Feed readers

People who use feed readers tend to use them extensively and wonder what they did without them. It helps people stay informed of all types of news from the newspaper headlines right down to small blogs, their friends' blogs, podcasts, what influential people are doing, product reviews, movies, music, TV programmes, and more.

People describe feed readers as replacing email lists, online forums or bulletin boards, and physical newspapers. All have some element of truth but none is completely accurate.

Here is my own explanation of feeds. I have tried to make it as simple as possible.

Without feeds, keeping up with what is new on, say, 50 separate websites is unmanageable. At best you could have 50 bookmarks in your browser and try to remember to visit them all regularly. You certainly couldn't visit all 50 each day.

If those websites provide a feed, however, you can subscribe to them in your feed reader instead. Then, instead of visiting all 50 websites each day, you simply open your feed reader in the morning. All new items from all 50 websites will be there in one place. You have not wasted your time visiting a bunch of websites only to find there is nothing new on them, and you have instant access to whatever is new on those that have updated.

Feeds are well used, but the problem is that all this use is only by a small minority of people who 'get it'. It's an incredibly difficult concept to understand, and there are a number of things which are to blame for this.

Firstly, there are so many different names and so many different (and competing) file formats for feeds. There are two quite separate formats both which are abbreviated to RSS, one standing for 'Really Simple Syndication' and another for 'RDF Site Summary', formerly known as 'Rich Site Summary'. Notice that neither is a particularly user-friendly name, and one even has another abbreviation, 'RDF', inside it, which offers no hope to the uninitiated. There is another format called 'Atom', which is separate again to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and RSS (RDF Site Summary/Rich Site Summary). To make it difficult, some people refer to them all as 'XML', though technically XML can contain any file format, it has nothing to do specifically with feeds.

Secondly, people providing feeds to the unsuspecting public persist in giving them these inconsistent technical names, some sites describing them as 'RSS', others as 'Atom' and some as 'XML'. They usually provide no explanation of what they are, assuming I guess that the only people that will be using them will know the technical ins and outs already. Assuming that the only people who want to use them will already know about them is like giving up. It's admitting that feeds are unusable by the general public. But they needn't be like this.

Whereever possible, I refer to them as feeds. This is the most generic term I can think of that seems to get kind of close to describing what they do, and seems to used by others as well. I don't call them 'RSS', because that is jargon and specific to a certain technology; feeds need not even be in the RSS format. I don't call them XML, because that is not descriptive and it betrays a misunderstanding of what XML is. It also helps to add to people's confusion about XML in general.

I think one of the best things to happen with feeds sofar is when in 2005/2006, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera all agreed on a single icon to identify a feed. The icon chosen was one originally devised by the Mozilla team, who created Mozilla Firefox. The same icon, except blue instead of orange, has been adopted by the Safari browser for Mac OS.

Browsers now recognise feeds linked to a web page and offer a better way of subscribing to them; usually by clicking the orange button in the address bar or status bar of the browser. You still need a separate feed reader to get the most out of feeds, and web-based feed readers like Google Reader are getting pretty good. But at least the browsers are beginning to integrate at least a little bit of functionality for reading feeds.

Not all websites have adopted the standardised method for linking to a feed, and many continue instead to provide their own various 'XML', 'RSS' or 'Atom' buttons to identify feeds. This means that you can't simply click the browser's feed icon to subscribe to some feeds. In addition to this, a huge number of people still use Internet Explorer 6, which does not recognise linked feeds at all, making the subscription process more difficult.

I use my feed reader almost daily, and have subscribed to over a hundred feeds. In fact, I have subscribed to all of the feeds from people's 23 Things blogs as a way of keeping up to date with them, thus demonstrating how useful they can be. I have a handful of feed categories, including one category named 'Uninteresting', where I keep subscriptions from websites that don't really interest me, but I might look at if I have time to kill.