The great RSS mystery

Several years ago, I was getting around evangelising ‘feeds’ at conferences, in articles and on my blog. I thought feeds would revolutionise the way we interacted with the web. Feeds would be the new search. I still love feeds and feedreaders. I subscribe to over 1100 in one reader and a lot less in a second reader. I scan through them at different times of the day.

A lot of my feeds are from OPML files from lists of marketing and business blogs that other people have created. The benefit is that it takes me out of the echo chamber that can be created when you just subscribe to your mates or people that you agree with. I never get far into the posts that are delivered by these feeds without finding really interesting and, often, thought-provoking stuff. Of course, I also subscribe to mates as well and to searches and to media feeds etc. But the OPML files create a powerful interaction with the web. I can’t get through all this stuff, of course, that’s where the ‘mark all read’ button comes in. Nevertheless, I’d hate to be without my feeds and my feed readers.

It seems that I’m part of a (disappointingly) still small section of online users that is not growing very much and may have in fact peaked, according to a Forrester report reviewed by Steve Rubel. Steve say:

Lord knows, as someone who spends three hours a day in Google Reader, I am a giant evangelist for RSS. But I am also a realist. Feeds are way way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve. So I think RSS has peaked.

Mashable points out that the usage of feeds, in the background, has become ubiquitous:

it’s pretty difficult to hit a website these days that doesn’t use RSS in some way, shape or fashion. If you look at the average page here on Mashable, there are about two or three sections which rely on RSS to pull in information relevant to the readers. If you turn your attention to the most popular sites on the web, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Google all have syndicated content strewn all through them.

Let alone sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo and and thousands of blogs and news sites out there that rely on aggregation of content via RSS.

The need for users to actually have an RSS reader has diminished. Certainly things like Google Reader and NewsGator are designed for those who want to maximize their ability to scan a great deal of news sources in a short amount of time. Most folks don’t live to blog haven’t a need for that sort of efficiency, and tend to head to either an aggregator service like FriendFeed or Facebook or the direct websites themselves.

Nevertheless, it is still a mystery to me why many more people don’t use feeds actively. Granted there is an art to managing feeds to get the most out of them but the payoff if you put in the effort is enormous and once you have got the hang of it they are virtually indispensable.