5 ms·

I'm pleased to see renewed interest in RSS (web feeds generally). But my concern is that, for first time users, the onboarding process is too complex. There are

by genmon 6y ago

I'm pleased to see renewed interest in RSS (web feeds generally). But my concern is that, for first time users, the onboarding process is too complex. There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear. A plug for my own answer to this: I recently launched https://aboutfeeds.com https://aboutfeeds.com -- a one pager "getting started" guide aimed at first-time users of web feeds/RSS. The goal is to have it linked next to every "RSS subscribe" button out there.

boastful_inaba 6y ago
Hey, looks like you had a very similar idea to me! https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ Though you've gone for the 'simple one-pager' approach where I tried to sell people on it via a full site. I was going to do a visual revamp sometime soon, hopefully include more readers etc but time has been an issue.
- genmon 6y ago
  This is great! I especially love the starter packs. We both opted for "web feeds" over "RSS", which makes me feel better about that choice. Do you have any sense of whether you've been able to reach new users? It's going to take a lot of effort from us and people like us, I think.
  - boastful_inaba 6y ago
    I chose 'web feeds' since it covered both RSS/ATOM and avoided the need to define their acronym meaning. My view stats were very low last time I checked, but I haven't done much in the way of promotion either. (I did look into keyword advertising but that was prohibitively expensive.) I'll probably try for another round of organic promotion once I do the site overhaul.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  But neither of your websites have a section for website authors!
kev_da_dev 6y ago
I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user. My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user. In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user. Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)
- smichel17 6y ago
  > RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user. I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed. I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc
  - genmon 6y ago
    Browsers used to have RSS built in — I forget when Safari removed its reader. But you’re right about that button... something that glows when a feed is present. The current UX, at least on my iPhone, is that I go to a site that looks like it _probably_ has a feed, and then I use the share sheet to push that URL to NetNewsWire. Then RSS auto-discovery takes over. But there are a growing number of sites that look like they _should_ have feeds (posts on the front page arranged chronologically) but don’t. And the user experience is simply terrible when you attempt to subscribe with auto-discovery and it silently fails. The problem is getting that in-browser glowing button on mobile. Browsers are too locked down.
688e7ad06d59e95 6y ago
>There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear. You are 100% correct with this. But not only that is the problem. There are too many sites that don't offer obvious RSS feeds. Like YouTube. I don't have a google account, but I still want to follow some channels. What would be the best way? Right RSS, but YouTube doesn't offer that really obviously. So here is how you follow a youtube channel with RSS: 1) Klick on a YouTube Video from a channel you want to follow 2) From there click on the youtube channel (Doesn't work if you directly click on the channel from the serach) 3) Then you have the url https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel-ID-here> https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel-ID-here> (for example colinfurze's channel ID would be UCp68_FLety0O-n9QU6phsgw 4) Now the last thing left is combine that channel ID with the following: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-ID-here> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel... and add it to your RSS feed! (For example the full colinfurze url would be: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCp68_FLety0O-n9QU6phsgw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCp68_FL... ) Easy, isn't it? :)
- 688e7ad06d59e95 6y ago
  Just checked the extension from the OP. It resovles to the same URL and works fine too. Nice thing.
- strajk 6y ago
  My favourite rss reader NewsBlur (no affil, just very happy user) allows subscribing to YouTube channels just by entering its URL - no need to digging for RSS feed :)
m-localhost 6y ago
Great work. This should be extended to podcasts and images would be nice as well. At the end, maybe there is no way anymore to get non-technical people interested into these technologies if they can get their news from a preinstalled "news-app" and "podcasts" from spotify. I myself just wrote a little script to turn youtube channels, playlists and searches into video feeds that I can subscribe to in my podcast player. I love rss.
- genmon 6y ago
  Illustrations would definitely help, you’re right. It’s in our issues list, and I have some ideas about simple ways to address that. Issues list is on Github incidentally https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds Podcast: I’m not close enough to this world to know. Has podcasting answered the discovery question by centralising directories, or are podcasts still discovered “in the wild”?
zmix 6y ago
Would you mind letting people know about the ATOM format as well? The sentence 1. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) is wrong. It is not "a.k.a. RSS". It must be "What is Really Simple Syndication (a.k.a. RSS)?" ATOM, in many, but not all cases, is superior, since it allows for easy extensibility. Should people be made aware of Feed technology, I would love them not learn to associate it with RSS, but understand, that there is also ATOM, which even has derivates, namely OPL and ODPS. There also exists a PubSub type API for ATOM. Thank you.
- mro_name 6y ago
  and Atom actually is well defined (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 etc.), while RSS is just a mess. There's many of them and no RFC or similar.
benrapscallion 6y ago
I was surprised to see that this page itself doesn’t have an RSS feed to follow updates.

by genmon 6y ago

boastful_inaba 6y ago

Hey, looks like you had a very similar idea to me! https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ https://www.youneedfeeds.com/ Though you've gone for the 'simple one-pager' approach where I tried to sell people on it via a full site. I was going to do a visual revamp sometime soon, hopefully include more readers etc but time has been an issue.

genmon 6y ago
This is great! I especially love the starter packs. We both opted for "web feeds" over "RSS", which makes me feel better about that choice. Do you have any sense of whether you've been able to reach new users? It's going to take a lot of effort from us and people like us, I think.
- boastful_inaba 6y ago
  I chose 'web feeds' since it covered both RSS/ATOM and avoided the need to define their acronym meaning. My view stats were very low last time I checked, but I haven't done much in the way of promotion either. (I did look into keyword advertising but that was prohibitively expensive.) I'll probably try for another round of organic promotion once I do the site overhaul.
Can_Not 6y ago
But neither of your websites have a section for website authors!

kev_da_dev 6y ago

I completely agree genmon! RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user. My belief is that, in order for RSS / ATOM to really catch on, we need to completely abstract those concepts for the end-user. In my opinion, getting people to care about RSS / ATOM is like getting them to care about HTTP. They do not care about the actual mechanisms - only the end result. That being said, I think all we're missing is GREAT product design. Too many pipes are still exposed and it scares away the average user. Make webfeeds as intuitive as social media giants and we have a revolution on our hands :p PS: would love to build this with someone if there's any takers :)

smichel17 6y ago
> RSS / web feeds are a bit hard to grok for the average user. I think basically you want reddit's early marketing, "the front page of the web". Except it's your front page. It's a feed where you can go to see the latest stuff from everywhere you're interested in, rather than having to check each site individually. Like how one's reddit home page shows posts from all the different subreddits to which one is subscribed. I think the best entry point is probably the browser, like Firefox's "top sites" on about:home. The browser is uniquely positioned to know what sites you frequent. If it also knows where to find those sites' rss feeds, it could automatically suggest adding them (also on the home page or similar). Once you've got that -- people actually using it -- you're over the hump, and it's easy enough to for users to transition to curating their feeds, using a different application, etc
- genmon 6y ago
  Browsers used to have RSS built in — I forget when Safari removed its reader. But you’re right about that button... something that glows when a feed is present. The current UX, at least on my iPhone, is that I go to a site that looks like it _probably_ has a feed, and then I use the share sheet to push that URL to NetNewsWire. Then RSS auto-discovery takes over. But there are a growing number of sites that look like they _should_ have feeds (posts on the front page arranged chronologically) but don’t. And the user experience is simply terrible when you attempt to subscribe with auto-discovery and it silently fails. The problem is getting that in-browser glowing button on mobile. Browsers are too locked down.

688e7ad06d59e95 6y ago

>There are too many unexplained steps, and the benefits are unclear. You are 100% correct with this. But not only that is the problem. There are too many sites that don't offer obvious RSS feeds. Like YouTube. I don't have a google account, but I still want to follow some channels. What would be the best way? Right RSS, but YouTube doesn't offer that really obviously. So here is how you follow a youtube channel with RSS: 1) Klick on a YouTube Video from a channel you want to follow 2) From there click on the youtube channel (Doesn't work if you directly click on the channel from the serach) 3) Then you have the url https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel-ID-here> https://www.youtube.com/channel/<channel-ID-here> (for example colinfurze's channel ID would be UCp68_FLety0O-n9QU6phsgw 4) Now the last thing left is combine that channel ID with the following: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-ID-here> https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel... and add it to your RSS feed! (For example the full colinfurze url would be: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCp68_FLety0O-n9QU6phsgw https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCp68_FL... ) Easy, isn't it? :)

688e7ad06d59e95 6y ago
Just checked the extension from the OP. It resovles to the same URL and works fine too. Nice thing.
strajk 6y ago
My favourite rss reader NewsBlur (no affil, just very happy user) allows subscribing to YouTube channels just by entering its URL - no need to digging for RSS feed :)

m-localhost 6y ago

Great work. This should be extended to podcasts and images would be nice as well. At the end, maybe there is no way anymore to get non-technical people interested into these technologies if they can get their news from a preinstalled "news-app" and "podcasts" from spotify. I myself just wrote a little script to turn youtube channels, playlists and searches into video feeds that I can subscribe to in my podcast player. I love rss.

genmon 6y ago
Illustrations would definitely help, you’re right. It’s in our issues list, and I have some ideas about simple ways to address that. Issues list is on Github incidentally https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds https://github.com/genmon/aboutfeeds Podcast: I’m not close enough to this world to know. Has podcasting answered the discovery question by centralising directories, or are podcasts still discovered “in the wild”?

zmix 6y ago

Would you mind letting people know about the ATOM format as well? The sentence 1. What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) is wrong. It is not "a.k.a. RSS". It must be "What is Really Simple Syndication (a.k.a. RSS)?" ATOM, in many, but not all cases, is superior, since it allows for easy extensibility. Should people be made aware of Feed technology, I would love them not learn to associate it with RSS, but understand, that there is also ATOM, which even has derivates, namely OPL and ODPS. There also exists a PubSub type API for ATOM. Thank you.

mro_name 6y ago
and Atom actually is well defined (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287 etc.), while RSS is just a mess. There's many of them and no RFC or similar.

benrapscallion 6y ago

I was surprised to see that this page itself doesn’t have an RSS feed to follow updates.