Another big step for RSS
Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 6:35 am
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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.
Tags: social+media, Software
Categories: Social media, Software
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Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 7:48 am
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?
Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 8:41 am
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.
Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 8:42 am
P.S Love your blog design.
Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 2:16 am
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
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
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