This past year was a big one for RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, was the backbone of all early developments in the new era of the internet. It made blogs readable, podcasts subscribable, wikis trackable and search persistent. While explicit, knowing adoption of RSS is often said to be dismal ("it's too complicated, it's just more info overload" etc.) - I think we may be underestimating the extent of adoption. Here's my list of highlights from 2007, what's yours?
Three years after a 2004 Pew study found that 1 out of 20 people online said they used an RSS aggregator to read content online (in 2004!) - RSS was in 2007 the 3rd most searched for "what is" term on Google all year. Only "love" and "autism" were looked up more and RSS beat out both "emo" and "HPV."
For whatever reason, it's the consumer space where RSS remains the strongest. It's been more than a year since pundit Steve Gillmor argued that any corporate executive worth anything was already getting their news by RSS. Enterprise adoption seems in reality to be lagging far behind where it ought to, though. Each of the leading enterprise RSS vendor startups has had to raise a pile of money over the last 14 months.
Thus our look at the major events in 2007 for RSS and syndication focuses almost entirely on the consumer market. This list was assembled with the help of tens of people who edited it with me on a wiki.
No single event probably came close to the impact of Facebook's explosion in popularity in terms of popularizing the concept of syndication and feeds. While the application platform is of debatable utility, the News Feed is one of the defining elements of the world's hottest social network. Almost all other social networks have followed with similar functionality and explaining RSS is now as simple as saying "it's like the Facebook News Feed."
This Spring Google bought RSS publishing and analytics service Feedburner for a mere $100 million. While the rise of Google Reader helped the advertising giant capture a huge portion of reader Attention Data and trend information - buying Feedburner extended this knowledge all the further. Feedburner was a brilliant business that was ahead of its time and probably ought to have waited out the market until it could have commanded a much higher price. What do I know, though?
In February, both Feedburner and rival RSS ad network Pheedo published reports about RSS reader market share. Both companies demonstrated that the new Google Reader was a dominant product but that the still innovative Bloglines and the fall-off-a-log-simple MyYahoo! retained substantial market share. They used to be the leaders, though.
Google Reader is a very nice product that keeps on innovating, most recently with the addition of some simple social networking functionality and an off-line mode. 2007 was also the year that Google Reader finally added search! The product is not well suited to the rare freaks among us with more than 1000 subscriptions, however.
For some crazy reason the world is full of people who still feel morally obligated to read every single item in their feed reader. These people, probably the majority of RSS users in fact, complain that RSS is becoming a big source of information overload. (Hint: it's ok! Just read what you can and don't worry about the rest!)
For anyone who reads feeds, though, prioritization and personalized recommendations are two things that hold a whole lot of promise.
In 2007 both Bloglines and Newsgator were among the companies who moved towards implementing a simple, open Attention Data standard called APML. A wide variety of other companies began experimenting with other methods of systematizing and automating prioritization and recommendation as well. Expect this to be even bigger in 2008.
Google Reader, Newsgator and Netvibes all began offering mobile versions of their feed readers in 2007. Google Reader went offline using the new Google Gears.
In early 2007, Yahoo! released an RSS mashup and service suite called Pipes. While there's a long, long list of services built on top of RSS (my favorite is Dapper) the fact is that this major brand recognition brought a new validity and new user numbers to this very useful class of tools.
The list of institutions now making RSS feeds available continued to grow rapidly over 2007, as the utility of the offering is undeniable. While no hard and firm numbers are available, one good source to get a feel from the breadth of feed publishers is the RSS Compendium Blog. From Dubai newspaper the Khaleej Times to
Big thanks to the many people who helped me put this list together in a wiki over the past few weeks. I love RSS and hope that next year will be an even bigger year for this world-changing medium.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: 2007: The Year in RSS.
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And yet, and yet, with all those good numbers ... as TechnoSailor writes in his "The Problem with RSS": "that’s where it stops. The problem with RSS is that that simple three letter acronym strikes fear and trembling into the masses. People like my father don’t know how to read my content in any other way other than using his web browser"
I came across http://aiderss.com in a comment to his post; a dandy little system, and pleasant to use. But still: it seems that entry to the world of syndication is still "easy" for the smaller portion of the web community. I just googled "problem with RSS", 60K results ... jumped ahead to the 20th page and found even those deep results substantial and meaningful. (Sure, lotsa geek stuff, but still.)
I don't doubt "RSS was in 2007 the 3rd most searched for "what is" term on Google all year."; this certainly evidences buzz ... but not adoption. Evidently the desire is there, the demand, the pull ... and yet I have to think there's a digital-divide of sorts here: for those of us who find Pipes! great fun, well, the web's a candy shop! But for the great mass of the community? I wouldn't say web developers deserve coal in their Christmas shopping, but maybe we should take a good close look at what we've enhanced to see what we've ignored.
regards
Posted by: Ben Tremblay | December 24, 2007 1:43 PMThank you Ben for your thoughtful comment. I do think, though, that you're underestimating the rate of RSS adoption. Your dad might not get RSS - but I bet if you got a group of your family members in a room, several of them out of 10 might be already using MyYahoo or iGoogle.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickI have seen a lot of the same items with the amount of RSS adoptions. One thing you did not mention in an app that may be contributing to the gain is Microsoft. Office 2007 Outlook now has the ability to add feeds right into the app. With the reach of Exchange into organizations I tihnk this may be fueling growth. Vista also supports RSS feeds right in the OS. You can even put them on your desktop if you want. As these two apps are adopted by more and more organizations the number of people reading feeds should increase even more.
Posted by: Bruce | December 24, 2007 2:37 PMoutlook was probably a very big thing to overlook, thx bruce
Posted by: marshall | December 24, 2007 3:22 PMGreat lookback, Marshall.
How about predictions for 2008?
Posted by: James Lewin | December 24, 2007 3:35 PMI think I am a bit weird when it comes to rss, I tend to read the title and then go to the site to view it so have no reason for a reader. I use sites like Original signals and iGoogle instead.
Posted by: Darren | December 24, 2007 3:43 PMI use a feed reader and I am getting inundated with posts and like you said, I have to choose what I want to read and just forget about the rest.
Posted by: Small Business Marketing | December 24, 2007 6:59 PMThanks for a nice post and happy holidays to all.
great post dude. can i refer to you as The RSS King?
Posted by: Baratunde Thurston | December 24, 2007 8:08 PMVery good summary. You shed light onto a lot of things for me.
I was inundated with information 2 years ago; but now due to nifty features of Google Reader, I have learnt how to prioritize and read what is important.
One direction which i hope Google innovates seriously is the Trends part. If only Google were to release some tools to use the Trends (not just in Reader but in other Google apps as well), it would be a wish come true.
As far as non technical people are concerned, i think they need not go and set up Google Reader if they are going to subscribe to less than 10 feeds. They should give Google homepage a serious look before that. It hardly takes 10 seconds to setup and begin following. Even news stories or google searches.
Posted by: pkj | December 24, 2007 8:23 PMAs much as I might wish otherwise, I truly believe RSS will succeed the day we stop calling it RSS.
Hear me out -- most people on the Internet already use RSS, they just don't know it (My Yahoo, iGoogle, etc). If we stop focusing on sites like Google Reader and focus it more on iGoogle, I think it'll drive adoption to the point where we can *then* explain the advantages of a full-featured RSS reader (and call it that).
RSS is incredibly valuable (its to the 2000's what email was to the 80s and 90s), but most people just dont have a need for a full-featured RSS reader (they're happy with just the one email inbox). Either push RSS adoption through portal sites a la iGoogle, Netvibes, et al, or merge it into the inbox and then we'll finally get somewhere.
Of course, someone like Facebook could introduce true RSS and call it an "Other Sites News Feed" or something and that could solve a lot of our problems.
Posted by: Ravi | December 24, 2007 8:33 PMRSS rules! it'll continue feeding everybody's mind with what's happening around the internet.
Nhick
Posted by: ITrush | December 24, 2007 11:01 PMhttp://www.itrush.com
Yes, Google Reader has got big share but personally I hate it.
I use FeedReady all days -- thanks for great Aqua UI and ton of useful features to discover.
Posted by: Jimmy | December 24, 2007 11:13 PMI personally don't like RSS very much. I guess it's extremely convenient for busy people who have no time to visit sites individually, but it's a no no for me. One of the features of being jobless I guess.
Posted by: Qraqq | December 24, 2007 11:25 PMNeedless to say, Mr. W and I are delighted.
(Let's not get too excited by Pipes, though, hm?)
Posted by: Samuel Thwart | December 25, 2007 4:57 AM+ new recomendation Feed Services like mindity came up. http://www.mindity.com (I leaved my google reader for that)
Posted by: Richard Huskey | December 25, 2007 6:54 AMalright, alright, i'm gettin' it... now, which one?
my guess is, it is sort of like having my bookmarks live in front of me, instead of borrowing through those stacks trying to remember what was interesting and why i bookmarked it
(and would firefox please allow me to stay in the bookmark window beyond just one click... frustratin')
now to sign up on the first one comes my way...
Posted by: gregory | December 25, 2007 9:21 AMDapper is good, but don't forget Feed43.com. It allows you to create simple feeds from any feedless page with predictable content. Maybe a quarter of my feeds I created myself using this tool. For example, ones for the NYT columnists, who, ridiculously, don't yet have their own. Indispensable.
Posted by: Rollo | December 26, 2007 2:38 AMthanks... dapper and feed43...
isn't news.google.com a kind of rss feed set-up? and man, talk about limited news, yikes, hardly worth going there anymore....
maybe that is how rss will be too, soon enough
Posted by: gregory | December 26, 2007 6:12 AMyes, thanks for mentioning Dapper and Feed43. I like Feedyes.com too. All wonderful, wonderful services.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickI love RSS - such a simplicity for the end user, with so much value, whats not to love about it...
I took a quick glimpse of Feed43, and although I'm a technical person, I found it too complicated for my test-for-two-minutes approach. it probably gives good value, but must work harder to be average-user-friendly
Thanks for the article ,Marshall
Merry Christmas all!
Posted by: Esdee | December 26, 2007 12:31 PMNice post Marshall.
Insofar as full disclosure is concerned, I work for NewsGator so I do have somewhat of a biased view on this subject. Having said that, I also see on a daily basis how RSS is transforming consumer and business user access to content, and often without them even realizing it.
First of all, Google Reader is a very nice product that I use myself. Now that they have Gears working it even has an offline capability. One issue that Google is simply going to have to deal with is the degree to which their ambitious plans to make Reader the centerpiece for google apps in order to compete with Facebook is offensive to their users. What they very subtly did is make their new sharing features opt-out instead of opt-in and as a consequence a lot of their users are finding that things are being shared that they would rather not be shared. This is the bargain you strike with Google when you use their free services, give them a stream of personal data as the price of admission.
There are several points in your post that relate to attention data. Clearly we have a big interest in this that is driven by the obviousness of the problem (nobody says "gee I need more feeds", right?) and the long term strategy to create data service products built on demographic and behavioral data. This can be incredibly useful for consumers and businesses alike and I foresee an entirely new product sector developing as this technology matures. It's not easy, despite what most casual commentators would suggest, it requires expertise in dealing with large databases and knowing what metadata is actually useful.
Lastly, on the enterprise side of the business we are seeing a nice uptick in demand for behind the firewall RSS platforms. Companies are starting to figure out that RSS is not only a great way to manage syndicated content, whether free or premium, but also offers limitless options for taking data from structured transaction systems. I am excited to see how enterprises start replicating with RSS and blogs/wikis what they have historically done with proprietary CMS and message bus technologies. We are approaching 500,000 "seats" in large enterprises with our NG Enterprise Server and Social Sites, so clearly business users are starting to benefit from the trickle down, they just may not be aware they are using RSS, or care for that matter.
I do agree with Ben that the one problem with RSS is the name "RSS", but I remember when ERP was new and we had the same problem.
Posted by: jeff nolan | December 26, 2007 9:07 PMMarshall - great summary, thank you!
There's just one big missing piece - Attensa has an extremely robust enterprise RSS platform for behind the firewall security (that Jeff Nolan cited above). And Attensa for Outlook's free RSS reader that largely solved the Outlook problem when Microsoft introduced it earlier this year.
I can't wait to see how adoption rates stand in 2008. I think it'll make this year's accomplishments pale in comparison.
Posted by: Janet Johnson | December 27, 2007 9:18 AMGood post.
Posted by: Custom PeelAwayAds | December 30, 2007 8:21 PMPersonally I use a desktop aggregator from FireAnt- cool, nice useful layout and shows video, audio and text in a logical way. a pity it never seems to get as known as it should!
For some things I use FireFox built-in newsreader.