Like a lot of people I know, I’m addicted to my newsreader (RSS reader). RSS integrates so perfectly into my life, in terms of time-savings and information needs, I’ve noticed it’s actually sort of given me a new worldview. In this new worldview, I view everything through a sort of information-time cost benefit analysis. Put pretty simply, there’s a ton of stuff out there that I want to know, but I consistently value that gained knowledge against time spent accruing it.
The perfect example is a sports score, because it’s a relatively meaningless piece of information (I say this as a sports fan). The Yankees play 162 games, most of which are not on TV in my market, so I often forget to check the score of the previous night’s game. To check the score requires three effortless clicks from Yahoo.com’s front page, but I can only remember to do this every few days. I want the information, but the time-cost and work required to get it, on a daily basis, just don’t work out in my case. If I could go in to Yahoo, and subscribe to Yankees scores in RSS, I’d be happy as a clam. Let’s explore this a little.
Things like sports scores (or stock closing prices, as another example) are little bits of information that are temporal, and require significant effort to accrue. Here’s where RSS steps in. RSS eliminates the temporal nature and significant effort; your newsreader picks up that load. And since things like sports score are tiny bits of information, they fit well into the micro-chunk model of RSS. The only problem is I can’t get a sports score delivered to my RSS reader. Sure, I can filter Google news and get all items matching Yankees and score, and that will have the information, but it will also have a lot of information that I don’t want. Filtering is a good first step, but its not the answer we need if we want to microchunk.
As RSS proliferates, we’re going to need to start designing for RSS, rather than leaving in the afterthought role it currently occupies. Right now RSS, for most sites, is a filtered database dump; even in that primitive format, think how powerful it is. Now imagine a site that designs for RSS, letting you do truly custom, fine grain RSS operations – things like getting sports scores sent to your RSS reader. If a site were able to do this in a user-friendly, low barrier-to-entry format, it would stand to become the clearinghouse of information on the net. RSS is a pervasive, disruptive technology, and there’s no question in my mind that adoption will eventually tick up to the point it become a mass-market tool. The site that most understands the information value of RSSing small, valuable bits of data could stand to become a significant news authority in Web 2.0 and beyond. Its time to design for RSS.
