Using an RSS Reader is like sipping at a hydrant « MashLogic

Farhad Manjoo urges mayhem on your RSS Reader. He’s got a point. RSS is a powerful technology whose potential has been stifled by RSS Readers. Here are the lowlights.

User-unfriendly Packaging: To use an RSS Reader, you have to understand the concept of RSS. It’s like making you grok DNS before you can browse the web.
Dissociated from Browsing: Consuming RSS is a stand-alone activity. You need to switch out of web-browsing mode into RSS-consumption mode and start up your RSS Reader. Context Switching is inefficient and wasteful.
Information glut: The filtering power of RSS is losing the battle against the growth of content generation. You load up your RSS reader and see 100’s (1000’s if you subscribe to Twitter feeds) of new messages.
Hit-or-miss categorization: As a user you are captive to the categorization imposed by the publisher. Let’s say I write an article about people using the iPhone to play music with the Ocarina application built by Smule. I decide to publish this through my Entertainment feed, but you may expect this to be available under Mobile Tech. The categorization is coarse, subjective, and ultimately hit-or-miss.
No room for Discovery: The burden of locating and subscribing to feeds is on you. Some RSS Readers make suggestions based on your existing subscriptions, but it’s still up to you to vet these suggestions — any new subscription is an all-or-nothing proposition.

RSS is narrowcast through RSS Readers. A firehose of information is delivered and consumed through a keyhole. This is a disservice to publishers (their content does not reach all potentially interested consumers) and to consumers (vice versa).

We didn’t like RSS Readers so we built a better solution.

MashFeeds from MashLogic syndicate RSS broadly through every web page. The firehose is sprayed gracefully across the Web Meadows and you can frolic and take sips at will!

Take the above example about the iPhone article. With MashFeeds, you will see links to my article from the keywords iPhone, Ocarina, and Smule whenever those terms appear in content that you are reading. Contextual, fine-grained links, made visible as you browse related content. You don’t need to have knowledge of the nuts and bolts of RSS. Yes, there’s semantic intelligence involved.

Publishers offer MashFeeds alongside their RSS feeds. Consumers subscribe to these MashFeeds or build their own by converting existing subscriptions (OPML).

If you would like to break your RSS Reader habit and freely browse the web, with relevant and contextual links from every page, back to articles from your favorite feeds, here’s what you do.