Category: software

I’ve got an issue with this article from today’s MediaPost on a few levels…

Hespos says that XML Syndication currently faces a standardization problem. “There are plenty of readers but no killer apps.” Hespos notes that XML Syndication is still very much in the early adopter stage. “All I see is a lot of bickering in the early adopter community,” he says. “[XML Syndication] lives in blogging communities. If Microsoft were to take it up that would be a good thing, because it would speed up the adoption process.”

Rick Bruner, president, Executive Summary Consulting, agrees. “It comes down to what Microsoft does with it. Longhorn is expected to come with an RSS reader. At that point, it could go mainstream–it could become a viable ad medium then,” Bruner says. [MediaDailyNews]

My issues here are that the writer claims (in the article, but not quoted here) that Atom will soon overtake RSS, which is interesting because based on the number of Atom feeds and the release level of the format it is still very early. Sure Google is the main backer, and apparently it’s easy to say they’re major so therefore it will win. This brings me to my next issue which is right in the quote above…

Both Hespos and Bruner claim that it is Microsoft who is holding adoption up based on their general lack of support. This is total bullshit!

The adoption rate, first is significant, both on the content generation side and also on the aggregation side. I’ll let you decide which number scale is more correct – Bruner in another article states according to research it is somewhere between 2.5 Million and 8.8 Million. It’s big. (There is no study on usage of these feeds… just that certain blog systems generate multiple formats.)

Microsoft does not have an aggregator and has not integrated RSS into the browser or the OS. but waiting for Microsoft and Longhorn will only delay what is already happening. People are finding ways to use RSS – though it needs to be made much easier to do so. Longhorn is not coming tomorrow or even this year… waiting on that will just have you listening to the hold music…

In thinking more about it, I think it’s going to take an AOL-like experience to make this take hold on a mass-scale – again assuming it should be used by all. Imagine the AOL UI with an RSS aggregator within. They could deliver their ads in a sane way, but enable a great number of people to read a huge amount of content within an efficient timetable. Maybe this hurts their ad model, as less time on is going to reduce the number of ad impressions, but perhaps they’ll just have to rethink the way things are served…

Dave Winer covers the software claims quite well (as you might expect) on his site.

No avoiding the heat I guess…. social networking continues to draw interest from the Majors…

Yahoo on Wednesday dropped hints of growing interest in social networking services for search, coming after announcements of efforts from rivals Google and Microsoft.

o’s vice president for search, said the company sees a future in which people can share their Web searches with friends.

“A lot of the Web is about sharing,” Cadogan said, speaking to an audience at Stanford Business School’s first annual technology conference.

He pointed to a fairly new feature from Yahoo that lets people in remote locations search simultaneously by using IM environments in Yahoo instant messenger. “This is just the beginning. A lot more will come from that,” said Cadogan, a former executive at Overture Services who joined Yahoo when it bought the commercial search pioneer. [News.com]

Tiny Mac-related hosting site is giving away gig of free email. No idea how. Stefanie Olsen reports… [John Battelle’s Searchblog]

Spymac is trying to promote new Web hosting and auction services by giving away copious amounts of e-mail storage. With roughly 47,000 members, the former Apple Macintosh gossip Web site is small potatoes, compared with Google and other free–mail providers. But Spymac’s move to offer more storage is among the first signs that the market is moving toward parity and indicates the relatively low cost of such a move. [News.com]

This is a great post (quoted below) and links through to some significant thinking on RSS and the general adoption of the technology…

It’s something I’ve thought about as well, though this is clearly beyond the scope of my abilities to solve (I’m a marketing guy, not a developer…). I know for a fact that most of my friends and my family who stop by hear have no aggregator installed on their computers and are not currently using bloglines, myFeedster or something similar hosted elsewhere. Kinja, which launched last week, seeks to be the aggregator for people who nothing about RSS or aggregators but will have the same challenge getting adoption to occur.

On my site if you click either of my feed links (left side scroll down), you’ll get a pretty page of xml in the Mozilla family of browsers and Safari unfortunately downloads the file to your desktop. This is not a good thing… No one can easily understand the value without using the tool, but can’t quite grasp how to use the tool or even how to add feeds.

This needs a simple solution pushed through a transparent technology… assuming of course that we all agree aggregation is something for the masses…

Is RSS only for geeks? Should users be required to understand what ‘XML’ or ‘RSS’ mean, in order to take advantage of subscription and aggregation? Are subscription and aggregation useful for a broad range of users, or only for “power” users?

To me, the answers are obvious. I believe that subscription and aggregation are features that appeal to the mainstream, and the number of users who use RSS without having any clue about the underlying technologies could easily dwarf the number of %u201Cpower%u201D users. There are certainly people who feel differently – people who think that aggregator usage is low because most users don’t want or need the functionality. But I’m pretty sure that uptake is low because of poor user experience at this point. [Better Living Through Software]

Day 2… still no reply from my email for help on import. Not too good for a service seeking to be an aggregator for people who don’t know what RSS is… the other 90%. No auto-reply to let me know my message was received …

I am sure they are swamped with requests for info (the help page directs to you the main contact page with the main contact info). Might want to adjust that for help requests so you can filter these for more specific issues.

I’ve only messed with Kinja minimally at this point, importing my own blog – a bit of vanity perhaps – but it looks interesting. I doubt I am the audience, or someone who would make much use of the service – at least for now. Have to see how things develop.

Yahoo has launched a system to show the Web Rank popularity of pages viewed by those using its toolbar. It’s similar to the Google Toolbar’s long-standing PageRank meter – and brings with it some of the same potential problems. [Search Engine Watch]