Hi, I'm Michael Mistretta, a teenager passionate about technology, photography, and God. Welcome to my online home where I write about technology, reviews, and my thoughts and opinions on technology-related matters. 
Theoretically, technology exists to make our lives easier. In the real world however, it’s not that simple. In many ways, technology over complicates even the simplest tasks in our lives. And so the story continues with RSS.
RSS is one of those technologies that seems like a revolutionary way to simplify your life at first, but ends with tireless hours of complex organization and wasted time. At the very core, RSS is a brilliant idea - bringing the news you care about to you, instead of you going to the news. However, the existing RSS readers ruin the simple foundation that RSS was built upon. Once again, software is shown to be the major bottleneck in the development of a platform.
The creation of any revolutionary new technology represents a major paradigm shift. However, in order to explain a new technology to a person, you must compare it to an existing technology. Sometimes these comparisons don’t always fit perfectly (for instance, see the original Macintosh manual where the Finder is described as “a central hallway in the Macintosh house”). Two different comparisons are typically used when explaining RSS - email inboxes and newspapers.
RSS as an Inbox
It’s no coincidence that the most common way to consume RSS is similar to one of the most common uses of a computer. Everyone uses and understands the way an email inbox works, and so, that knowledge is translated into an RSS reader that functions like an inbox. You refresh your RSS feeds much as you get new mail in your email client. You sort your feeds by folders much as you do - or should do - with email. And there is a big annoying number that marks your “unread count”, or the number of new RSS items you have to “read”.
This is where the comparison between RSS and email fails.
RSS is not email and shouldn’t be treated like it. Most email is specifically directed at you, and requires your attention to read and possibly take action. RSS feeds, on the other hand, are not specifically for you. They don’t all require your attention, and need to be “read”.
How many times have I come home from a weekend away, only to find the RSS count in the thousands. RSS quickly becomes a burden that is dreaded. And so the question remains - is there a better way to get your content?
RSS as a Newspaper
Recently, there has been a push towards a different approach for RSS. Instead of treating RSS feeds as emails in an inbox, Dustin MacDonlad’s new app, Times, takes a new - actually, an old - approach to RSS. Alex Wooley, a casual RSS user, sums up the game-changing nature of Times nicely:
Before the introduction of Times, it’s fair to say I wasn’t really an RSS worshiper. I had NetNewsWire installed on my system (after they made it free) and opened it once in a while (where I would be blasted with 200 feeds which I really didn’t want to have to read through). So, I didn’t want or have a need to read RSS feeds. Upon downloading Times, I knew I’d been hit with a new kind of RSS feeder, something I hadn’t experienced before, something quintessentially different.
Times frees RSS from the dreaded “unread count”, and allows you to consume RSS feeds in a different, more refreshing way. The philosophy is that you will be able to scan headlines and find the content that is appealing to you without having to go through and “read” every single article. While it’s an interesting approach, it is suited for more casual RSS users. When you begin to have hundreds of feeds in your arsenal, Times quickly becomes cumbersome and useless.
I would have to say that NetNewsWire does the job for me… its great!
Comment by Daniel Brusilovsky — May 13, 2008 @ 10:57 pm
Personally, I find the “Inbox method” more effective, assuming you wish not to miss any content. I see ‘newspaper’ as something that you’d easily be able to miss something if you don’t watch it every second since it’s always changing.
I don’t find RSS to be flawed, I believe it is just how you decide to use it. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the next post.
Comment by David — May 13, 2008 @ 11:12 pm
“How many times have I come home from a weekend away, only to find the RSS count in the thousands. RSS quickly becomes a burden that is dreaded.” This is only true if you let it. Simplify and prune those feeds.
“There are personal blogs that I enjoy reading every word of, and there are news blogs that I purely use to obtain the latest information from. They are two very different and distinct uses of RSS, and deserve to be treated differently. ” Ian Beck talked about this in his review of Times. Now he uses Times for his favorite blogs and NNW for news sites, similar to what you describe here.
Comment by Chris — May 14, 2008 @ 12:43 am
I use Google reader for my RSS and love how simple it is, I have played with Times but i think you really need to have limited numbers of RSS feeds for it work well.
Comment by rmaspero — May 14, 2008 @ 1:27 am
I’ve tried Times, it’s nice, but not for me. I have loads and loads of feeds that I’ve grouped into folders in NewsFire, which is now my reader of choice for its simplicity. All I need to do to improve my RSS “experience” is dump some of my feeds. For example, I subscribe to both Engadget and Gizmodo. If I chose either and dumped the other, my unread count would drop by 40-50%.
Comment by Henning Stedtnitz — May 14, 2008 @ 4:06 am
Chris,
I agree. I was considering for awhile using two separate RSS readers for my two different kinds of RSS feeds. However, something in me dreads having two separate apps to do the task of one. Plus, I use NetNewsWires syncing feature constantly, and would hate to lose that functionality with Times.
Comment by Michael Mistretta — May 14, 2008 @ 5:05 am
someone showed me AideRSS yesterday. That seems to be really promising. I tried Times, but I’m still one operating system behind and it does not work on 10.4 (this means I it will happen more and more often now).
To bad that there’s no real solution yet, shouldn’t the cry for a really good RSS reader be really loud? All I want is: really organized (I have that in google reader, but just as an example, I’ve got over 1000 new posts this morning), and I would like it skimmed down (that’s where Aide RSS comes in) and I want the original design, because many of my feeds are picked by design as well (that’s where Times comes in). Someone’s gotta come out with that.
I was thinking I should publish my feeds and read my feeds by popularity
Maybe I can higher a few dwarfs…
Cheers, Hans
Comment by Hans — May 14, 2008 @ 7:09 am
Just a little nitpick, but the instances of the word ‘metaphor’ should all be replaced with ‘paradigm’.
Comment by James — May 14, 2008 @ 7:13 am
James,
Fixed. That was the word I was looking for. Cheers.
Comment by Michael Mistretta — May 14, 2008 @ 7:16 am
I’ve used NetNewsWire for a long time and I still like it, but I recently switched to Google Reader. I prefer Reader’s sharing features and it’s a lot better on an iPhone than NewsGator Mobile. NNW’s syncing isn’t always completely reliable - I see a lot of duplication between NNW and NewsGator Mobile. With Reader, I don’t have to sync, since both are using exactly the same items.
Comment by Mike Cohen — May 14, 2008 @ 3:01 pm
I agree, RSS should not be treated as email. I havent got round to using a dedicated RSS reader yet, im still using mail and I can’t stand having unread RSS feeds.
Comment by Steve — May 14, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
I think Khoi Vin got it right in a fairly recent post of his. My RSS reader should be able to learn what I like and dislike. It should be able to filter the content I’m subscribed to so the articles I’m more interested in and most likely to read should be pushed to the top. It should help me filter out the chaff.
The inbox method is the best for me of the current offerings, but I would dearly like a feeder that could learn which subjects/categories/etc of feeds I skip, which I read in full and which I actually want to visit the site to read and the filter the “inbox” accordingly.
Comment by Phil Bowell — May 14, 2008 @ 5:52 pm