Richard McManus of RWW notes the continuing decline of RSS Readers, suggesting the market is largely dominated by Google and in disarray. Five years ago there was a perception that this was a hot category. An underlying standard was freeing up new atomized content and conversations that could be pulled and curated. Bloglines was acquired, and new clients were popping up weekly.
I believe an opportunity to cooperate beyond the syndication format, on standards for the basic usability of subscribing (the Coffee Cup problem) was missed at the time when it mattered. Innovation continued with the rise of Netvibes with the widget model, and Google Reader as a Bloglines 2.0. But then it stopped.
Last night I found myself looking at RWW’s list of the top 10 RSS Readers, and Tweeted: Why didn’t a single top RSS newsreader adapt into a Twitter client?
We all know that Twitter cannibalized RSS Reader habits with something simpler and social. And innovation happened elsewhere for aggregation with simple focused things like Techmeme. And that enterprise RSS innovation moved away from clients. But iGoogle and Netvibes widgets as Twitter clients were developed by third parties. Perhaps it was innovator’s dilemma on a compressed scale, but the Readers didn’t expand what could be read.
There is a ton of innovation in the Twitter client space. From Seesmic to Tweetie (I paid for it) to Brizzly (Jason Shellen created Google Reader). 107 clients on oneforty.com. There are some that bring baseline newsreading and conversations together, like Threadsy. With blogs adopting the Twitter API, the future will be reverse engineered.
Jeff Nolan and I usually spend our time disagreeing about politics and agreeing about tech, further demonstrating that smart people can be idiots. I can’t disagree with him that there is no RSS Reader market today. But I can surmise that if the original players in the market stopped thinking of it as software, and kept evolving it into something closer to FriendFeed for people who want less information — the network would be the market. And an opportunity remains.
(Cross-posted @ Ross Mayfield's Weblog)
Ross,
The scope of the discussion between Richard MacManus, Jeff Nolan (linked to your post), yourself and all the comments underscores the range of issues involved in the RSS debate. Consumer RSS consumption, publisher behavior, underlying integration/backoffice protocol…..
The rapid growth in “subscribable information” (“followable” in the case of Twitter) and options for users to consume it are very positive overall. The popularity of any particular tool will fluctuate and the best approach will depend on the objective of the user. What Twitter has demonstrated is that subscribing and the experience of consuming subscription based information can be very simple and powerful. I would argue that we are in the early stages of sorting out how our personal and business lives are impacted by a world of networked and frequently changing information. The success of Twitter is very important in the this process and as each of you have suggested it should be embraced as opportunity for “RSS” readers.
I do not necessarily see these trends sustaining the either/or view of how information is consumed. For example, I can “subscribe” to any of 70 RSS feeds or “follow” 13 or so Twitter accounts on Forbes.com. You can follow Attensa on twitter or you can subscribe to http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12375152.rss with an RSS tool. Perhaps someone will argue there is more “Real timeness” in the Twitter stream but add in PubSubHubBub or RSS Cloud and that distinction goes away. And then of course there is the whole debate over centralized or distributed….. and which is better for the web in general.
This is all good. Twitter has once again driven home the virtues of simplicity. But as I write this there are organizations working to overcome limitations to the utility of Twitter that result from its simplicity.
As things evolve along the “browse” > “search” > “subscribe/follow” use model the tools we embrace change, become, obsolete and hopefully contribute to future innovation. The promise of these tools to simplify our information lives personally and professionally is huge but different approaches are required for different environments. For example, in the business context where information awareness means, innovation, execution and dollars the ability to quickly connect and subscribe to information has enormous utility that is just beginning to be explored and resized. While the notion of “subscribe” and the concept of “activity stream” have great value and form the basis for real business solutions – security policies, manageability and other factors require different tools. It is an interesting journey.