
- I’m aware of products that try to filter and massage RSS to make it useful, but those products just treat the symptoms.
- This comment (and subsequent replies) on Fred’s blog nails it.