Generally every person who is net freak starts his day by going through his RSS feeds. People like me, subscribe to many RSS feeds about programming, iPhone & Apple tech, Usability and stuff. Everyday I have about 30 unread articles in my reader app (I use NetNewsWire on mac). People start going through these articles and they really end up reading only small percentage of those unread, Usually only 5-6 out of 30. As most of the Articles are about same thing, same news, same product explored or smashed. Thats where the problem begins.
What people want to read at any given moment also depends on the external factors eg. Work place, Kitchen, Bedroom. When I am in Bedroom, I am really not interested in reading stuff about programming, similarly when I am at work place, I am not interested in reading and watching funny jokes and videos. There are many bloggers and site writing about the stuff from micro-gadgets to social and political views. This is the problem too.
The main goal and purpose of subscribing to RSS feeds is to stay connected and stay informed. People are really interested in reading the news or posts and not in the website posting that news. The news is more important, at least more important than the person or site who is posting it. Most of the RSS reader put RSS hosts at the primary position. They show how many unread posts are present on any given site. Of course some people are interested in sites and people who are posting the things as well, but the very definition of the RSS reader according to wiki says “It is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.” Here we can clearly see the important thing is entries and news. That is why I think most of the RSS reader apps are doing the things in pretty wrong way, they could do much better.
What most of the apps are doing right now is this…
What I am looking for in reader app is this…
I think Categories and Tags is what people actually need to see as a primary differentiator element. RSS feeds provide Categories in the XML that it sends so it could be done with some efforts. Maybe it will be great if user gets to decide what that user needs as a primary differentiator.
