Mike Sansone did a BlogTalkRadio show this morning (listen here) that talks about how he gets business people up to speed on RSS, feed readers, and general tips for using RSS efficiently.

One point that Mike made is that non-technical people look at feeds like a microwave… they don’t want to know about the neutrons and the power configuration. They want to know which button to push to make popcorn. The real power of the RSS/Atom story isn’t in how it works, but in what it does for you.

This goes back to Greg Reinacker’s comment in 2005 that “RSS is plumbing.” The specification merits of RSS or Atom will only win over the geekerati. Everybody else just wants to know where the popcorn button is.

So how do we make RSS as easy as microwave popcorn? Personally, I don’t see this happening until every email client - desktop and online - has free, robust support for RSS feeds. The biggest barrier I see in my workplace is resistance to “yet another application to monitor.” If feed items show up with their email, suddenly it isn’t so bad. Unfortunately, few email client feed readers are both good AND free. If GMail ever integrated Google Reader, that would be a killer, killer app.

Now where’s that butter?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 11:45 and is filed under syndication, google, rss, atom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.