Jan

21

The Non-Existent RSS Reader Problem

January 21, 2007 |

Lots of talk today about RSS readers. Dave Winer, the god-father of RSS, argues that

One of the first rules of software design is also the primary rule of business — “The user is always right.” Most RSS readers remind the user, all the time, how wrong he or she is. Or inadequate or lazy or behind in their work.

What he is referring to is that most readers tell a user how many unread items there are. To understand why Winer doesn’t like this much, you have to read up on his idea of River of News RSS browsing (think Techmeme’s River of News). Michael Parekh joins in and argues along the same lines:

But then the interface still reminds me of my cluttered closet every time I launch the reader. There’s tons of stuff in there I probably need, IF I made the time to go through it all, organize it, and KEEP IT
organized going forward.

Personally, I follow Amit Agarwal’s idea of having a list of A-blogs that I read every day or am motivated to at least skim through every day. But really, I don’t think the software is telling me I am doing anything wrong - it just tells me how many items a feed has.

The real problem is when the user thinks he/she actually has to keep up with all the news. Even with a small list of feeds, that’s impossible and mostly not worthwhile anyway. I actually like the idea of knowing what feeds I hardly read and the Google Reader now has a feature telling exactly what feeds I pay attention to and which I don’t.

Maybe in the next revision, it will organize those feeds automagically, but until then, I just sit back, relax and enjoy the river of news flowing by me without worrying about getting to zero in my RSS reader.

(isn’t that where a lot of this anxiety comes from? The “Getting Things Done” craze that tells us we all have to be so fucking productive all the time and develop inane schemes to keep up with what apparently is more work than we should handle anyway?)


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