The Gong Show

The skeptic of Dead2.0, always being a contrarian, pointed out that RSS has only achieved 2% adoption… furthermore, only 11% of the public even knows what RSS is (The original source of these statistics is emarketer.com’s article called Really Seldom Syndication). His main argument is everyone would be better off is RSS vanished behind a wall of abstraction.

The Dead2.0 post got Scoble all riled up. Refusing to be frustrated by the staggeringly-small, current RSS adoption percentage, Scoble took refuge in a prediction of continued exponential RSS adoption growth.

I get the impression from Scoble’s post that he thinks he disagrees with Dead2.0, but I think they’re talking past each others points, and in the end they are both right. Dead2.0 is right because RSS usability is a disaster. Scoble’s right because there’s no reason to think that RSS won’t continue (or increase) its current adoption growth rate.

That RSS adoption is on the brink of an even-more massive explosion in growth, in spite of the fact that RSS usability has hardly budged since its inception. A quick survey of RSS usability problems:

• Clicking on a shiny orange RSS button still makes the average user’s browser barf XML. I don’t know how RSS popped up so high up in the stack, but it should be pushed back down along side its cousins: XHTML and Javascript standards. An XML standard has no business displaying raw in anyone’s browser.
• RSS implementations are buggy at best; industry leading aggregators (Bloglines, Google Reader…) constantly screw up feed presentations and timelines.
• The soup of acronyms and need to know the difference between Atom, RSS 0.92, and RSS 2.0 certainly doesn’t help. Implementations don’t even attempt to speak the user’s language.
• Lack of consistency in implementations, which is attributable mainly to the lack of a single, unified format.

Companies, most notably Feedburner, are resolving each of these issues, which is a big step forward for RSS adoption; Improved RSS usability will help ensure that RSS will become the next killer app, comparable to email. My long term dream for RSS is similar to that of Dead2.0: total abstraction so that users are harnessing the power of RSS without even know it.

But, as I said earlier, Scoble is right too. Even if usability doesn’t improve, strong growth will continue; usability problems hasn’t stopped RSS so far.

Digression: For skeptics who believe that RSS adoption will not see continued strong growth, I only have (and only need) one argument for you: IE7/Outlook2007 with built-in RSS support.

Disclosure: Feedburner is a portfolio company at Union Square Ventures, where I am employed. I would mention another company along side my mention of Feedburner, but they have such a huge lead in this sector that it doesn’t make sense to do so.