Piers Jones

How to send an RSS feed to your email account

From the RSS Blog a new and very simple service which allows you to send a website's RSS news feed to your email account called http://www.feedmyinbox.com

Great idea

RSS adoption rates still low according to Forrester report

There was some debate overnight in content of my googlereader inbox about the implications of a recent Forrester report saying that adoption of RSS stands at around 11% of internet users. Apparently the full report calls on marketers to make more efforts to explain the benefits of this technology to consumers if usage is to grow (I haven't read the full report, it's $279 and although I was interested I am going to make do with what I can get for free).

Steve Rubel feels that usage may have peaked there since "According to the research, of the 89% of those who don't use feeds only 17% say they're interested in using them" . Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins of Mashable counters that usage is in fact much higher than 11% since so many sites and features rely on RSS to provide content and users are already using these tools without realising it.

Whatever the true figure may be if you ask the average person in the street about RSS people rarely have a clue what you are talking about and why should they? I'm of the opinion that most of the 89% have no real interest in a piece of technology for the sake of it, they'll become interested if someone explains something interesting that they can do with it, easily.

The name, RSS explains the format if you are geeky enough to know what it stands for but it doesn't explain the benefits to anyone of actually using it. Feeds, feed readers, news feeds are all a much better explanation, we should choose a better name and then stick with it. News feeds are probably the best that I have seen so far.

Despite some tutorials that explain the principles of RSS just like the eco-kettle in the office where I work, if you need an instruction manual to understand it, its just too complicated. Even if you like the idea of an eco-kettle, when you want a cup of tea you just want to press a single button and for it to work. Yes I have learnt to use the kettle over time but it was a barrier to adoption.

We haven't quite got there yet with the usability of news feeds (or of eco kettles for that matter). Just because the technology has been invented it doesn't mean that we can stop there. RSS still has a long way to go in the way that it is explained to the non-technical user, concentrating on the benefits rather than the features and by supplying tools that are ridiculously easy to use. And of course finding a better name.

If that were done successfully I think the adoption rates of news feeds would be much higher than 11%.

Do something useful with facebook - the feedheads application

Some of you that currently use facebook may be tiring of invitations to become a mutant zombie or hug a wombat. I have found one application though that gives me a useful insight into the feed subscriptions of other facebook users which is called Feedheads. I think deserves more than the 224 daily active users that it has at present.

If you are a googlereader user that shares items of interest for other people like me, you can send these items to the feed heads application. Your shared items will then be displayed on your facebook profile.

Once you've done this the app will give you details of the top shared items of other users for up to the past 7 days, as well as a tag cloud of categories. You can also distill this down to any of your friends that have the app installed to see what they are sharing.

I've found feedheads to be a useful app for finding stories that I've missed or new feeds to subscribe to. Not that I really needed any more,  I see I'm not the only feed addict around.

Recommendations

This morning I've been following the build up and early start to le web 3 conference in Paris via Adam's blog and Twitter. Also took a quick look at Google reader's recommendations feature which uses your attention data and subscription list to recommend new feeds for you to take a look at. It's not bad but I'd love to be able to see how / why it is making the recommendations and allow me to tune it. I still prefer a personal recommendation though...

Update: you can watch a live steam of Le Web 3 event today (12th December) here

My long tail of attention

It just occurred to me that of the 165 items that I shared in Google Reader this month, the top ten only contributed 86  (52%) of those items. So I have a 'long tail' of attention, a further 79 items from 55 feeds that make up the rest.

This would counter the argument that I've read from many bloggers that in order to reduce your RSS reading time you should cut your feeds back to only the ones that you read the most.

If these stats hold true then you would be missing out around 50% of the interesting stuff. I don't know the names of all of the feeds that I shared since Google trends will only give me the top 40.

My attention top of the pops

Here is my RSS feed shared items top ten for the past month using the trends feature in Google Reader. Of the 633 feeds that I subscribe to I read 733 items and shared 165 items. So just over 22% of what I'm reading I shared with anyone picking up on the feed. 

Here is this months' chart:

At number 10 - the ever-excellent one man and his blog
at 9 - Scobleizer
at 8 - Mr Jeff Jarvis and his Buzz Machine
in at number 7 - Blognation and  their 'global river of news'
at 6 its Techmeme
at 5 - Fred Wilson and the VCs
at 4 - Techcrunch
at 3 - Read/Write Web
at 2 - it's Mashable

and this months number one - its Scoble again and his shared items feed

Looks like that Mr Scoble is still taking up too much of my RSS reading time. Who's getting your attention?

Ask Steve at Google for a new OPML feature in Google Reader

After reading this post from Andy Beard about the man behind the new Google Reader blogroll feature I'm linking out to Steve Lacey and saying thanks and what about easy to use OPML Steve? It would be a most welcome feature . Fingers crossed...

Social feeds with FeedEachOther

I picked up from readwriteweb about the launch of a new social RSS feed reader called Feed Each Other today so decided to try out the service for myself.

Its a very clever social RSS reader. I can subscribe to feeds and also see other users who are subscribed to the same feeds as me. It's good way to find other like-minded people and to browse for new feeds and inspiration.

The service is well thought through and has a clear user interface. I tried importing my OMPL file from googlereader and this worked without a problem. One word of warning if you try this, feedeachother will automatically set all your feeds to 'public' which could probably do with some work from a usability and privacy angle. You can go into edit your feeds easily later.

This wont replace googlereader for me just yet. But along with share your opml and the facebook google reader app it does provide some useful additional features that I cant find in the main googlereader product. Certainly RSS feeds and social networking seem to be a good fit going forward and it will be interesting to see how this space develops.

One last thought. If I keep subscribing to new types of reader then I could do with one central place where my OPML file is stored which all my RSS tools use alongside a central place to keep all my friends (xfn?). Otherwise it is going to be a pain making sure all these different versions are kept up to date. I hope someone works out the solution soon!

Google reader adds a search box

Back from my summer break this week and the best thing happened while I was away.

Google reader added a search box !!

This is the best feature enhancement that could have happened to my RSS reader of choice. For a while I hadn't event noticed it was there.

Thanks Google Reader.

Phew - Google Reader back

Looks like the recent but short-lived issues with Google Reader have been resolved.

I've backed up my OPML file just in case.

Google Reader is a tool I would find it hard to live without.