Keep it Simple: Alerts not Feeds nor RSS

Feeds, RSS and aggregators are all still a bunch of words mainly used by technically skilled people. It’s still hard to sell the feeds concept to normal people. And until we do it, RSSs will continue to be another difficult to understand (and explain) technology.

We need to invent a new product layer that sells feeds and RSS as simple Alerts. Alerts on specific content (news, footbal results, last-minute deals, etc). Alerts subscribed by users.

Bloglines is a good try but is still a techie tool. So there’s still opportunities in the development of news ways of interacting with feeds. It should be something that makes for feeds and RSS what blogger did for blogs. Simplification led blogger to a position where everyone can have a blog without even mention the word HTML.

In the same way, people should be able to use Alerts without even mentioning the word RSS.

Imagine the scenario (it all comes down to this in the end):
A user is looking for a place to spend his next holidays and found a page with last-minute holiday deals. He didn’t found any last-minute deal for his wanted destination but he would like to be Alerted if that happens.

This is where Alerts would be a very good solution to a very common problem. For the moment it’s all very messy. Information is still technologically encoded and difficult to process.

Note: here’s an Illustrated Bloglines Guide on How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday? (via Olifante)