RSS web feeds set to explode
Posted in Marketing on: Saturday, June 25, 2005 by Paul Boag
If you do not know what an RSS feed is or if you have not added one to your site then now is the time to act. Microsoft is the latest in a long line to integrate RSS into their product offerings.
Microsoft has recently announced that their next version of Internet explorer will use RSS to inform users of changes to their favourite web sites.
In my two previous entries on this subject, I have explained what RSS is and why you should add an RSS feed to your site. However, since those articles the adoption rate of RSS has sky rocketed. Microsoft’s major competitor in the browser market, Firefox, has already integrated an RSS reader into its browser, while Yahoo and many others allow users to add RSS feeds to their personalised homepages.
The number of sites offering RSS feeds has also increased dramatically largely fuelled by the almost universal adoption of the technology in blogs. However, RSS is not just the domain of blogs and technology sites. Major sites such as the BBC have also adopted the technology believing that it is a valuable communication method with its users.
Microsoft’s adoption of RSS in its next generation browser is part of a wider move to integrate the RSS format throughout its upcoming version of windows. Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team said:
"We want RSS everywhere. I want it in more than just the browser and aggregators. We want to help RSS get even bigger and better than today."
To learn more about RSS select one of the articles below:
Why add a RSS feed to your site?
3 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Paul,
The following article, based on a Yahoo study, has some interesting caveats on implementing RSS on sites at the moment.
It doesn’t say don’t use RSS, its just that almost no one actually know what all those RSS orange buttons actually do on the sites they’re visiting. So whilst many browsers now have RSS functionality built in, designers need to make it easier to access or subscribe to the feeds.
I have a feeling that calling them ‘web feeds’ might help adoption, there’s only so many acronyms that people can take.
Jon
Hi Jon,
yes I read the same report from Yahoo but my response was much more upbeat.
However, I do agree that people don’t have a clue what RSS is and that we as designers need to take that into account.
I have implemented an RSS feed and added it to My Yahoo, My MSN, and my personalized Google page. I just edited the .rss (xml) feed with new headlines and then refreshed all of my personalized pages (Yahoo, MSN, and Google). The new headlines are not being refreshed. Does anyone know how to get them all to recognize that the headlines in the RSS feed have been updated?