RSS and the Future of Internet

If you are not using RSS, you're miss­ing the hassle-free future of the Internet.

So, the world now has RSS (as does this, my own site.) Click here for a gen­tle intro­duc­tion to RSS. For research and news junkies like myself it is a zil­lion times more pro­duc­tive to read RSS than to wade through HTML (reg­u­lar web sites)… You don't have to sit around sip­ping cof­fee for the browser to load. You don't have to scour the web pages for "What's New." No ads and all the other flashy pop-in dis­trac­tions. Same font and lay­out for all con­tent which is in YOUR con­trol. Some have said it is like "Tivo for the Web". I think the same may hold true for mobile devices.

But what is RSS? RSS Stands for RDF Site Sum­mary (RDF stands for Resource Descrip­tion Frame­work, wow– that’s geeky) but most peo­ple rightly say RSS stands for "Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion" and that’s what it is: an easy way to syn­di­cate infor­ma­tion from most of your favorite sites. What does RSS actu­ally do? Well, if you’ve ever seen those lit­tle orange XML/RSS but­tons on sites that means the site’s head­lines and sto­ries do not need to be read by a crummy ole’ web browser, but by a (you guessed it) RSS reader. You can add all your favorite sites to a RSS reader and read dozens of sites in a quick, easy, ad free, spam free way. More good news, most sites have RSS feeds (NYTimes, CNET, CNN, you name it) there are many RSS read­ers to choose from and you can even read RSS feeds on your PDA, phone and even iPods!

Even the main­stream media is pick­ing up on it, CNN: Wel­come to the New Web

Okay so I'm sold, so what does the future hold for RSS and mobile devices?

RSS, by its nature is some­what sim­ple, stan­dards based, XML, text, all stuff that is small and easy to trans­port. It gets bet­ter; it usu­ally looks great on small screens too. Try and read your favorite sites on any mobile browser, unless they make a spe­cial mobile ver­sion, you’re usu­ally out of luck. Not so with RSS, usu­ally, you can read all your sites, or at the min­i­mum see all the head­lines and descrip­tions of the news you may want to see later on sys­tem which is made for large amounts of text view­ing, like a com­puter. I usu­ally read the head­lines on my device and mobile browsers like Opera or Pocket IE do a pretty good job of ren­der­ing the pages, but I’d never want to go to each site and see what’s new, that’s what RSS is for.

Yes, but what about WAP?

Some say WAP is dead (long live RSS). I kinda agree. The only part that is left is to have the des­ti­na­tion sites all in XML, then you have nice clean data, and most/all mobile devices will dis­play it. If car­ri­ers and OEMs would have adopted RSS as opposed to WAP and allowed every­one to make their own feeds, pub­lish­ing lots and lots of con­tent for phones, per­haps many wouldn’t have lost their shirts on try­ing to do WAP based des­ti­na­tions. Now, I read all my sites on my phone, I never could or would do that with WAP.

Car­ri­ers and device mak­ers "could" build in an RSS reader on phones now, but that’s not likely, at least not for the next year or so, 3^rd party apps will be the way to go. Some might ask, what about AvantGo? AvantGo (www.avantgo.com) was a way to deliver con­tent to mobile devices, but it didn’t really allow any­one to do so, they allowed cus­tom chan­nels, but once it got pop­u­lar you had to remove it (or pay quite a bit of money). AvantGo’s model had their servers in the cen­ter, RSS is on the edge– any­one can pub­lish. Lastly, you’d need to pub­lish to AvantGo’s spec, with RSS most tools that post to sites auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate RSS feeds. AvantGo might suf­fer the same fate as WAP soon (not many desit­na­tions). When was the last time you signed up for a "new" AvantGo chan­nel? For me, it’s been over a year. That said, AvantGo is still a good solu­tion if you’re dis­con­nected for long peri­ods of time and Sync-n-Go more than con­nect on the go, but that’s become less and less common.

In con­clu­sion, RSS might be pretty good for mobile devices, in fact I think it’ll be so pop­u­lar its likely peo­ple won’t notice or care what it is, or where it came from. It will be a per­va­sive part of our mobile device expe­ri­ence; you’ll get news, arti­cles and posts from the blogs you like to read, all on your mobile device dis­played in a great way. For now, it’s a bit geeky, not what any­one would call main­stream, so per­haps this is just a crys­tal ball view, but it’s not a bad one.

Adden­dum: A reader recently wrote to me about Google's "adsense" context-sensitive ads appear­ing on the right on this page, appar­ently the sug­ges­tions are pretty good. Check them out for some free tools for feed read­ers. As I write, the ad being dis­played is "Awasu Free Reader" which looks quite good!