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)

May 13, 2005 | Tags:  

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4 Responses to “Keep it Simple: Alerts not Feeds nor RSS”

  1. Sérgio Nunes on May 13th, 2005

    I’ve been using the term “Subscriptions/Subscribe” but “Alerts” seems like a good alternative. One other thing that I think is missing is non-technical documentation and examples on how to use these “strange files”.

    The majority of users that I’ve observed, click on a RSS/Atom link and, when confronted with raw XML, think that it is an server error. :)

  2. Carlos Jorge Andrade on May 13th, 2005

    Feeds, RSS and aggregators are all still a bunch of words mainly used by technically skilled people. Its 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.

    Agreed.
    In my previous job, we had to create a blog for a client and i think my boss today, although we tried to explain, still doesn’t understand what those ‘rss/xml’ signs at the bottom mean. :-)

    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 didnt found any last-minute deal for his wanted destination but he would like to be Alerted if that happens.

    IMHO, this concept allready exists… with email. “Alerts” by definition are “intrusive”. Feeds are not. You browse them, they don’t pop up on you. Feeds have a delay, email doesn’t. I don’t what to be “alerted” 1h late, when my feed reader goes to check the feed when i can me emailed on my mobile phone/pda. :-)

    And unless feeds show up on software you *use daily*(Outlook, intranets) no one(none tech uses) will download/browse a specific piece of software just to get those “notifications”.

  3. batixa on May 13th, 2005

    I already have my Bloglines working! Thanks!
    *

  4. blog.delaranja.com » Blog Archive » (By now) RSS is probably the best term on May 25th, 2005

    [...] it’s too late to change the term RSS into anything more understandable (like Alerts which I suggested). By now, some big players are already moving into RSS. BBC has a selection of RSS f [...]

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