I have to admit to being an RSS junkie. As someone who has a set of sites that I visit every day, sites that have a high content turnover, RSS feeds are a godsend. I read RSS feeds in Sage, a Firefox extension. It's lightweight, fast and seems to be an easier way to handle what in the old days we called bookmarks. There's no advertising and every site looks the same through the reader.
If I'm getting into RSS you can guess that it's hit mainstream. I'm not exactly an early adopter but when I find something that works I use it. Heavily. Why do I find that RSS works? Technically I don't care how it works, I happen to understand how RSS works but you can bet a lot of people don't. The point is that it delivers steaming hot, fresh content to me, fast. As someone who has spent the last 6 years designing websites, I am wondering why the uniform look of sites through a newsreader is so appealing. Isn't that a kind of backwards step? Not really, I still visit sites when I find something I really want to read. What is being cut out is that initial relationship with a site, sometimes the homepage. I don't have to orientate myself when I get to a site because I already know why I am there.
Obviously RSS feeds are changing my behaviour, the way I use and negotiate websites. In terms of design this has perhaps middle to long-term implications. Right now I don't think that we should start designing for RSS only and forget about the conventions of traditional navigation. What we do have to do is start thinking about incorporating RSS into every content-heavy, timely page we have. RSS relies on timeliness, that's the point. It shifts the focus of sites firmly to content, which of course, is music to my ears. Once we start to commit to RSS we have to start looking at how people are using it and incorporate RSS design into every site we build, even if it is just to note that it is not required. In our case I think too it would be beneficial to take a lowest common denominator approach to RSS, that is, assume that people don't know how to use it. The BBC uses this approach and it works well.
Basically we can't ignore RSS any longer. We would be depriving oursleves of an easy way to deliver content and judging by the sheer inflitration of feedreaders, we would be out of touch with our audience. This is never a good thing.
(Get Templatedata's RSS feed if you want to add it to your reader).
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