Consumer RSS is Officially Dead…
RIP Consumer RSS
It brings a bit of a tear to my eye to think that I had *So* much hope for RSS as a technology back years ago. Back in 2004 when I really started to embrace it and the web was really transforming and web 2.0 was still a new buzz word that was on the tip of everyone’s tongues (even though they didn’t know what it meant! LOL).
Skipping back, I remember conversations with my good friend Scott Paton back in 2005 when we were talking about blogging and RSS. I remember the twinkle in his eye as he described “Really simple syndication” or as consumers called them, “Web Feeds”. RSS Version 1.0 came onto the scene and allowed a constant “feed” of updated pages from a certain website to be fed into a reader of somekind. I remember the “My msn” and “My Yahoo” and “My Google” pages being the first places people added feeds. This was a little trick we used to get the major search engines to find our blogs, actually. Adding your feed to your personal homepage.
When Microsoft was launching Windows 7, they had planned all along to rename RSS (Ironically already deemed really simple), to “Web Feeds” to make consumers understand what they were better. They were planning a screensaver that brought an updated feed of news to your screen while your computer was sleeping. Almost like having an AM news radio in text format on your glowing LCD while your computer’s hard drive rested.
Jeff Nolan writes that Twitter Killed RSS, and while I don’t 100% agree Twitter is entirely to blame, I agree that RSS from a consumer standpoint is really dead now. In fact i’m not entirely sure it was ever really all that popular. It was kind of complicated for most newbies to figure out… and completely understand just how powerful it is.
RSS as a marketing tool
RSS is still incredibly handy for a number of reasons. It’s still being actively used for a ton of things, but it’s not widely publicized. I mean, those who know their “feed” address off their website can easily go to www.pingomatic.com and send the feed address to all the major search engines. Those search engines will check the feed’s updates and add the new findings to their databases.
RSS marketing doesn’t end there though… There’s an entire strategy behind it from Podcasts, to videos to PDF files and other media formats that come over RSS well. There’s also RSS analytics that actually track how many views, hits and clicks your feed address gets (Feedburner has some). Once your feed has exposure, the keywords you pick from your competitive analysis and research combined with your copywriting skills and ability to write compelling headlines that get massive clickthru’s will determine your success.
