Why Yahoo is Backing Away from RSS

Not to mention if you use RSS properly, people have to go to your page to read the article. Place ads there and maximize on that page.

nobody wants to navigate through ads to find the story.

plus some people are putting image ads in the RSS feed.

If you stop using RSS, dont expect those people to all of a sudden start checking your page. I would simply find a new feed to read.

I agree 110%. I began using the Yahoo TV listings a while back because those on the TV Guide site loaded too slow, were badly organized, and often caused my browser to freeze. As soon as I noticed the Yahoo TV redesign last week, I immediately went looking elsewhere again. Not only are the listings on Yahoo slower and less intuitively organized now, but there seems to be less logical functionality in the TV section overall. For example, it tried to force me to login before viewing the full-page listings, whereas before, I didn't have to. I now use the AOL listings, which have very good functionality and load at a reasonable speed.

As for Yahoo not having RSS feeds for certain sites: That's fine. If I can't have a feed when I want one, I'll simply find somewhere else to get the info or learn to live without it, just as I have with the TV listings. I think Yahoo underestimates how decisive and resourceful many Web users are, especially when it comes to big-name sites that offer a lot of redundant info easily found on other sites.

There is a tendency to over-subscribe to feeds as they are easy and time saving (only as compared to the time it would find the same information otherwise). However, one shouldn't use RSS to subscribe to things that you wouldn't necessarily otherwise read. I don't think RSS is best used to find new interests, but rather to keep up with current interests. Of course, this isn't a rule to be written in stone, but a general guideline. Also, you should consider using RSS feeds which are more specific. For example, instead of subscribing to all of Engadget, limit your feeds to just the tags "Sony" and "Apple." You'll have more individual feeds but far less static. Use some grouping features in you feed aggregator/reader to keep things organized.

Unfortunately, I have not had much time recently for this but I can't help feeling that there is plenty of room for improvement in RSS readers. One of the things I do in FeedDemon is to subscribe to a bunch of stuff in one "group" that is hidden. Then I create watch lists that scan those lists. So my first level of refinement is to control what RSS feeds I consider but then I apply another level of refinement based on the terms I'm interested.

There are two important caveats. First, it is obviously a pain to update the list of topics I'm interested in (i.e. the search criteria). Perhaps somebody will use Bayesian inferencing in some interesting way to mitigate this. The second caveat is that there are some feeds that I do subscribe directly to (i.e. I know I'm going to like what is in those feeds, I don't need the extra level of refinement).

As I said, I think there is plenty of room for innovation in feed readers (and I know there are many readers out there I have no tried that may incorporate these kinds of ideas). My frustration is that we use RSS feeds internally in my company as well and I need something that can read both intra- and internet sites.

Agreed, Michael. I'm working in this direction myself right now and figured I'd lob my softball question out there to see if anyone was on the same page as me.

Jason - I think your response is interesting because it assumes that I actually care about 100% of the content of any feed. I don't. I am interested in 40% to 60% of the content of most feeds I follow. And it's possible that filtering the Engadget feed down to Sony and Apple may not be narrow enough ... or it may be too narrow in some situations.

What I need is a feed reader with a type of "adaptive intelligence" that tracks my web surfiing habits and proactively subscribes to/unsubscribes from feeds and allows the content I care about the most to bubble up to the top. Content that's less important is minimized in the UI (or completely hidden). If there are readers that already do this, I'd love to hear about them b/c I wouldn't need to be working on it myself :)

Jason - I think your response is interesting because it assumes that I actually care about 100% of the content of any feed.

Actually, no. I certainly didn't assume that and that was the point of what I was trying to get at: we should try and make our subscriptions as accurate to what we want as possible. However, it shouldn't be assumed that RSS has the capability to give exactly what you are looking for everyday in the exact amount you want to read. As for the ability to customize a sites feed, that is totally up to the site and is not a function of RSS. You sound like you need web sites that can allow you to limit what you want. It's not RSS's job to do that in my opinion.

Your idea for a feed reader is interesting, but again, it has little to do with RSS. It has to do with finding feeds of interest. Those are, in my mind, two completely different things. I don't know of any software that does what you are looking for (not to say that it doesn't exist), therefore, I set it up to work towards what I want on my own.

Sorry I didn't completely connect the dots. I've started to drift from reading feeds as the primary way to understand the content and I've moved to reading the content of sites. Feeds can contribute as well, but the content of the site is often more indicative of the relevance to my interests.

You mention that "it shouldn't be assumed that RSS has the capability to give exactly what you are looking for everyday...". Correct, it doesn't have that capability. It's simply a stream of some of the data relevant to the content of a site. It has value, but current readers do not do a good job of identifying the most valuable information.

So, for me, RSS has less value than the content - and a shift away from RSS (regardless of the reason) doesn't bother me that much. I don't need RSS. I do need a way of being alerted to content that is pertinent to me without requiring that I visit all the sites or (visually) parse thru what RSS feed readers give me today.