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Does Your Mom Know What RSS Means?
There's no doubt that Dave Winer is a pioneer of our time, and that those of us in the weblogging industry owe him a heartfelt thank-you and pat on the back for developing Really Simple Syndication feeds, known as RSS for short. But as the self-proclaimed Rodney Dangerfield of the software industry, Winer's whining can get really tiresome really quickly. What's his problem? Really, simply, it comes down to the fact that he succeeded. He succeeded in creating a technology that is being adopted at a phenomenal rate, and is going to be baked-in to Microsoft's next operating system, Vista. Sounds great, right? Well hold on there. To Winer's insatiable dismay (those that read him regularly know that he rarely seems happy about decisions that are made by someone other than himself), Microsoft won't be using the label "RSS" when it incorporates feeds into IE 7 and Vista. The thing is, RSS means nothing to the average person. And worse, when the acronym is spelled out - Really Simple Syndication - it continues to be just as confusing. But if you tell someone that RSS allows you to subscribe to a feed on your favorite websites, so that new content is automatically delivered to you, they get it. FEED is the word that people latch onto in this scenario, and that's exactly what Microsoft has determined. Now, I'm no fan of Microsoft's historical naming abilities (Vista being the latest steaming example), however in this case they've got it right. Let's remove the confusion from subscribing to feeds, and make it easy for the lay person to understand.
RSS is a great name for the technology that supports the next big thing on the internet: Feeds. Yes, there are many examples of cases where the name of the technology became the name of the product or process (MP3, CD, DVD) But, in those cases, there was not an obvious and better-suited preexisting word that suited the application as well as "feed" does for syndicated feeds. In this case, like many others, the name of the technology doesn't really matter: do your parents record their television shows on a VHS machine, or a VCR? Really, they just tape their shows. It's what the technology empowers us to do that is important to the end user.
Ed Bott has a well thought out take on this subject as well. Dave, I don't mean to pick on you. Please just reconsider whether this battle is really worth waging, and ask yourself if your position really serves the public good, or simply your ego.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsJordan RunningAug 16th 2005 12:42PM
I, too, am with Microsoft on this one. Feed me!
J.T. MillAug 16th 2005 3:19PM
Watch them decide "creativly chance" AKA rename and put in security holes, RSS to somethimg more M$ like, such as MRSS - Microsoft Really Screwed-up Sendication.
Nicole SimonAug 16th 2005 1:26PM
Well, do we call it SMTP or do we say "insert mail address here, so you can get the latest news via newsletter"? Do you say RTF, DOC, DOT - or do you say "document"?
The reason why I think it will not stick (and should not stick) is because it is the format and not about the usage for me. Having it called feed is okay for me, because it describes something - it can be feeded to me, has content and so on. But RSS?
It does not matter which format it is, and you can see that it does not matter by the fact, that people speculate about how to get "the rss feed in atom format with enclosures" - it is too confusing, and now that the general public is taking up this 'thing I don't know what it is but it works nice', they will want to name it something usable.
That is why we say webpage and not php.
PeterAug 16th 2005 8:15PM
Feed is the best choice. The term "RSS" describes only the specific feed format RSS, not Atom or any other format that might come along, so "RSS" might be technically incorrect.
It really doesn't matter what MS called it, Dave Winer would find something to complain about. He was excited that they were integrating it at all and then angry that they didn't do it the way he wanted.
The end user couldn't care less if the feed is RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, XML or made of chicken salad, they just want it to work. Just like Nicole said, no one cares if your web site is HTML, ASP, PHP, Java or XML, they just expect it to work. People are going to treat feeds the same way.