WageRank has a basic feature request for RSS Readers: feed recommendation. In a post from earlier today, cdc compares the request to Amazon’s recommendation engine.
I can’t believe it’s 2007 and we don’t have a similar service that recommends blogs based on the blogs you currently subscribe to.
iTunes is another successful example of an intelligent recommendation engine based on a simple query of user purchase history.
There’s an important difference between Feed Readers and Amazon or iTunes, though. Discovery translates into revenue for the latter two - recommendations encourage additional purchases. But nobody wants to pay to use a Reader.
Story
Nearly a year ago, we had a similar conversation regarding another basic feature request: filtering.
We built Feed Rinse as an outside service that could be easily added to any reader. But even with thousands of users, the service didn’t drive strong revenue (paid accounts were a few dollars per month.) We even worked with Richard MacManus for a brief time to develop an enterprise strategy and then decided to drop the fees for individual use.
Somewhere in that time frame Google Reader launched. And then Microsoft announced that Outlook 07 would support RSS. Google and Yahoo! also announced they was planning important integrations into Gmail and My Yahoo! / Yahoo! Mail respectively. MacManus even wrote that the consumer RSS Reader was a dead market.
Back to the question
So, why don’t Readers offer feed recommendations? Well, some do (Rojo for instance,) and at least one did (Pluck’s RSS Reader has since shut down.) But at least part of the reason they don’t all is a lack of paid demand.
The Internet [community] expects content to be free, all the way from creation to delivery. And that depresses innovation in the RSS Reader category. There are those who would argue this same expectation also encourages innovation, but so can a kick in the teeth.
Feed discovery doesn’t have to occur inside the Reader. There are plenty of other options. And some of these could provide better solutions than checking the [opml] reading lists of others with similar subscriptions (more on this later.) But feed recommendations should be a standard option for Readers.
I’d be surprised if Google didn’t offer this in the coming months. They’ve recently released personal usage analytics and sharing options that are similar in nature. And Google isn’t driven by profit in each vertical they attack. Their advertising revenue subsidizes plenty of exploration.
Where does that leave us in the meantime? Same place, complaining about the lack of basic features. But regardless of how lucrative the RSS / Atom / XML / Feed category is, we’re going to see a lot of movement this year.
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3 Responses to “RSS Readers lack innovation”
[...] Aaron, one of the masterminds behind FeedRinse, asks that all RSS Reader provide feed-recommendations. [...]
While I agree with your assessment that the profitability of RSS readers is probably holding back their development, you have to understand that two of the most popular readers are owned by companies with ulterior motives.
Bloglines (IACI or Ask.com) and Google Reader (Google) are both owned by self-proclaimed “search companies.” Tracking the popularity of blogs and other feeds is without a doubt of value to these companies because they can use this information to improve the quality of their core business model: search.
Yeah, I’m with you. Microsoft and Yahoo! have plenty to gain as well. I’d say there’s plenty of value beneath the surface for other teams too. But there are plenty of categories that are far more [directly] lucrative. Innovation seems to be looking elsewhere.