Image by aqhong via Flickr
Since participating in RSS Awareness Day I have found myself much more aware of the lack of RSS! There are so many things that are pushed to me by e-mail that I would rather have the option of pulling by RSS reader. I know both technologies have a push and a pull aspect but the bevy of e-mail notification tools make e-mail the pushier option of the two. I’m not after a mass switch here but options, give me more options! Anything on the web that can change should have an RSS feed available.
Here are some advances I would like to see:
- Social Networks – RSS is starting to show up more, but what these networks need are the options to filter by each item that can be updated and to create multiple feeds. For example if you are on Facebook you should be able to subscribe to an RSS feed(s) that you set up from your newsfeed. You might want one feed for everything and I might want everything in one feed except to peel off status updates to second feed.
- A widely implemented SRSS (Secure RSS) – Feeds of from your bank, credit card companies, and investment firms are among a few useful places for Secure RSS feeds, there are any number of other uses including private corporate feeds. If there is one single item needed to push RSS more to the mainstream, this is it.
- Advertisements – The ability to mass ignore posts in RSS also makes it the perfect vehicle for the spammy type e-mail services you may tolerate. I like to see what Dell has for sale and the current prices on all the random computer gear at the new CompUSA.com, but I delete those e-mails unread for the most part, it would be much better to scan them and trash them in bulk in an RSS feed.
- DRSS (Dynamic RSS) – I don’t know if this is a coined phase or not, but this is a feature that’s just starting to pop up and that I hope to see a lot more of, an RSS feed that builds itself from a site’s content and your interests. I currently get an e-mail from Bankrate.com when they write about 529 college savings plans, make this an RSS feed for me instead! Call it filtering or call it search, either way you’re making the feed dynamic for my interests. With RSS bloat and purges this type of focused RSS will keep me reading and less frustrated.
These are my major wishes for RSS, what are yours?
I’ve recently become a Facebook user, and while I’m not addicted like some people I know, I can certainly see how people might spend too much time on the site. I read an article that told me that I needed to make a Facebook fan page NOW!My first instinct is to ignore this advice as being a little silly, why would I need to create a Facebook profile for this site when I want people to come here instead of spending more time on Facebook. After giving it a little more thought I’ve decided to go through with it, but I still feel like I might be sacrificing reader time to Facebook by creating more content for them, generating more pageviews for them, and encouraging my readers to track my site through theirs. Seems like a good deal for Facebook, we’ll see how it pans out for me and users like me. Visit The Knight Knetwork on Facebook.
Facebook is a “jack of all trades” on the internet and it pulls together all of the social web tools that people use to stay in touch with each other and crams it onto a single, simple, and highly customizable webpage. It supports crude forms of e-mail, IM, photosharing, videosharing, lifecasting, blogging, calender, and classifieds. There’s more, but there’s a ton of worthless junk too, and it’s all very viral. There’s a lot of competition out there for this model and a lot of interest in ways to pull all this information together, I’m going to let the shiny newness wear off and take a look back and see how I like it in a few weeks. I think I’ll still use it regularly, so if you want to drop me a line on Facebook and tell me what you like about it I’ve put a link to my profile on the about page. Feel free to comment here as well!