Another big step for RSS
Mainstream adoption of RSS took a step forward yesterday when Google launched its Reader product. This is the new version of Google’s RSS reader and includes features like feed discovery and sharing (also spotted on Steve Rubel’s blog).
RSS is a key technology in pushing forward mainstream adoption of social media tools. It’s the glue that puts together a lot of the content sharing networks that make social media tick.
But the real issue is most users don’t know and don’t care what RSS is. So as long as we have RSS readers or RSS aggregators we have a problem. It’s the same as 3G – no-one cares what it is, but they probably do care that they can get video on their mobile phones. Stephen Davies had a post about this on PR Blogger a little while back.
As marketers our role is to take the technology and what it’s called out of the equation. Customers buy or use things because of the benefits they get. So it’s great that Google Reader is being positioned as “your inbox for the web”. Indeed the Google blog post announcing its arrival doesn’t even have RSS anywhere in the post – great stuff. Marshall at Techcrunch congratulates Google for making a video that demystifies RSS for the average user.
Yahoo! Mail’s new beta version also includes an integrated RSS reader. When you consider the number of users that Yahoo and Google have combined, it’s easy to see a big hike in the use of RSS when these two tools are marketed, and that can only be a good thing for social media.
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All blogspot.com domains have RSS feeds available at /atom.xml although anyone promoting a site’s RSS feed should probably explicitly mention this. Or mention the burned feed from Feedburner, which Google hasn’t done.
I wonder when Google will get into that game? Will it become part of Analytics at some point? Home grown technology of through acquisition?
Nice points, Simon. I’m looking forward to IE7 being delivered to the masses. Considering Microsoft still has the lion’s share in the browser market that’s when we’ll see an uptake it in RSS.
P.S Love your blog design.
Dear Simon : we have developed a fine RSS creation, management tool called http://www.flaremaker.com.
Flaremaker competes with :
Feedcraft
Feedspring
FeedForAll
RSS Editor for Firefox
RSS Builder
We need some advice and expertise finding a partner and geeting this launched in UK and USA. Please could you help.
Bill Smith
Andrew Mobbs
http://www.myzan.com
Hi Bill,
Would be great to talk more – I’ll drop you an email and we can take it from there.
The service looks really interesting
sw
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I'm Head of Marketing at Medway Council in south east England, as well as a communications consultant.
I've had my own website here since 2001 and since early 2006 I've been writing a blog about communications, marketing and public relations with a focus on the public sector.
I'm married with two young children and live in Whitstable, Kent. Outside work I enjoy running, cycling, caravanning and generally being outdoors.
The content and opinions expressed on this website are not endorsed by nor reflect the views of any company or organisation I work with.
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