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to you and the others who have asked: how many regular, non-geek people do you know who know what RSS is? my count: 0. they might use My Yahoo!, but they don'
by dzohrob 19y ago
to you and the others who have asked: how many regular, non-geek people do you know who know what RSS is? my count: 0. they might use My Yahoo!, but they don't know what RSS is. there was a study by yahoo from awhile ago [1] that stated that 12% of internet users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used it. my bet is that those numbers have hardly shifted; have you seen a marketing campaign for RSS recently?
my goal is not to win over geeks, but to make RSS easy and useful for regular people, who have no idea what it is or why they should care about it.
[1] (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpublisher.yahoo.com%2Frss%2FRSS_whitePaper1004.pdf&ei=eiboRr_4BpGggAP3m_m1Bg&usg=AFQjCNGwGhyII_1alIcvQHRmBsQJAuSf8w&sig2=o4K0C05hyp9a5KS0gAHdAw http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=h...)
- tx 19y agoValid point. However, NewsGator, FeedBurner and FeedReader are all well aware of that fact. I've been part of a consumer-grade RSS startup myself. We were trying really hard to educate users (we made a big deal about it) we've been trying to avoid using RSS word, we had web-version (like yours), we had IE plugin and FireFox plugin (!), but ultimately came short of inventing a working business model. Too much competition, too few customers. My startup survived (switched to business customers) and I believe you're coming to the market too late.