There is an interesting discussion at Wisdump about RSS and if it will ever become mainstream, whatever they mean by that.
Email is completely different since it allows people to communicate with one another while RSS just acts as an asynchronous communication tool. Every major online communication breakthrough (IRC, IM, etc) succeeded because it handled communication in a many-to-many relationship. RSS on the other hand is simply a one-way 1-to-many relationship and this is what will prevent it from ever making it big and changing the lives of people.
For me personally, RSS is not a communication tool anyway. It’s an information tool. Something that allows me to go through huge amounts of data without spending much time or effort.
And with my mother (and few other non-technical people that I know) reading RSS feeds via Bloglines, I’d say that RSS is halfway mainstream already. Whatever I mean by that.
I think it’s already mainstream – it’s just that the ‘stream’ isn’t very ‘wide’ or ‘deep’ yet. I don’t know a lot of people that even KNOW what a news aggregator IS, let alone why they’re so useful. Every single person I’ve introduced to them goes NUTS with excitement.
RSS -is- hitting it big, but only in a small segment of the internet population. It will cross a threshold soon and then you’ll hear a lot more about it.
Hell, support for it is built into major browsers already, it’s just that folks don’t realize how to use it.
Great post! Love yer blog man, always something to get me thinking… which no small task with a potato-head like me. (grin)
Agreed. And this is especially true for non-technical people. Those technical guys type faster and have a whole range of tools to make their lives easier.
Useful tools that are easy to use, and that hide the underlying technology are growing in quantity and quality. Some of these tools introduce friendlier terminology for the non-technical people. Such as Google Reader, for example, and its “subscriptions” instead of “RSS feeds”.
Thanks! :)