You know what I wish? That Google would’ve pushed one of their Chrome experiments through more.
For a while, the spam feed that Chrome opens to by default had a hidden setting you could enable, that added a subscribe button to websites. You clicked “Subscribe”, and the websites you subscribed to appeared on your start screen. This should’ve gone even further. It should’ve allowed opening feed: links, so people could add subscribe buttons to websites.
Behind the scenes, this was just “find the top level RSS feed”, but the UI was so much better than whatever RSS looked like the last moments before browsers removed them. Nobody knew what RSS was, “live bookmarks” were confusing to me even though I occasionally read through raw RSS XML, but all it needed was good UX. Instead, the old RSS web seemed determined to make very clear that RSS is its own “thing”, an orange button that wasn’t always there, that most people were afraid to click because nobody knew what it did.
Modern browsers, launchers, and operating systems all come with a list of articles, most of them pre-selected by Some Algorithm. Adding simple, standardised “subscribe” buttons to UX everywhere could’ve integrated with the system so well. I’m sure whatever behaviour analysis Google is doing and whatever ad network trash Microsoft is doing would’ve worked just as well with a feed the user can manage subscriptions for.
I think the key here is that it’s a feed managed by the user. There’s not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you’re doing it in their best interest so they don’t notice how you’re making money by subtly feeding them ads.
RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.
You know what I wish? That Google would’ve pushed one of their Chrome experiments through more.
For a while, the spam feed that Chrome opens to by default had a hidden setting you could enable, that added a subscribe button to websites. You clicked “Subscribe”, and the websites you subscribed to appeared on your start screen. This should’ve gone even further. It should’ve allowed opening
feed:links, so people could add subscribe buttons to websites.Behind the scenes, this was just “find the top level RSS feed”, but the UI was so much better than whatever RSS looked like the last moments before browsers removed them. Nobody knew what RSS was, “live bookmarks” were confusing to me even though I occasionally read through raw RSS XML, but all it needed was good UX. Instead, the old RSS web seemed determined to make very clear that RSS is its own “thing”, an orange button that wasn’t always there, that most people were afraid to click because nobody knew what it did.
Modern browsers, launchers, and operating systems all come with a list of articles, most of them pre-selected by Some Algorithm. Adding simple, standardised “subscribe” buttons to UX everywhere could’ve integrated with the system so well. I’m sure whatever behaviour analysis Google is doing and whatever ad network trash Microsoft is doing would’ve worked just as well with a feed the user can manage subscriptions for.
I think the key here is that it’s a feed managed by the user. There’s not enough commercial potential in that. As a tech company, you want to be the one curating the feed, and you want the user to believe you’re doing it in their best interest so they don’t notice how you’re making money by subtly feeding them ads.
RSS is simply too good for the contemporary internet.