RSS as Infrastructure

I’ve noticed my direct use of RSS has decreased steadily over the past few years. In 2006 and 2007, I was avidly using a variety of RSS Readers from FeedDemon to Bloglines to several Firefox extensions that I’ve since forgotten the names of — but RSS was a big part of my web reading experience in and of itself: it was the visual framework through which I got my content.

Back in October of 2006 I wrote that RSS would reach its stride once it became “invisible” to the end-user. About two years after I wrote that post, I decided to abandon feed readers of all kinds for a system of saved bookmarks — bookmarks! — in my browser that I have opened faithfully every morning ever since then.

But the web has come a long way since then, and in particular the rise of mobile platforms and mobile applications has helped bring RSS back in to my life.

My tabbed browsing solution has worked well for so long because it allows me to experience the content I read in the environment it was meant to be consumed. I get all of the Facebook content recommendations in the sidebar. I get to see the cool design choices by the creators of these blogs, and just as importantly, if I decide to click on a link and follow the thread of a conversation, I am already up and running in Chrome, and it’s all very integrated into my normal browsing experience because it is my normal browsing experience.

This system has broken down lately as I’ve been doing more and more work on my phone. It’s just easier and more pleasant for me to do my reading, browsing, and email from my phone while I’m on the go, even though I have a MacBook Air.

But mobile interfaces are not built for this style of gimmicked feed-reading, especially because I often want to re-blog or share what I am reading, so the other day I went into my Google Reader account and “rebooted” it with a set of feeds that correspond to the pages I read every day in my browser and then added the mobile Google Reader interface to my phone as a bookmark.

A little later a friend pointed me to an app called Feedly that offers a great RSS solution that lives somewhere between Flipboard (another great option for RSS, but also not yet available for my phone) and a classic RSS reader, it embraces the native format of my phone and provides great tools for interacting with the content I find. I now already prefer this to my usual tabbed-browsing desktop solution.

I have built a side project or two, none of which have taken advantage of RSS in any way, in part because I don’t have any idea how to produce an XML/RSS document from Rails and haven’t bothered to learn, but in part because RSS just hasn’t been part of my idea of the web landscape of late, but I think that is a fault and a flaw that needs to be corrected.

RSS is a powerful standard and it will only become more powerful as it becomes more ubiquitous and more invisible to the end user. RSS doesn’t get a lot of limelight anymore, in part because there’s not much exciting happening around the technology itself, but I think we are just starting to see companies figure out how best to take advantage of it.