Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Christopher Coulter — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 04:04:30 -0000

Penny Doubling is Chain-Letter Accounting, it never sustains. Anyone toking on that pipe, knows not even basic economics, each additonal penny needs DOUBLE (or more) effort...the formula falls apart pretty darned fast.

http://www.businesspundit.c...

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Christopher Coulter — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:58:45 -0000

We want terminals? No we don't, corporates do, but we don't...we want fun surfing, email, IM, goofy things, ways to communicate, gaming, and social bond, find info and news, and just plain waste time, and even bad things, like porn. A terminal is a locked prison, and not everyone's needs are the same. The Corporate Mainframe wasn't it, the Network Computer wasn't it, too centralized, but on the flipside, the Desktop is a nightmare...

Iron-fist, no fun, or fun, but nightmareish chaos...pick your poison.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

kareem — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 03:06:07 -0000

Remember the old saw? Would you rather have $100,000 today or a penny doubled every day for a month?

I can hang out and watch the doubling effect.

----------------------------------------------------

wow just relised if u wait for a month you end up with 5 million!

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Jim Cahill — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:49:08 -0000

I think it will catch on when nobody has to think about it. I remember the early days of Windows where you had to add a TCP/IP, Netware, or DECnet program to get a PC communicating on a network. Things got a whole lot easier once Microsoft embedded TCP/IP into Windows.

Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 2007 do the same thing for RSS for the bulk of folks not already on other operating systems and web browsers (aka the majority of people.)

I've been running the beta the last few months on my PC. IE7 makes the RSS readable with an easy subscribe button at top, and IE7 and Outlook sync RSS feeds so you can read the feeds like emails in Outlook. Very easy, no addons, no thinking... Heck, you hardly realize you're doing RSS.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Phil Gomes — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:39:11 -0000

It's for this reason that I became a big fan of FeedBlitz. It pings your feed and serves it up as an opt-in email.

I personally prefer RSS as a delivery vehicle, but I realize it's not for everyone.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

robpas — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:05:27 -0000

Robert,

You're on the money here. As people understand the power of this information stream more business uses will occur. This is like the early days of news when folks were rowing out to meet the ships to get the latest information from travelers. Reuters anyone??

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Michael Martine — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:55:12 -0000

The thing about rss is you can explain it all you like but what really gets people to grok it is to just use it. If you can get somebody to use a good reader for a couple weeks, they will experience the value of it in the same way you do. Explaining it just doesn't explain it.

Probably the biggest thing to happen with rss will be Outlook 2K7. That will also be its biggest problem in the workplace. I can just see a bunch of CEOs and presidents scratching their heads over this. They still see computers as fancy typewriter replacements. They're going to see this as a new way for people to not do their work.

And by the way, isn't Flickr just wildly popular, these days? Surely it wasn't because the kewl kids and early adopters were using it? You can't tell me it was all popular and mainstream right from the beginning. How about Google? Google wasn't mainstream at first. How about email? How about listening to mp3s? The cycle of adoption from edge to mainstream may not turn at a constant rate, but whether it applies to RSS certainly is not arguable. It applies to everything.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

MaxK — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:51:35 -0000

I've only started using RSS recently... and for one simple reason: full text.

When I downloaded my first aggregator a few years back, almost all of the feeds were summaries -- and if I wanted to read the whole article, I had to go to the website. So, I thought, "Why not save my bookmarks and just go to the website first?" It seemed like all RSS did was give me one MORE step in information gathering. Plus, the aggregator at the time (I forget which one, but there weren't many) wouldn't display photos.

Just last week, I got SharpReader, and I've seen the light. Most of the "better" blogs publish full text, and SharpReader is insanely easy to use and intuitive. Unfortuntely, I wish the regular news sites would publish full articles... but I'll take what I can.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Cramer — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:34:29 -0000

"But we still believe that most people in an organization want terminals. Terminals you don’t have to worry about data management, you don’t have to worry about floppy disks. You just sit down and it does the work for you automatically." (Ken Olsen, I beleive)

Wow! Now that someone gave a quote, I can truly appreciate the genius of Ken Olsen. He is right, we do NOT need _desktops_. They are nightmare to maintain, in both organizations and at home. We want terminals. The only thing he did not know is that the industry will decide to go the desktop route first before accepting the terminal concept.

Of course, anyone can easily guess that our terminals today are web browsers. It is far from ideal. Web applications suffer from numerous limitations. But it is a step in the right direction. Also, Google makes a tremendious push to move all the data on the Internet from desktops and "terminalize" access.

Anyway, it seems to happen quite often with great visions: they turn out to be correct, but with a delay from a couple of years to a couple of decades.

Cramer

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

LayZ — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:50:17 -0000

BTW, where is CB Radio today? Weren't all the Kool Kidz using CB Radio at one time? Along with Betamax? Didn't the "influencers" get all excited about that technology at one time? Wonder why they weren't successful keeping it going. ;-)

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Pradeep — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:21:04 -0000

hi,
I do have an aggregator account but never use it to go through blogs I like (I like only about 20 blogs or so)....so don't really feel the need for an Aggregator. I put it all on the Blogroll and visit them out of my blog.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 06:21:30 -0000

The problem is that you don't know if RSS is on the 14th day or the 30th. The "all the cool kids" argument doesn't work - all the cool kids have been using Linux or Macs for years, and I don't see the market shares of those products growing fast.

RSS will grow, of course. Whether it will be a mass market product depends on the applications people build with it, not the technology itself. What you and others are forgetting is that RSS is an enabler, not a product.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Ivan Pope — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 04:59:31 -0000

I started a magazine called 'The World Wide Web Newsletter' in 1993 because I knew that this was important and I wanted to evangelise it. For the first few years, a lot of very clever people would dismiss my pitch with the line 'Isn't it just CB radio all over again'. Well, it probably took those clever people another couple of years to get it. But get it they did in the end.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Rick Stirling — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 03:35:27 -0000

I asked a guy I work with yesterday (cutting edge gaming company) if he had an interesting Feeds to share.

Not only did he not know what they were, but couldn't understand them.

Even when I popped up bloglines his response was along the lines of 'But why don't you just go to each page?'

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Michiel — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:21:00 -0000

"Where’s the business opportunity?"

Still always thinking about the monies ;)
Where's the business opportunity in HTML? Oh, wait, you mean browsers are free? And so are RSS readers.

(as a side note, all browsers suck at RSS. Get a dedicated RSS reader)

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

LayZ — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:54:30 -0000

@28. "Introduce people to RSS...."??? That is the WRONG strategy. That would be like me introducing my Mom to POP, IMAP, and SMTP so she could "get" email. Outside of the geeks and wanna-be Geeks in the blogosphere no one cares WHAT makes up the technology. Just show them why getting automagic updates to their favorite web sites might be a cool thing to have. On the other hand, go ahead, do the Jay Leno "man on the street" question about RSS and see how far you get.

Geezus! It's NOT about the technology.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Jason H — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:49:38 -0000

With the release and adoption of the Microsoft Office Suite and other Office Server products such as SharePoint, RSS will begin to take off like email did several years ago. Corporate users (who aren't tech people) will start to understand what the RSS icon is and what it does once they start using it in these and competing new products. With portals becoming a more common method of finding and creating data for internal corporate consumption, RSS will become much more important. I think it will become nearly as important as e-mail in the next 4 years. This will be especially true with the majority using Outlook and the new 2007 version incorporating an RSS reader out of the box.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

MattW — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:21:16 -0000

I'm surprised the number is that low. You know what I think? It means there's still a huge opportunity to introduce people to RSS and evangelize it. I was a bit of a late comer to RSS, and the more I use it, the more completely indispensible I find it.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Andrew Parker — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:09:05 -0000

I just turned my mother on to a feed reader two weeks ago, so I'm not surprised to hear that Maryam just started using them too. Though I agree with the continued doubling, I think there is going to be a hockey stick inflection point in the RSS adoption curve VERY soon.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Karim — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:34:35 -0000

I think RSS almost has to win. What's the alternative? WS-Eventing? WS-Notification? The world needs some kind of simple publish and subscribe mechanism... something where a user can say, "Let me know when this changes."

There are lots of other examples of large companies missing the boat, you don't have to pick on DEC. :-) Intel thought the microprocessor was a dumb idea, for example....

I agree DEC didn't really "get" the PC. The way I remember it, they were kind of late to the game, and their PCs were always sort of bizarrely incompatible with all other PCs. AND more expensive to boot. Sort of like Apple used to be. LOL

Like Apple, they always had good-looking hardware. The front panel on a PDP-11/70... you know, back in the day, that seemed soooo futuristic... now where did I put my RSX-11M manual....

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

Keith Patrick — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:29:22 -0000

Here's an RSS usability anecdote from someone who is technically capable but ignorant of RSS: I expected RSS to be a lot like the old push tech (and I thought RSS was based on CDF), whereby a client periodically pings a server for updates such that the user is alerted to updated content & views it. What I found with IE7 was a unified stylesheet for viewing a 2nd set of Favorites. Maybe I'm misusing IE7, but as an aggregator, I didn't really see the aggregation aspect of it. To me, it just looked like a way to make a bunch of different blogs look alike when I was expecting it to make it easier for me to see when my pool of blogs have updates that I haven't read.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

george bush — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:25:27 -0000

RSS will be successful when no one except the geeks would know it. Right now there is no point in explaining "rss" or "feed" to my mom. Same way, 12 years ago, she didn't give a damn about HTTP. But she started using a computer (and later hotmail) simply because she could start communicating with me and her grandson. If I tried to communicate her the power of HTTP and corporate firewalls and cross-platform portability of web pages, she still wouldn't have bought a computer.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

bobwyman — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:22:44 -0000

James Bailey: When was the last time you saw a Linux or Unix box with a graphical interface that *wasn't* X-Windows? How about all the Citrix use in corporations? It's all terminal stuff. Yes, it may be that X Windows usually runs on a full-blown computer. However, if you went and looked at most IBM PC's in corporations during the 80's, you would see only two applications: 1) A spreadsheet 2) A terminal emulator (either VT100 or IBM 3270). Those early IBM PC's were running as terminal emulators.... Today, many computers do the same -- using X Windows, Citrix, or Web 2.0 Applications through the browser.

bob wyman

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

John C. Welch — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:04:00 -0000

James, go to a Nebraska Furniture Mart...Wyse WinTerms everywhere. Thin clients are rather popular in quite a few applications.

The one I can’t figure out is instant messaging– does anybody actually us that in real life?

I live on it. It's at least as critical as email, and a much better tech support resource for me than email by a long shot.

Re: Newsflash: 98% don’t use RSS

James Bailey — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:50:12 -0000

"That being said, if Ken Olsen was wrong about people wanting terminals than the Google people are going down the wrong trail with their web based applications. All of this “thin client” and “web applications” stuff is just timesaharing wrapped in a different wrapper."

So far, people haven't really wanted thin clients. Not in any real numbers. There are a few breakouts now but still nothing overwhelming. Google is trying again, but the jury is still out. Certainly Ken Olsen was wrong when he predicted that the terminal was never going away in business contexts. It may come back in a new form but it has been gone for many years. The last gasp was X-Terms. I haven't seen one of those in 10 years.