More about RSS
Reuters has published a pretty useful introduction to feeds. The information isn’t really groundbreaking but the fact that it is in mainstream media (this article was published on Yahoo! News) means that we should start seeing feeds more widely used in the coming months and more non-techie people becoming aware of them and even using them.
There is a debate on the Micro Persuasion blog about the statistic quoted in the Reuters article that only about 2% of online users use feeds and half of those users are 40 years of age and younger. One commentator on Micro Persuasion made the following point:
Those stats are false. You can say that only 2% of users know they are using RSS. But anybody with a MySpace blog (or any blog) or that uses Google Blog Search (or similar), is in fact using RSS, but they just don’t know it.
This may be true. How many people use services like My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google’s Personalised Home Page and simply add modules without giving much thought to the fact that those modules involve the use of feeds to provide that content. The Reuters article suggests that the survey was conducted on people who actually use the feed buttons on blogs. I’d love to know whether the survey incorporated services that I mentioned above. Charlene Li of Forrester Research conducted the research. I’ll see if I can find out more about the survey.
(Source: Micro Persuasion)
Tags: feeds, user adoption, micro persuasion, charlene li, forrester research
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