RSS sucks
: RSS doesn’t suck. RSS has great potential. But every RSS reader I have tried sucks botulism.
Newzcrawler just died one day and took the many painful hours I put into creating my RSS feeds with it; and when it worked, it was needlessly geeky and complex. Snarf died less than an hour after I started using it and won’t come back to life. NewsGator wants to mess up my Outlook and I don’t want to do that; I need Outlook for work. CleverCactus looks neat but it’s way too hard to add a simple feed. NewsRoom says dire things about needing to install different MS XML versions or the world will blow up. Oddpost just added RSS to its mail client (why does anyone thing that RSS and mail have anything to do with each other? the days of usenet are long over!); it’s even too complex to work with. And so on and so on.
ARRRGH!!!
RSS is great. It’s world-changing. It can bring information to any device anywhere; it can lead to new, dynamic searches; it can change the way information is served to its public.
But none of that will happen as long as the clients are over-geeked, overcomplicated messes.
All I want is an RSS reader that checks the blogs I read regularly and tells me when they’ve been updated and then lets me read them in a browser where I usually read them. When I want to add a new feed to my reader, it should be as simple as one click or, at most, one cut-and-paste (in some of these clients, you have to go through six to 10 steps just to add a feed).
I want to tell my bosses and colleagues about the wonders of RSS and XML and how it will change the world. But if I show them the state of the art as it exists, they will hoot me halfway to Indiana.
I wish the RSS gurus would stop snarking at each other about how funky their feeds are and get their acts together to create a browser-friendly (and I mean Internet Explorer friendly!) client that is ready for prime time!
