Monday, 6 April 2009
RSS Needs A Re-Brand
RSS is an extremely elegant and useful online technology. It has revolutionised the way thousands of internet users access, organise, and share information online. But despite it being pretty simple to use, penetration of this technology into the wider online user-base has been minimal. In fact a lot of people haven’t even heard of RSS.
Personally I think that the biggest reason for this and the biggest problem RSS has is it’s name. It’s brand if you will. It doesn’t really mean anything and it’s equally hard to explain for most people.
In the real world, we don’t promote fluoride, we promote toothpaste, we don’t promote combustion engines, we promote cars, we don’t promote the physics of flight, we promote travel. Why do we insist on blinding people with science in the online world? Is this a need that stems from geeks wanting to keep the coolest technologies to themselves? I really don’t know, but I do know that just blurting ‘RSS’ to people isn’t enough to get this technology out to a wider audience and that’s a big shame, because it’s extremely useful.
I think the answer is to re-brand, or re-package RSS, recognising its role as a powerful underlying technology, but layering an accessible brand or online service on top. If we look at facebook, myspace and twitter, these are all built on sophisticated online technologies, but they weren’t promoted in this way. They are all more than the sum of their underlying technologies.
Perhaps a web service with the tagline ‘all your online reading in one place’ would mean more to potential users than RSS feed aggregator. I think this will be the type of approach to spread RSS and allow us to reap the maximum benefit from this technology.
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