I think RSS1 is great, but I sometimes feel like it’s at odds with one of my favorite things about the web. For one thing, I see less of my friends’ cool websites. A lot of the websites in my feed reader are really nice to look at. Some of their owners do periodic redesigns which are fun to see. I feel like I’m missing out a little on these lovely personal websites because I nearly always interact with them through my feed reader, which flattens all of the personality into a minimal, legible view.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how RSS is really designed for only one type of website: blogs, where new articles are written and presented chronologically; but not all websites need to be a stream of new posts. You could, for example, have a digital garden where you are revising ideas as much or more as you are writing new articles. A digital garden is a type of website that is perhaps more conducive to periodic browsing, rather than a feed containing updates of every change.
RSS can even become a burden. A feed reader is another inbox, and like all inboxes you have very little control over how much stuff gets put in there. The more feeds to which you subscribe, or the more prolific some of the authors are, the more of a commitment opening your feed reader becomes.
I wonder what the alternative looks like. A tool that helps you remember the sites you like to visit so that you can browse them at your leisure, but that doesn’t create a commitment to read—or at least look at—absolutely everything that is published on all of those sites. Something that doesn’t flatten out the wonderful individuality of everyone’s website. Is it just the bookmarks in your browser? That’s what I used to do before I discovered RSS2.
I wonder what kind of an effect these tools have on our personal websites. Do we all make blogs in part because we start from the assumption that we need an RSS feed so that our friends know when we’ve written something? Do we treat our websites as just glorified archives for our RSS feed? If we assumed that people were visiting our website periodically instead of subscribing to our RSS feed, would we design our home pages differently?
Footnotes
I’m just going to use “RSS” as a synechdoche for all types of feeds including Atom and JSON feeds. ↩︎
If I recall correctly, my entry into using RSS feeds was web comics. Back in college I read a lot of web comics (Sluggy Freelance, XKCD, Questionable Content, Penny Arcade3). RSS made it easy to keep up with the latest strips and not lose track of where I was. It worked well for this. ↩︎
Yes, yes, I know. ↩︎