Micro Persuasion: RSS Needs to Become Seamless

Friday, October 07, 2005

RSS Needs to Become Seamless

Yahoo! has just published a white paper on RSS (PDF) that has several key findings:

• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of
RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start
pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling
technology.

• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe
to podcasts.

• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly,
browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).

• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.

The middle two bullets say it all. RSS (with or without MP3 enclosures) has to become seamless before it becomes useful to the masses. Even Google hasn't mastered that yet. I am using Google's personal page to access my favorite feeds and I was disappointed to see there's still quite a bit of a learning curve for the average bear. (Via Scoble)

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo

Posted at 07:21 AM in RSS | Permalink

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