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mapgrep

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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