New fangled RSS thingie?

Most of the technology friends I have know that I've been espousing the virtues of RSS like Don Quixote and with about as much success.

I guess I was an early adopter of RSS and that was just for getting news content. RSS is the backbone of other technologies too, such as podcasting and photocasting which is an RSS feed with photos. The appropriate program can subscribe to the feed and display the photos on your computer and notify you when there are updates, some programs elegantly integrate them in with your own photos, such as Apple's iPhoto.

When coders first started delivering RSS feeds there wasn't really an elegant way of delivering the content to your average or casual computer user other than adding another program. Last year Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 to the masses and finally, all the major browsers would support RSS feeds natively. Prior to IE7 for the Windows users you had to use Firefox as your browser (and their implementation of RSS wasn't very elegant) or a third-party program for subscribing to and viewing feeds.

According to my theory on how your average person (and they will be dinosaurs before long) uses a computer, a third program for regular viewing is just too much to handle. Your average dinosaur uses e-mail and web, anything beyond the first two is something used for work, a chore, or a project, such as Word or Excel or Photoshop Elements.

So, now we have a situation where the excitement about RSS has worn thin just because the people who dig it have been using it for a long time and it's commonplace OR others tried it with a 3rd party viewer and it was too clunky for the majority of them and they haven't re-visited it. Outlook 2007 for Windows did add the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in the mail application, which is surprising because I would have expected Apple to introduce it first, although it should be included with Leopard 10.5 operating system sometime in October 2007.

I am still an avid RSS user, I love getting my news updates as headlines + 2 sentences and I can readily click on the rest that I want to read. For me it's really the closest thing to being able to skim the newspaper or a magazine and then delve into the articles that interest me. I have collections of feeds in folders in my browser, such as 'IT', 'Industry', 'Local News', and several others. Whenever there is a new article a little number indicating the number of articles shows up next to the folder and I can click on it and check them out. It's incredibly convenient and keeps me up to speed on most of the news that interests me.

I've tried to explain how it can make you productive to lots of techie and non-techie friends but I'm running out of breath so it'll be my thing for now.