February 5th, 2006
Focus on the User, Not the Technology
There are two prevailing views of the evolution of online information flow — one focuses on the arc of technology, the other on what the user wants and needs. The technology-centric view focuses on issues like RSS adoption rates and RSS vs. email. The user-centric view focuses on issues like how people can find the information they want in a sea of information.
I think technology-centric view is focusing on the trees rather than the forest. Most people don’t care what technology enables them to get the information they want — they just want the information they want.
Dave Winer wrote about how RSS can bust through, to which Scoble responded with the typical technology view:
Dave Winer has an interesting post on how RSS can break through. I think the thesis is wrong. It already HAS broken through. I asked the audience at LIFT last week (not all bloggers, either) how many use RSS and 80% of the hands went up. Maybe the question should be “how do we get the other 20%?â€Â
If we achieve 100% adoption of RSS, that in itself will do nothing to solve the information overload problem. (If you think information overload is only a problem at the “edge,” you’re taking the technology-centric view.)
Dave Winer’s view is interesting because it straddles both views — he’s championing RSS, but with a clear understanding of what users need:
It must be easy to find relevant feeds. Too much hunt and peck is involved. The reason My.Yahoo and iTunes have been successful is that they centralize a lot of the discovery, they make it easy to find stuff you might be interested in. But not easy enough to qualify for brain-dead simplicity. That’s why we’re working on reading lists, trying to drive adoption of the new practice by the industry. If, when you get started using an aggregator, it gives you some interesting feeds, and then as time goes by gives you more, without you having to do anything, that’s going to make the finding of relevant feeds a passive thing. Until you’re ready to take over, you can ride the bus without learning to drive. I think this is going to get us another 15 or 20 percent of web users into the RSS world.
It doesn’t matter to most people whether they are in the “RSS world” or not. What matters to them is whether they can find what’s “relevant.”
RSS will replace email even if it’s not “brain dead simple,” as Fred Wilson puts it, if the average person starts to feel like it’s the key to finding the information they want. That’s what brought the masses online in the first place. That’s what brought everyone to Google — Google didn’t offer people a new “technology” — it offered people a solution to their problem of how to find information online.
If RSS can enable a solution to real user problems, adoption will follow the trajectory of web browsers, email, and Google.
Topics: Google | RSS | Technology
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More Bridges, Fewer Roads…
Today, Fred Wilson brought up the Email vs. RSS discussion again. Fred’s perspective is different than that of most technologists. He sees the wider potential. The problem is that most people building the technologies get far too caught up in…
Your reaction is exactly right, Scott. But, although user focus is clearly the place to look for inspiration, the results almost always need technology as their embodiment. The difficulty is that software technologists are too often blindsighted by the upward-mobility of their technology, and fail to see the mass-market that they’re leaving in the dust.
I created a lengthy comment on Fred Wilson’s blog. But, this has now come up a few times today, so I decided to post More Bridges, Fewer Roads on my blog, which goes into greater detail about what I’m talking about, specifically as it relates to RSS, email, and the future. Maybe a lot of it is obvious. But to software people? I’m not always sure.
Sorry for aside, but I forgot to put that last comment into coComment and needed a quick excuse. I’m sure you heard the buzz about coComment. If you haven’t… check it out. No affiliation here. I’m already addicted to it though!
You know, Scott, I think this is an area where “old” media like newspapers (or their websites) can play a role — like the bridge that Gary has in mind — when they are combined with an easy RSS reader like My Yahoo or Google’s reader or IE7. If a newspaper has feeds for everything under the sun, or even feeds for stories with particular tags, then someone could click “send me all the stuff about New Zealand” or “send me all the sudokus and anything by that columnist who uses all the big words” or whatever, and then build their own collection of news and other things, instead of having to wade through the newspaper or its website looking for what they want.
Mathew, I think tagging is the key — without tags there’s no way to pull exactly what I want out of the mess of feeds, which is still just static packages. For all the talk of “liberation” with RSS, I still have to take the whole feed, even if 80% of it is useless to me.
You’re right about the critical importance of the user, but the tech-trees do have to be nurtured for there to be a user-forest. The relevance issue is extremely important, and cultivation of the technology is needed for the forest to be healthy.
Dave Winer’s view falls flat on the tech side where he suggests a centralised RSS subscription service. The web (including RSS) works because it is decentralised, centralised services really are not the way forward.
[…] If he is implicitly taking the stand that RSS readers are the best and only response to the “information overload” problem (a la Scott Karp’s “Focus on the User, Not the Technology”), I don’t buy it. […]
Scott, wrt your tagging comment and parsing out the info that I want: unbundling is coming, but business models for content publishers aren’t where they need to be yet.
The smart firms are experimenting, but it will be some time until we see wholesale adoption of microchunked content by publishers.
In the meantime, mainstream users are content to use RSS without even knowing they’re using it (see: my.yahoo), which is ultimately how it should be, anyways. They just have to wade through some chaff before they get to the wheat.
I still believe that a key component of RSS adoption will be as mom and dad become more comfortable consuming user created content (Flickr pics of the kids, youtube grandkid movies, etc) through RSS. Of course, the user-focused subscription solution isn’t there yet either…
k
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Focus On The User, Not The Technology