I have a cadre of feeds that I always read, but I also have many more that I only want to read when I’m very interested in a specific subject. Since these phases are loosely cyclical, I am always going back and having to refind feeds I removed the last time my interests changed.

I’d like my feed reader to be able to display feeds based on my current interests, without losing track of feeds I’ll want to return to later.

An example implementation might be give each feed a star rating and a tag, then have an interface where you can set your interest level for each tag.

The feed reader would then use this information to determine which feeds to display. This is just an example solution, the best interface should be determined the same way as all interfaces should be, through use, experimentation and refinement.

The first step in finding a solution is recognizing a problem.

Before RSS I followed 5 websites. CNN, 43 Folders, Wired, and a couple of others that rotated with my interests. Then I started using an RSS feed reader and now I follow over 80 websites via their RSS feeds. That’s an increase of 16X or 1600%.

How often do we hear about increases of 1600%? That our product is 16X more efficient than our competitors? That profits are up 1600%? Numbers like that don’t come around day-to-day. Numbers like that only come around as the sign of something larger, of a fundamental paradigm shift that’s about to take place.

Right now not very many people use RSS. Only 1 out of 10 blog readers use it, a tiny percentage among a group that can benefit easily from it¹. Despite all the benefits of RSS, it has been very difficult technology to get people to start using. The RSS tagline - get new content without visiting a website’s homepage - just isn’t very exciting to most people.

But RSS can provide advantages that most people find exciting. If I were asked to list the benefits I receive from RSS, I would say I have deeper knowledge in my field, I am more current and better informed about my hobbies, I have closer connections with friends and family who have RSS feeds, and I read more interesting and inspiring content in general than ever before. That’s a list of benefits that anyone would find exciting.

RSS is being adopted slowly because people don’t associate these benefits with RSS. Which isn’t surprising - RSS isn’t marketed that way - but just as important is the fact that these advantages don’t happen overnight. They reveal themselves slowly as you manage and hone your stable of RSS feeds. RSS veterans are enjoying them now, but these time-released benefits aren’t doing anything to help RSS gain widespread adoption.

I would like to see RSS gain widespread adoption, and the best way I can think of to help that happen is to tell my story about how I came to gain these benefits from RSS. About how I went from initially dismissing RSS to considering it the most important new technology development in recent web history. Maybe this information can help market RSS or maybe it will help convince an RSS dabbler or two to take a closer look. With or without my help, the RSS revolution is coming. I’d just like it to see it happen sooner.

So here’s my story about how I became an RSS convert.

The Story

The First Look

My first look at RSS was pure OS X software fetishism. Most surveys rank the Mac-only feed reader NetNewsWire the most popular desktop RSS reader on any platform, this is remarkable considering the size of the Mac market-share. And NetNewsWire is remarkable software. The hotbed of remarkable Mac software during 2003 and 2004 was the now defunct O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators contest. That page was the best pool of distinctly innovative Mac software that I had ever come across. Just as important as the innovative ideas that drove the software was the high emphasis all of the winners put on the user experience. These were interfaces that went beyond being functional or useful to being so well-designed that they are fun to use. NetNewsWire was the inaugaral contest winner; so it held an exceptional position in an already exceptional group. I was definitely going to try it.

The first thing I did after I launched NetNewsWire was take a look at the built-in “Sites Drawer.” The Sites Drawer is a list of feeds, sorted by topic, where you can subscribe to any of the feeds with just a couple of quick clicks. I gave the list a thorough once over, subscribing to every feed that looked interesting. Then I headed over the to the feed-finding search engines syndic8.com and feedster.com, where I added more feeds after a couple quick searches for topics I was interested in.

Soon I had very long, very full list. But I didn’t enjoy reading any of it. And, after the initial buzz of trying something new wore off, I stopped opening NetNewsWire. Soon after that a routine maintenance cleaning wiped NetNewsWire from my hard drive.

A Second Look

I continued to hear about how great RSS was, but now I had my response. I’d just think to myself: “I know what that’s about and I don’t want any.” I had tried RSS and decided it wasn’t for me. Who needed all that content?

But eventually the lure of new technology caught up with me again. This time it happened when I noticed that several of the sites I visited daily had RSS feeds. I decided to give RSS another try, this time with a new approach. Instead of going out and finding feeds about topics I was interested in, I would practice restraint and only subscribe to feeds for websites that I was already visiting. I made a rule, that I would only subscribe to a feed if I I wanted to know about every single new article that was posted on the website.

My new rule kept my RSS feed list lean and I started to use RSS. I got excited when the little red number told me that there was a new story waiting for me because now I knew it would be something I was interested in. I started to enjoy using RSS. Using RSS was more fun then using a web browser. It was like using a remote control after changing channels manually for years. Nobody ever chooses to go back to changing channels by hand, using a remote is just more pleasant. Using RSS is a more pleasant way of browsing the web.

This revelation would get me to stick with using RSS, my RSS conversion was underway.

The Potential of RSS Explodes

RSS made web browsing more enjoyable and more efficient. It was a classic geek hack: It takes a little bit of work to setup and configure but quickly repays you by getting a task done more effectively. Geeks lives are filled with these kinds of hacks. They’re the kind of thing we jab each other in the ribs about and comment about how clever they make us. But soon I would stop considering RSS a typical geek hack and start seeing it as a significant new development in information management technology, one of the most significant since the introduction of the web itself.

The deeper benefits of RSS reveal themselves slowly as you hone your stable of RSS feeds. Once I was committed to using RSS, I started seeing a slow but steady shift in the types of sources I followed. Before RSS I followed publications - Wired, CNN, Newsweek - articles grouped together by a 3rd party with a certain tone and range of topics associated with their name. The shift I saw caused by RSS was that, instead of following publications, I started to follow authors. A subtle change but one that carries significant benefits:

• You can trust an author in way that you can never trust a publication. Human beings are much more open about their values then publications.

• The author who writes an article that is highly interesting to you is far more likely to write another article that is highly interesting to you than another such article is of happening to end up in the same publication again.

• You are far more likely to read and retain an article if it is written by an author in a style that you know you respond to.

• When you follow a large number of authors who consistently write articles that are highly interesting to you, it forms a kind of radar for finding both new important information and old overlooked information. The longer you have one of these radars, the deeper and more up-to-date your knowledge of these subjects becomes.

The combined benefits of all these advantages are an increased awareness and deeper understanding of the topics you care about.

But RSS doesn’t just help you follow the topics that are important to you, it also helps you follow the people who are important to you. With the proliferation of blogs, Flickr galleries, and other social networking websites, more and more people are generating RSS feeds, most without even knowing it. Subscribing to the feeds generated by your friends and family is a great way to keep closer tabs on the lives of people you care about.

Finally, RSS is a method to get just the parts that interest you from the thousands of small bits of news that happen every day. Customized RSS feeds allow you to see only what’s important to you from local events, weather reports, items for sale, apartments for rent, job openings, software updates, book releases, movie openings, and new music releases. Before RSS, the best way to stay up-to-date with this kind of information was to read the paper and a great way to describe RSS is that it’s like having a special newspaper, tailored to your interests, delivered every day. The jobs are all in your industry, the for sale items are all things you want to buy, and the apartments are all in your price range.

How did RSS go from its origins in web content syndication to providing all these advantages? RSS has two characteristics that push it beyond its web syndication roots to being a whole new medium for content distribution:

• RSS keeps memory and update frequency from being primary factors in determining which content we follow. We can only comfortably remember to visit so many websites. Each website we want to follow requires us to learn how often to look for updates and to keep track of the last time that we visited. Websites that update infrequently or sporadically are more difficult to follow. The result is that we limit ourselves by both number and by how much difficulty checking for new updates we can handle. By removing these limitations, RSS allows us to follow a denser, higher quality set of content.

• With RSS we can choose to receive information, without giving up the choice to not receive information. A lot of the information available through RSS could also be received through email. RSS has many technical advantages over email², but the most profound reason to use RSS is that people don’t like to receive this kind of information through email. People are protective of their email. They hesitate before giving it out, especially to someone promising to frequently send them new information. This hesitation has nothing to do with whether or not they want the information and everything to do with not cluttering their email. Email is used to communicate personal messages with friends, family, and co-workers. These personal messages are both more important and more likely to require taking action quickly³. Cluttering email with less important, non-actionable information is poor information management. RSS allows you to receive this information without cluttering your email and gives you absolute control over starting and stopping receipt of the information. The result is a denser stream of quality information honed by consequence-free experimentation.

Conclusion

To summarize RSS, I could tell you about events I’ve attended that I wouldn’t have known about, about how I am closer to the cutting-edge of my industry than ever before, that my increased awareness has changed my professional direction and given me significant new business ideas, that I am more aware of the lives of my friends and family with RSS feeds. I could tell you all these stories but it would do little to help you understand what RSS can do for you. The only way you can find that out is to try RSS for yourself.

1. Almost all blogging software automatically generates RSS feeds. ↑

2. One-click adding an event to your calendar, tagging an interesting story for deeper reading later or being able to use web URLs to reference the articles later are just a few of advantages of using RSS over email. ↑

3. Please complete this task as soon as possible, pick-up some milk on the way home, here is my feedback regarding your project, etc… ↑