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More Signal - The Official Fliptop Blog
by Doug Camplejohn on Jan. 13, 2010
There have been a bunch of stories proclaiming RSS is dead, but I think they’re dead wrong.
RSS is just a building block technology, like HTML or SMTP, that has gotten even better recently with additions like Pubsubhubbub and rssCloud.
The problem is that it’s in your face as a consumer experience, when it should just blend into in the background.
Ask ten of your non-technical friends what RSS stands for and you’ll probably get ten shoulder shrugs. Ask them to name an RSS Reader brand, and you’ll still get the majority of them throwing back blank stares.
The fact is, the RSS user experience is generally lousy and has never cracked the mainstream. At the end of the day, it’s really about building a better subscribe experience. Here are a few things I think are broken and need to change:
1) The tag “RSS” – It’s really a way to follow or subscribe to content, so let’s call it one of those instead of RSS. We don’t write “SMTP” next to the email icon, or “LPD” next to the printer icon d0 we?
2) The subscribe experience. On some sites you still see the XML code when you click the RSS icon. On most others, you go through several pages that take…
