Feeds: a marketing nightmare

Do you know a lot of non-technical people who use feeds to keep up with information online?  If your answer is “Yes”, chances are that they’re using iGoogle, My Yahoo or another reader that understood that, what people care about is the content not the technology.

RSS, RDF, XML or Atom are all technologies used and marketed to get content from a blog or service to a user. But, the problem is that all these acronyms increase confusion and diffuse the feed subscription market. “Are XML feeds also compatible with my RSS feed reader?”

A lot of content-oriented Websites dedicate pages to explaining the benefits of using feeds and how it can be done (some even do this extremely well) but, this only puts a band-aid over the problem. It’s easy to get users to add content, modules, etc from a site (iGoogle, Blogline, Netvibes, etc) but, getting users to subscribe to a feed from your blog, Website, service, etc and engage with it is another story. There are too many ways to lose the subscriber in the process.

Plus, even if the subscription process is really simple but looks or feel complex, the benefits will generally be outweighed and people will stick to the process they’re already familiar with. Feeds can be very useful but, being a technical solution marketed in hundreds of ways has definitely limited the growth of this new media.