March 22, 2006

Interoperability

Man, somebody should tell LiveJournal, MySpace, Xanga, Flickr, and Friendster (and del.icio.us too, while I’m at it) that they should really consider adding the feature where users can friend people in other systems. Not only would that be hella more convenient for the users, but it will drive more traffic to everybody’s sites. Huge untapped market there. Tricky part is just how to display updated friends pages for friends in other systems, but at the very least a text link with an asterisk to show new activity should be fairly simple.

Yeah, yeah, I know. There’s already RSS or Yahoo! 360. But it’s a pain to track down all the feeds, and you’ve already done the work of adding them as a friend already. Besides, what percentage of the users out there know and use RSS?

March 22, 2006 09:54 PM in Blogging | Permalink
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Comments

strange that rss is still unknown to most people - even geeks.

Posted by hughes at 03/23/06, 08:03 AM (link)

Well, it’s not exactly intuitive or easy to explain or easy to use. The fact that there are competing standards hardly helps, and that there is no standard location on a page to find the feeds. I think it’s something that’s gonna need a user-friendly layer on top of it, kinda like HTTP compared to FTP.

Posted by fling93 at 03/23/06, 09:06 AM (link)

Fling: It is probably going to need more than a user friendly layer on top of the RSS feed to get people to use them. I looked at the Yahoo 360 site, and even I couldn’t figure out how to set my blog up for RSS feed. You can almost say that the blogosphere is like the internet of the early days, before the HTTP web standards. All the different sites want to have their own type of feed, and each one wants to be the internet standard (So they can make money).

What fun we have.

Posted by Eric Hopp at 04/02/06, 09:25 PM (link)

Yeah, Yahoo 360 is far from the answer. The onus is upon the content creator to input their various RSS feeds into the Yahoo system, and you lose some of the features, like friends-locked LiveJournal posts. I hardly use the thing myself.

So it’s not exactly a user-friendly layer on top of RSS yet. What that would look like, I’m not sure. And you might be right. Even that might not be enough. But I think it’d go a long, long way.

Yeah, the blogosphere needs better standards. Particularly comment systems, which is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

Posted by fling93 at 04/03/06, 06:45 PM (link)