Nice Plumbing
Greg Reinacker, CEO of Newsgator and the closest thing there is to an RSS celebrity, made an interesting statement at the Blogging Enterprise conference. According to Steve Rubel, Reinacker thinks RSS is destined to become as ubiquitous and invisible as SMTP. When asked to define RSS, he replied: “RSS is Plumbing.”
This sentiment was echoed by others on the panel, and reflects the observations made by Brice Dunwoodie, who cited these statistics from a recent Yahoo whitepaper:
- Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
- 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
- 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to podcasts.
- Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).
So here’s what you need to do: Tear off that obscure RSS icon from your website. Only your geeky, non-mainstream friends know what to do with it anyway. Replace it with something honest:
Now, where’s my pipe wrench?
December 19th, 2005 at 06:37
Hey Mark,
found your site via your first XML.com article (congrats by the way).
I don’t see a difference (for users) if they look at an icon that says “RSS” or “Nice Plumbing”, as both tell the user nothing about the object linked to.
Though I agree with the general sentiment of your posting, as it is hard enough to explain the concept of HTML to average users, so let’s not burden ourselfs with the need to explain what RSS/Atom/”Feeding” is all about.
Further you missed mentioning, to implement with the icon a script (or place “feed:” infront of the link), so that users aren’t confronted with an unreadable page (if sent straight to the feed, which is not stlyed as yours is
), only with this do you achieve the desired results (users having a simple and easy way to subscribe to feeds).
I acutally believe, you will see the same happening with (X)HTML, with the emergence of more and more WYSIWYG editors available for online content publishing (integrated with web applications such as blogs, e.g. TinyMCE interated into blog apps). Actually it is already slowly tacking place. It started, I believe, with the introduction of BBCode mark-up. While at first imlemented as security (to prevent malicious HTML code), it has emerged as the way for “regular” (as in non-geek) users to change the look of their contributions.
In other words, the technology spanning the web, and driving the Internet, will in near future, more and more, fall back into obscurity, hidden from most users, as we simplify everything in life, once it reaches a certain complexity level. How else could we push for broader addoption?
JasonMR
PS: A comment preview would be nice…