Comments on: RSS Readers Are Fine, But They Are Niche Products

By: ¿Por qué comento tanto del Google Reader? « El Rincón del Ornitorrinco

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:58:41 +0000

[...] en Internet, acerca de que si los lectores de RSS son relevantes, de que si hay un mercado, de que si son productos de nicho, etc. Esto es una cosa periódica en algunos círculos de los comentaristas y escritores de [...]

By: links for 2009-12-22 « burningCat

links for 2009-12-22 « burningCat — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:04:24 +0000

[...] RSS Readers Are Fine, But They Are Niche Products [...]

By: Rick Martin

Rick Martin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:51:45 +0000

Yes, I agree about this fine line. Another thing that blurs this line even more is the share function of many RSS Readers, which in a sense makes them distribution platforms as well. I’ve found new value recently in Google Reader’s shared items from people in my network, and I can’t help but wonder how many others are giving it a second chance as well.

By: Rob Diana

Rob Diana — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:23:45 +0000

Rick

I had thought about the “Twitter is an RSS reader” argument, but it is not just the presentation that is different. The whole paradigm of Twitter is much different. You can use Twitter as a proxy for an RSS reader because there is a lot of curation that goes into the links that get shared. I am also trying to draw a fine line between RSS reader products and reading stuff that happens to be shared through RSS technology.

By: Rick Martin

Rick Martin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:17:33 +0000

Given that almost every major news site or blog distributes their content via Twitter, would you not agree that Twitter is also an RSS Reader?

And in that case, there is still very much an RSS market.

By: Rob Diana

Rob Diana — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:16:49 +0000

Jean-Marc

I almost used the compiler example, but I figured that many compilers are freely available as well now. The librarian and power user example you give is exactly what I am thinking about.

By: Jean-Marc Liotier

Jean-Marc Liotier — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:51:57 +0000

In the paper era, only librarians had subscriptions to a significant number of industry periodicals. They curated and digested them for wider consumption in simpler forms. Now everyone can be a librarian, but only the power users really want to – so it is quite natural that the market for their specialized tools is limited. Besides, I haven’t heard anyone complain that compilers haven’t gone mainstream. Like tools used by developers, RSS readers are often built by the same class of people as the one who use them. But VC despair not : RSS is also the technology for the most of invisible links that currently percolate news from site to site – there are plenty of opportunities to do business over that, and it does not look like an RSS reader.

By: Rob Diana

Rob Diana — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:44:35 +0000

Mark,

The problem I have with sites like Netvibes is that I do not want that type of visual clutter when reading my RSS feeds. They work for some people, but I am trying to read a lot of information at one time. Google Reader works very well for me in that situation.