Random Chuck

realtimerss:

RSS is not email. It can be confusing because there are feeds that are like email. For example, GMail offers a feed of your inbox. I’ll concede that feed not only is like email, it is email. A reader for email feeds probably must behave like an email reader.

I certainly agree with Dave. This is without a doubt the biggest failure of RSS readers in general. I don’t like to leave legit email unread and these tools actually make me feel just as guilty about hitting the “Mark All As Read” button as if I were deleting unread emails. In fact, I consistently nuke RSS feeds that I get automatically signed up for in new versions of my mail and browser apps. That’s not how I want to read my RSS feeds.

There are other feeds that you never want to miss a post on. If a member of your immediate family has a blog, you probably want to see every post. Or your boss or teacher or best friend. For those feeds you need a simple feature in your reader that allows you to click on the name of a feed to see all the posts from that feed.

This is a critical issue. I think if Google Reader added better support for reading lists, I’d be happy. There ARE critical, low-bandwidth feeds that I never want to miss a post from. (And yes, there are Twitter posts from the same sorts of users that I’d like to never miss as well.) If I can have a list that is news “spew” and another list that is “unmissable” feeds, I’d be quite happy. It’s absolutely wrong to treat all feeds the same.

What makes it unique: RSS syndicates news.

Yes, but it syndicates other stuff, too. Failing to acknowledge that in a general purpose reader tool will always leave some segment of the user base unhappy and underserved.