As RSS feeds proliferate, it becomes more and more difficult to keep up with critical blogs and news feeds. While mainstream tools like my.yahoo will probably become the dominant platform for reading RSS in the near-term, there are a number of more innovative and interesting viewers out there.
One of the more compelling offerings is Netvibes.
Netvibes is an ajax-based RSS home page. At first glance, it doesn’t look that different than other portals. Once you begin to use it, though, you can see how Netvibes has created a powerful and flexible interface that it simple to use.
Users can drag and drop content panels to any spot on the page. Each panel can be customized with a click, changing the color or number of posts to include. In addition to text-based feeds, you can point to image feeds such as flickr, a websearch box or links to any other site such as delicious.
As the site has been developed using Ajax, all of this customization can be done without redrawing the full page.
What’s the impact for publishers?
RSS will soon be changing the content delivery game in a big way. If you haven’t begun developing your RSS strategy, the clock is ticking. RSS will be at the heart of Microsoft’s new IE7 and Windows Vista. The ubiquitous orange feed icon will be prominent in the applications, both of which will deploy a common feeds list and a feeds API.
What this means is that the user experience will change. With feeds, the publisher will no longer be in full control of how their content is being consumed. Users may use a simple interface, like my.yahoo, to browse articles or they may wish to configure their own custom interface through tools like Netvibes. Users may prefer online-only readers such as Netvibes, existing portals such as my.yahoo, or may prefer to read their content offline using apps like Feedreader. Solutions providers may mash your feed with other content, developing applications that you'd never considered.
Publishers will soon have to make decisions about what content they will include in their feeds and whether they want those feeds to be easily syndicated by others. Those decisions will have critical branding implications. More importantly, content providers will have to decide whether to make their feeds customer-centric or advertiser-centric. Today, many publishers (NY Times, WSJ Online) limit their RSS feed to just a headline or a few words from an article, forcing the reader to click through to the publisher’s website for authentication or to drive advertising page views. But this is not a very customer-friendly experience and may send your readers looking for similar content elsewhere.
In the meantime, if you aren’t using RSS yet, take a few moments to configure Netvibes and make it your browser Start page, so you can begin to learn how RSS may impact your 2006-2007 strategy.
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