Making RSS feeds simpler

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Word of mouth guru Andy Sernovitz has an interesting post where he argues that we need to make RSS feeds simpler for people to understand. He does an OK job, although Pat in his comments does it much better likening RSS to ‘home delivery’ instead of having to remember to go down the newsagents whenever a new issue of your favourite magazine is published.

But far from simplifying it Andy makes it far too complicated by recommending that people “get a feed reader” and saying that his favourite is Google Reader.

No, no, no. Nearly everyone will already be using either Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox, so why, why make it harder for them. If you’re only reading a small number of feeds then the basic reader built in to your browser is more than adequate. My Dad is a perfect example, he’s now well into feeds and happily shows others how to use them. But he does it in IE7 and would definitely not want to waste time learning something else, even if it is better.

p.s. It’s a shame Andy didn’t credit Microsoft with already making the biggest move in simplifying RSS by standardising on the   icon, rather than using its own new one (which nearly happened) and calling it a feed, which is reasonably self-explanatory and what Andy is calling for.