Hacker News Reader

Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, RSS is like many other platforms without a default client. Well-engineered, extremely useful, but impossible to explain to non-technical people. Before you can use RSS, you have to know what it is, look for it on a website, and have a client downloaded or an account on a web service. For this to make sense you need a mental model of a server with information, a client requesting it, and a technical specification that teaches them to talk to each other.

Compare with Facebook or Twitter, where you click a link to the default client and can start using it right away.

Ultimately, you can google "Twitter" or "Facebook" and start using the platform right away. Google "RSS" and you get technical explanations, a Wikipedia page, and competing choices for feed readers.

View on HN

The web has no default client.

Email has no default client.

TV has no default client.

The telephone network, after a lengthy battle involving AT&T, has no default client.

SMS has no default client.

Somehow, people find a way to use these things. It took many years from when the first web browser was written in 1990 to get to ubiquity. We got RSS in 1999 and it is in widespread use among web publishers; I can't think of a major news site that does not use it. Where we are lacking is in user uptake. Give it time. Open standards always take longer, but one will eventually get us there.

SMS and the telephone network did have default clients for a long time after they were introduced -- in both cases, the default client was the phone you had. Mosaic, Navigator, and IE were all so close that Wikipedia describes the latter two as being based on Mosaic. It does help adoption to have a single, obvious client, but a close second would be having the clients be indistinguishable save for branding for non-expert users.

The default client for email and web is the one that comes with your computer. The default client for SMS is your phone. The default client for TV is to turn it on and flip through channels.

The point of the OP was not about having a single standardized client, but rather having the functionality baked into product(s) without the user having to seek it out on their own, or even learn what "RSS" means. The feeble attempts from Safari and Firefox are the closest we've come, but ideally this was a push that should have happened at the OS level, both on desktop and mobile.

There is no default client for television transmissions. You have to buy a receiver and they're not trivially cheap. You even have to decide which one you want, picking from a dizzying variety of brands, models and sizes.

I suppose that's true these days; I haven't used a TV as anything but a dumb monitor for about 7 years, so I guess I haven't kept up.

But TV is something that people already know that they want, so they're more willing to jump through hoops; they'll fiddle with it until it works, or call up the cable company and say "make it play HBO and sports". RSS, on the other hand, is something people won't want until they've used it and integrated it into their lives. This is a microcosm of adoption of the internet itself, which only took off once (a) browsers were part of the OS, and (b) AOL disks were everywhere, combined with social forces turning it into a de facto "default client".

By "receiver" I meant a television set. The big box that takes some sort of a signal, whether off the air or off a cable, and shows it on a screen. There is no default TV.

No, there is not, but there doesn't need to be.

There's no default oven or toaster or blender either. Because you buy the product to perform a function. If you buy a TV, you want to receive TV signals, or play content on a device that plugs into a TV.

If you have a computer, it can do damn near anything so there needs to be defaults for the things it can do, to expres to new users that it can do them. If every computer came with a default feedreader pre-populated with a set of feeds and explained "hey, click the [icon] on your favorite websites, and we'll show you new updates right here, like a customized newspaper" there'd be larger uptake.

Being able to do damn near anything makes a computer sound more like electricity than a toaster or a blender.

People buy toasters not because there is a default one but because they've used one in the past and got used to the idea. We need to focus on getting the idea of possibility of RSS-like functionality across, not on a nitpick like lack of a "default" client.

It would be an interesting twist to see RSS explained as "Twitter for any website."

This is one of the things we're working on at Start.Me (http://thestart.me) . We're trying to speed up your online browsing routine and figure out how to add both RSS and non-RSS sites to feeds without users necessarily having to know what RSS means; just what sites they want to keep up with. Would love anyone's feedback after we release something next week.

Could you try not loading a hover box on first page load? It looks like you're doing something neat, but I hate having to have 'no' as my first response.

Good work though.

Agreed, but there needs to be a mechanism to tell me how to use it. I like the idea of flicking around to browse, and this is not something I would have guessed without the info boxes.

Yeah, we were really trying to get users to click the "Try Demo" button to bring up the info boxes that teach the flicking to navigate but I do hear both your thoughts on creating less friction at first interaction.

Not to be a debbie downer, but you can enter any website in Google Reader and get a feed subscription back too, without having to know what RSS means. (It doesn't, strictly speaking, work on non-RSS sites, true, but despite the recent trend we're talking about here, most sites still have 'em if you look hard enough.)

That said, it's a marketing thing. If you can make things click for the everyday joe, all the more power to you!

I had a site I used that feature for, but google took it away like a year ago

What you said is is way more reasonable than what the original posting said.

The original posting referred to "platforms without a default client," whereas you refer to, roughly, "a commonplace convention for some higher level platform to select a default client" (my words).

The original posting further implied it is a problem that there are "competing choices for feed readers," which you did not state. (This was silly, not least because the counterexample of Twitter also has competing choices for feed readers.)

I completely agree that stronger RSS choices and less asking the user, especially at the browser level, would be a great thing. More defaults would be great. But the original post was supporting the idea of a single, global default vendor.

Missing the point. Because RSS has a more convenient alternative in the form FB Likes and Twitter feeds its not so popular to use. If the web/email/tv/phone had a super convenient alternative, we're talking one-click integration to a system you've already adopted, that people would use it don't you think?

I have no idea why Apple insist on the default RSS client under Mac OS being Safari. Mail has support built in, and is a far more appropriate place to keep it since people already think of it as the place to go for asynchronous updates.

  > The web has no default client.

Every computer comes with a browser. Back in the dark days, ISPs geared towards new users were full-on content providers ala AOL.

  > Email has no default client.

Again, either your ISP sets it up for you, you're using your OS's built-in (Windows Mail, Mail.app) or you're using GMail or similar.

  > TV has no default client.

Sure it does, it's baked into every television set ever sold, and it's started when you turn the set on.

  > SMS has no default client.

Again, buy a phone and it's got an "SMS client." Receive SMS, phone alerts you, you can respond.

However, RSS has no default client. If you see a link that says "contact us via email" and you click it, your mail client responds to the mailto: link. There should absolutely be an rss:// (or whatever) protocol link that browsers can either handle internally or ship to whatever client.

>Every computer comes with a browser.

There was a time when this was not true. No computers came with browser. Then the web got really, really popular. Browsers were added after the fact.

Even today, the share of non bundled web browsers matches that of bundled web browsers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_Web_browsers

Bundling is nice. RSS should be bundled! But it's a red herring to say the lack of bundling, or the fact that it's got multiple vendors, is why RSS has not succeeded enough.

As someone who started an RSS-based company (that's now defunct) I think the issue isn't just a lack of a default client, it's a lack of a tangible conceptual model for people. I spent years explaining the RSS concept, testing lots of different metaphors, and almost always got the "blank stare" or "nodding along so you think I understand".

I think the deeper problem is that it takes a kind of abstract thinking, that content and presentation are different things and that the content of a website or blog can be a resource as much as a particular presentation of it, that's just not normal for non-technical people. I think most people still think of websites as "places" you "go" to, and the idea of the content/data packaged in a format for easy syndication is a mental leap regardless of the metaphor you use.

Reading your second paragraph made me chuckle. Your point is likely spot on but I couldn't help thinking how most of that paragraph involved jargon that most people I know would get glossy eyed over. I wonder if rewording it to laymans or non 'geeks' terms might help.

Information on a webpage and 'the' webpage are not exactly the same. Rss uses information from the webpage to create a title and a short description in a way that you can view hundreds of titles and descriptions very quickly. When you find a title and or description that interests you a single click delivers the webpage in its authors intended form...

I think you're correct. If somebody said that to me before I had used Rss I might have glossed over as well.

edit: Sorry about the defunct company part.

Heh, I was intentionally not using any of the explanatory metaphors. :) Trust me, in the many years we were at it I tried lots and lots of non-jargony, more-concrete, ways to get the concept across. I never found the one that seemed to click with everyone.

We also had the additional problem of trying to be the "next generation" of using RSS (application platform, dynamic filters, etc...) before anyone other than tech-inclined people "got" the first generation.

Learned lots of painful lessons from that company. :)

Also agree with the main points of the parent and yours. But I must admit, as a technician myself, it has always troubled me that a feed is bound to a webpage, thus I never used the RSS icon in the navigator bar. For me, a RSS feed is linked to some kind of information, a topic, a person. What is the CNN main page RSS feed about? The TV program? Breaking news? ALL news? No clue.

> I think most people still think of websites as "places" you "go" to

Not arguing against you -- just pointing out -- who is it to blame for making people think of websites as places? I don't think it's the people themselves, it might well be us.

When the web was popularized in the 1990s, "place" was the metaphor that was pushed onto people. It wasn't a natural metaphor nor it was a necessary one. You don't "go to" a TV channel -- you "turn on" a TV channel. For some reason, though, you "go to" a web "site". Why?

I started using google reader when I came from a completely non-tech understanding of the web. Heck, I still just paste in the website of a blog I want to follow into google reader, and it pulls up the RSS, should it have one. One huge plus of RSS is that I follow lots of artsy things, so I get the actual pictures, not unlike tumblr (which also is, IMO, a far better mechanism than twitter or FB for following blogs/sites).

I'm a fairly technical person and I've started just putting sites homepage URLs into Google Reader. I'm tired of having to go to the site, hunt for a little RSS button, or if they don't have one I have to pull up the source and find the meta or link tag or whatever and then copy out the HREF because Chrome doesn't have an RSS button in the location bar.

I feel like RSS has gotten harder to use lately.

There is an official Chrome extension for RSS:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmk...

I have no idea why it is not part of the default install though.

Putting the url of the site in should usually work. There is a standard called RSS autodiscovery that lets a reader discover the address of a RSS feed without there being a badge on the site etc.

Posting to Twitter and Facebook does not preclude providing RSS.

Right, but after one of these big social platforms eliminates the other big social platforms, it will be in its best interests to stop providing RSS feeds because that will be an easy way to force more people to use their platform. (And non-techies will not take the trouble to post the same post to Twitter or Facebook and to a service that provides RSS.)

True but that doesn't mean your own service/whatever should only offer updates via facebook, instead of having RSS for your blog/whatever.

True.

I suspect some individuals inside companies are motivated to increase number of followers/fans, and figure an RSS option would dilute that figure. More likely, it's just ignorance ... Facebook and Twitter show you're down with the kids.

> Sadly, RSS is like many other platforms without a default client.

While that may be true, I'll bet that almost everyone has a decent client.

For example, IE7-9 all have RSS readers. Yes, they manage and create subscriptions. The RSS icon turns orange and becomes active when there's a feed available on the current page.

I'll bet that the other major browsers do as well or better.

Firefox 4 removed the RSS icon from the address bar on pages that have RSS feeds. Chrome doesn't even have an RSS parser now.

Sorry to hear. Opera has an RSS icon in address bar and a built-in RSS reader. Subscribing to a feed is three clicks: first on the icon, second on the feed to use (admittedly problematic), third on Subscribe button on feed preview page.

I guess this is not in the interest of Google to promote free and decentralized information systems - how can they then analyze it and sell ads with that. They rather push a centralized stream à la Google+.

Google search indexes and analyzes the whole web, which is by definition a decentralised information system. How would popularisation of RSS negatively affect their business? Not to mention that Google Reader is still the best web RSS client out there.

Well then why do they want to close it?

1) Why did they create it in the first place? 2) Nobody said they want to close it. 3) The burden is on you to provide a proof for your conspiracy theory.

Actually it was just an opinion from me, I may have expressed myself a bit wrong on the words. But I suppose it is so. I won't be able to "prove" it as I have no insider access to Google executives.

1. They probably created it like one of the many products they did without a profit purpose at the beginning. Even with search, they didn't know where to head before a few years.

2. Right. I was just trying to explain why there could be rumors. They are closing a lot of services that aren't key to their business, though. I can understand that from a financial point of view very well. They may also want to consolidate the brand, and making it easier to grasp for non-geeks. All valuable goals.

3. "Conspiracy theory" is a big word. Think again about it. Companies try to move markets to their products, sometime using offensive methods. Remember Google suspended whole accounts (including Gmail, Gdocs) because users used pseudonyms on Google Plus. They're definitely serious about G+. But I won't search literacy on that topic for you. The world out here is competitive and brutal, that's all.

EDIT - Reformatted blank lines

I think you bring up a few of the reasons why I'm finding RSS feeds more difficult to locate on sites. Several times recently I've only been able to find them by knowing where WordPress automatically publishes the feed or by viewing the source of the page.

No one publishes only on RSS, so the non-techie's can go to a web page to see what's new on the Foo blog. I think a bigger problem is that Foo blog's web site is different in hundreds of small details from Bar blog's web site. In other words, one reason non-techies are more likely to follow someone on FB is that they are already familiar with FB's user interface.

The bigger problem though comes when the non-techie has written something online that I want to read...

Well, beta users really don't need to use RSS. It's like IRC. You have to dig into it if you want to use it, and you would so because you have to.

Actually I stopped using RSS years ago. It's a time consumer, you lose the charisma of every different websites and their way of browsing (I don't see myself using reddit or HN's RSS), a lot of website just truncate their articles in their RSS feed...

I agree that RSS is a poor way to consume to consume social news sites like Hacker News. It's a fantastic way to consume blogs, especially infrequently-updated ones. Why would I flip though 100 tabs in my browser every day to see which ten blogs have new posts when I can open my RSS reader instead and see all the new content at once?

Exactly, that's the time consuming part. Not a lot of people are following a 100 blog, I was. I remember checking my rss reader every 2 minutes to check a new article.

The only solution I found to get back to normal life was ditching my rss reader. Now I just the read 3-4 blogs frequently and check the others from time to time. I enjoy the design of each blogs. It's part of the atmosphere and of the read.

RSS has been my preferred interface to HN, news sites, and blogs for years.

Having to go to websites to get the same information is so cumbersome, primitive, and time consuming in comparison.

I don't really care about the "charisma" of websites. I'm much more interested in just getting the information they have to offer in the most efficient way possible. I couldn't consume nearly as much information efficiently without something like RSS.

Really depends on how you feed on information. Like I said in another response I was an avid user of Google Reader and netnewswire. I was checking it every 2minutes to read a new article, I had basically no life beside my rss reader (and before that I had no life because of IRC, another story).

The only way to go back to my normal life was to ditch my RSS readers. Now I'm enjoying a few websites and I realize I really don't need all those informations. Some websites I don't even need to check their new articles "in time".

And I found out I did care about the "charisma" of websites. It was like reading a different news paper, different texture, different layout, different feeling.

I understand both part, but I think very few people need a RSS reader (do we all read 100+ websites everyday? I was and I don't anymore). And I think a lot of RSS reader users would actually enjoy going back to the tranquility of reading directly through a blog's interface. I know it's less practical, you change the UI everytime and if you read a lot you only need the information. But juste give it a try, don't use your RSS reader for like a week, or at least a few days if you really need it. You'll see a difference :)

TL;DR:Internet doesn't have to be all about information.

What does it matter that most people can't use RSS. Even if 1% of the internet population uses RSS it's still a useful technology. People can learn how to use these things over time, maybe a long time. The knowledge can be transmitted.

Firefox made an attempt at this problem with an RSS icon, but failed.

I wouldn't go quite that far. Their icon is what introduced me to the technology. And I'm still using it daily.

I miss that icon. Installed an extension just to add it back in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com