

How to explain rss to normal people. - drinko
http://internetducttape.com/2008/02/28/explain-rss-using-facebook/

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prakash
This is how I have explained RSS for the past 4-5 years:

Question: Simplifying greatly, what are the 2 ways you can get a
newspaper/periodical/magazine?

Answer: One way is for you to go buy the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Pull).
The other is for the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Push) to be delivered to
you whenever it is published.

RSS is similar to getting the newspaper delivered to you, and hence saving you
from hitting refresh or checking a website to see if it has been updated.

Similar to email, RSS needs a reader/client to read these updates, and these
readers/clients could be similar to microsoft outlook or yahoo/gmail/hotmail.

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aneesh
Actually, rss is reasonably mainstream. You don't have to explain rss to
normal people!

Most of my non-hacker friends use some sort of feed reader. They know that RSS
lets them read blog posts in their feedreader without visiting the blog, even
though they may not know the format specifications.

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drinko
I guess it depends on who your friends are, but mine have no clue. Part of the
trouble is that awful name.

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thwarted
RSS needs to be integrated into email clients, not web browsers. RSS's
"notification" use cases are closer to email, even in the terminology
("subscribe"). If there was better support in email clients, RSS would see
more use for things like ecommerce shipment notifications, website and
ecommerce "newsletters" (which often get marked as spam when sent as email)
and the like. The user remains in "control" then, unlike email spam, because
they can unsubscribe by grabbing the feed anymore. Reach statistics would be
more accurate too (for the same content that was traditionally delivered via
email).

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simianstyle
Honestly, I still think RSS is useless to normal people.

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bootload
_"... Honestly, I still think RSS is useless to normal people. ..."_

Useless in the same way plumbing is to a house. I like to think of RSS & Atom
as the plumbing of the Internet.

