Low RSS Adoption: Is It About Tools or Needs?
by
on October 20, 2008,
Today we hear yet another piece of news that may seem to be depressing for all the tech-savvy people as Steve Rubel speaks about a new Forrester Research report on the state of RSS (available for download for $279). The main conclusion of the report is that RSS technology is still very far from going mainstream with the adoption rate at 11% with 12% more people not sure if they do use RSS or not (presumably because they simply don’t know what the question is about at all).
To be fair, the growth is here and it is rather impressive if we compare today’s 11% to the 2% three years ago but still 11% sounds like a small share of population for the technology that we in the tech blogosphere have grown accustomed to as something that makes our lives much easier. Besides, I can imagine that if RSS has reached 11% of the population in the US, it must be much worse outside of the US where adoption of the latest technologies usually comes first with other markets following.
But the main question to me here is actually why - exactly why does an average Joe prefer not to use RSS technology if the technology-aware people think it is so awesome? I believe there must be two possible answers to this question: the first one in the field of tools available and the second one in the field of the need the consumers have (or don’t have).
When it comes to the tools, they are certainly abundant with tons of RSS readers available as both online and desktop applications. Of course some of them can be pretty difficult to comprehend as they are built by developers and for developers - not for the general population. But there are tools that are very straightforward and the learning curve must be short enough to adopt them if the benefits outweigh the pain involved - say, Google Reader or Bloglines.
There are also tools that are easy to explain to consumers as their dashboards to the web - the start pages are offered by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft as well as by independent developers like Netvibes or Pageflakes. Start pages seem to be pretty easy to both understand (which must be a priority as without understanding there will be no adoption at all) as a place where you can start browsing the web instantly looking at what is most important to you and eventually to adopt as they both offer a large collection of widgets people can use right away and also deliver some real-life value like the widget for weather forecast in addition to multiple RSS feeds.
My opinion is that the tools that people are supposed to use for RSS aggregation are both abundant and not actually difficult to comprehend in the majority of cases. Besides, there are plenty of very mainstream websites that offer RSS feeds to their visitors so people often bump into the suggestion to subscribe to content via RSS everywhere when surfing the web. Yet we still see this low adoption rate - so I can’t help but wonder if it is actually about the lack of the need here, not the lack of the tools.
After all, usually when consumers have a certain need and some product is here to satisfy that particular need, people will usually both find the product that will handle the process and learn how to use it. But if there is no need in the market, it will be difficult to make people use the new technology they don’t see enough value in - especially with the majority of news sites offering both RSS feeds and subscription by email functionality.
My idea is that when your grandmother really realizes she can benefit from using an RSS reader to keep track of all the news and events that are of special interest to her along with the family photos you and your older sister upload to Flickr, she will be sure to find an RSS reader that will fit her taste and does exactly what she needs it to do. Until then she will be fine with getting you to visit her to share the latest news and show the recent photos as well - and probably a few hours of family talks over a tea with home-made cookies will be of higher value to you than teaching your grandma what RSS is.
Image by mhofstrand used under Creative Commons
