RSS Not The Next Big Thing?

You know, I sometimes have the feeling I'm spending half of my time responding to what people are saying and thinking about RSS. Here's another one ...

Steve Rubel just posted an article on WebProNews considering whether RSS is really the next big thing.

"Still, the question gnaws at me - what's it gonna take? What's going to "tip" it? Will RSS tip further? I sure hope so. However, if one-click subscribe links to the two largest portals in the world can't tip it on the user side, what will?

At one time I thought it would be commerce feeds, but now I am not so sure. The info junkies may already all be on RSS and the rest of the world might remain content receiving their email newsletters."

Well, while one-click subscribe to Yahoo! is nothing to frawn upon, that's not really something to make RSS extremely popular.

Consider, if you go to a news site every day, as it becomes part of your daily routine, do you really need an RSS feed to keep up with it? Not really, since you're already there every day. Why would I subscribe to something I'm going to visit no matter what?

I don't need an RSS subscription for news.google.com either, since it's already part of my daily routine.

So, what's going to tip the scale for RSS?

a] RSS applications that make life easier, such as using RSS for constant, live and dynamic job search, or receiving crucial updates via RSS to SMS, or receiving updates for my computer applications, or consuming mobile content via RSS on the go, and so on ...

Remember, greatest success is achieved by advancements that really improve life and make it easier in some fundamental way, and not simply by making something just a little easier (one-click subscribe).

b] Aggregating content from many different sources. Now, RSS is really at the beginning, but once RSS filtering becomes more widely used and supported, we'll see users aggregating hundreds of RSS feeds, but consuming only the filtered content that specifically meets their needs.

c] And of course the most important, in my opinion, the scale will really tip only when Microsoft implements RSS functionality directly in IE. Which should happen sometime this year ...

The RSS future does look bright ...