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%.

Happy RSS awareness day

May 1st is RSS awareness day so spread the word!

If you are reading this blog you probably already know what RSS is and use it as a tool in your daily life.

As we found out last year, in the average UK town very few people know what RSS is when you ask them the question.

Probably the best way to raise awareness about RSS would be to change it's name to something a bit more meaningful to the non techie - like feeds, or web feeds. Any ideas?

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.

Improved Feed Digest features

It looks like there are some handy new features in a recent release of feed digest which give you easier formatting and style to produce widgets from any RSS feed.. Here's a trial using a feed of latest news from around the web using Zibb.com and items on del.icio.us tagged with 'RSS' blended into one feed.

Create a feed for a website that doesnt have one with Feed Yes

I stumbled across a service called FeedYes today which I was really impressed by. You can give it any URL and it will create a feed for that page with some simple editing tools. Very useful indeed if you want to grab a feed for a site that does not have one yet and there are lots.

I've included a test set of feeds below on the subject of commercial ovens (don't ask it's for a work project) and then combined all the feeds together with feeddigest.

Testing, testing

Feed blending and widgets with Feed Digest

A good tool for RSS remixers and DJs.

Feed Digest allows you to blend and mix feeds from multiple sources with a very easy user interface. Most impressive at first glance seems to be the blending rules. For example being able to eliminate duplicate URLs within multiple feeds. The resulting blend can then be accessed as a variety of different format code snippets to include on your blog or even as OPML.

Well worth a look. As a trial of the new service here is the blended result of the feed from this blog, my twitter status updates and my google reader shared items.

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.

How to send your facebook status directly to Twitter using RSS feeds

I came across this rather nice site today called Twitterfeed.com. You can set up any RSS feed to post directly to twitter . All you need is an OpenID to create an account with and the RSS feed from your Facebook status updates (or any other feed for that matter).

There are step by step instructions on this site of how to set up your facebook status to post to Twitter via Twitterfeed.com  and this includes how to find the RSS in Facebook which is really hidden away.
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The post from Facebook to Twitter only runs every 30 minutes right now but I think I can live with that.