Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room.
RSS vs email
| Jason F. | Email is probably used 100:1 when compared to RSS |
maybe 10,000:1 |
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| Ryan S. | RSS is harder to understand too |
it’s abstract |
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compared to email |
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| Jason F. | Email runs the world |
| Ryan S. | “send a notification” versus “somehow magically see updates in a different format on a different application” |
| Jason F. | People know how to get an email. |
They understand an email |
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they’ve been getting emails for 10 years |
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| Ryan S. | when we rely on RSS for things, it’s saying “here learn something new” |
instead of “use what already know” |
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another plugin, or another application, another setup process, etc |
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| Jason F. | RSS is way too techie still. |
| Ryan S. | it’s too complicated |
| Jason F. | I don’t even use RSS anymore |
I wouldn’t want a company to force me to use yet another piece of technology to have to use our products. |
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Everyone on the planet who uses our products has an email address |
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a tiny sliver actually use RSS, know what RSS is, and understand the benefits of RSS. |
Media descriptions
| Matt L. | "Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Facebook Stake" |
| Sam S. | "Facebook, a service that lets people set up their personal Web pages," |
worst description ever |
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| Jason F. | Sam: lol |
It’s amazing how often the media just totally botches such simple shit like that |
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| Sam S. | yeah, doesn’t give you a whole lot of faith in the things they’re reporting about outside your area of expertise |
| Jason F. | Good observation. |
Roll the dice
| Mark I. | Jamis, you’ll appreciate this: My 10 year old wrote a program to roll dice and is using it to play D&D by himself. |
It’s actually more accurate to say that he has several programs. One for each die type. :) |
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| Jamis B. | ha! awesome |
tell me he wrote it in Ruby! |
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| Mark I. | Of course. |
Using Hackety Hack. |
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| Jamis B. | very cool! |
| Mark I. | It’s fun to watch. He swears it’s faster for him to load up the program and run it than it is to just roll dice. Of course, he’s delusional. |
Russian spam
| Mark I. | Incidentally, I came across a filtering rule for email that has completely eliminated all the Russian spam I used to get. |
Matches: (в OR и) Do this: Skip Inbox, Delete it |
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If I got legitimate Russian mail, that wouldn’t work. But since I don’t speak Russian anyhow, I figure I’m safe. :) |
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| Jamis B. | lol, awesome |
Wim Leers
on 01 Nov 07Notifications e-mails for commits, new messages on forums, etc. annoy me like almost nothing else. I see e-mail as a two-way communication medium. So I don’t want to get notifications (which are things you don’t want/have to reply to) via e-mail, since they essentially increase the number of items I think I have to reply to. That’s why I hate that you can’t turn off e-mail notifications in Basecamp. It’s one of the reasons I ditched Basecamp, too.
While it may be fine to only offer e-mail notifications for more than 99% all of computer users, it’s not sufficient if your application serves mostly “techies”. They want more power and will ditch a service if they can’t get the info they need in the way they want it.
jake
on 01 Nov 07interesting to see the wsj bashing right after the walt interview
steve
on 01 Nov 07It is not bashing to point out obvious and serious flaws.
Bashing would be “The WSJ is barely useful as fishwrap, little less as a news source.”
Sameer
on 01 Nov 07Re: RSS RSS readers are the culprit for the most part. I think MyYahoo’s approach to RSS consumption has the best odds of making RSS mainstream as far as web based feed reading goes. “Add content” makes so much more sense than XML, Feeds, Syndicate, Subscribe, etc etc.
Mark
on 01 Nov 07But in some places and among other generations, SMS, IM and “bulletin boards” (social networking pages) are used 100x more then email. It wouldn’t shock me to see email practically disappear in the next decade.
millenomi
on 01 Nov 07RSS is an overemphasis on form (technological form, in a way) over function. It can do cool things, but everyone who pushes it keeps calling it by its transport format’s name, which is completely inconsequential for those who want to use it.
I like “feed” better. :)
Nick
on 01 Nov 07So “RSS vs email” point and not speaking Russian must be the reason for Basecamp to produce invalid RSS feeds for cyrillic characters and ignoring e-mails (in English) about the problem, right?
Here’s how I see most of my todo items in RSS feed source: соотве тствии
And it looks like this in RSS reader: дебаговой
z
on 01 Nov 07re rss i think i’ll like it much better when it’ll allow for content to preserve its original formatting. its just waaay too bland for me. my eye relies alot on various visual cues – subconsciously of course – but those are very important to me.
Killian
on 01 Nov 07Jakob Nielsen wrote this last year:
from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html
Bob Monsour
on 01 Nov 07Were it not for RSS, I would not have read this and walked over here to say this…
Regards, -Bob
Derick
on 01 Nov 07I wrote a bunch of dice rolling programs on the Apple II+ in Applesoft Basic when I was 11 or so, ca. 1978, for the same purpose (D&D). But the real breakthrough was writing a program to roll the dice and automate rounds of rolling dice for Risk—that sped the game way up.
There’s nothing like an interpreted language with immediate feedback to make programming accessible to kids.
Roger Wilco
on 01 Nov 07I can imagine if this was fifteen years ago…
All the techies know RSS is superior to email for getting notified of things versus communicating about them. We should be thinking of ways to make non-techies realize this. Instead of falling back on what works today, we should be thinking of ways things will work better tomorrow.
Micah Calabrese
on 01 Nov 07JF, how are you keeping up on news/bogs without using RSS, good old-fashioned bookmarks and browser tabs?
I completely agree RSS is way too techie. Just before we decided to pull the plug on Newshutch (web-based news reader) we were in the process of replacing all references to “RSS” and even “feed” with “site.” (i.e. “Add a site” rather than “Add a feed”)
Andrew
on 01 Nov 07“Jason F.: I don’t even use RSS anymore”
Yes, actually you do: you publish 37s as an RSS feed that many of us subscribe to.
You guys obviously take some pains to make sure that formatting of particular posts (like this one) translates into something reasonable in RSS readers (it does).
You might not be an RSS consumer, but you are a certainly RSS producer, and a very popular one at that.
Nick Husher
on 01 Nov 07I’d agree with the comments to the effect of, Don’t Call it RSS. Even moreso because the abbreviation stands for the abysmaly stupid name, “Really Simple Syndication.”
News feed sounds better and is actually descriptive of what it is, not what it’s made out of. Now, excuse me while I go use my ERBC (Electric Rapid Bread Cooker)... I mean toaster.
Chitwood
on 01 Nov 07I say feed. RSS, though I appreciate it on all of its levels, basically gets me nowhere inside the firewall.
I’m surprised to see the communication above as I’m always told the “young people” coming into the organization only use IM and don’t email. Interesting.
Problem is when email is used for non-productive items such as news alerts, corporate spam (I should be able to “subscribe” to the volunteer org announcements I receive and not get him by them all.)
I like the word syndication, too. I syndicate mainstream media, user generated content, competitive intelligence information, and other items I regularly need/want. Saves me time/effort and it is all in one place and I can share it easily without having the email it. :)
My 2cents.
Dave Rosen
on 01 Nov 07Jason, can you actually bold text in Campfire somehow?!
dlh
on 01 Nov 07Ryan S. sez:
I guess that’s why Mail.app in Leopard has support for subscribing to RSS feeds.
Dave
on 02 Nov 07Roger Wilco – That’s possibly the greatest comment I’ve ever read. Funniest and greatest.
August Lilleaas
on 02 Nov 07Couple of days ago, it struck me that most people seriously hates software and computers. It’s so many standards and technologies out there it makes it impossible for them to understand most of it.
I think I’ll have a “I’m making software for people that hates using software” mindset from now on.
IMil
on 02 Nov 07I fear that your Russian spam filter is too simple. Some day you may have legitimate Russian customers. Surely they will write you in English, but they may occasionally leave Cyrillic characters in signature and ‘from’ field.
johnkeane
on 02 Nov 07Roger Wilco – that was almost exactly the same reaction I had on reading that exchange.
Right now, far more ordinary people use email than use RSS (feed/syndication/etc., but I’m going to use RSS for this post). Far more techy people use email than use RSS. But that’s (mostly) irrelevant.
Yes, this means you need to consider using email as your communication method to reach your customers – you certainly can’t rely on RSS. But if RSS is the BETTER way to deliver your content, and if it’s a growing technology, then you really ought to get behind that too – and try to find ways to expose that technology to the ordinary person.
It is clear that email is dying a (slow) death. If spam (I get 4,500 spam mails a month into my gmail inbox, compared with ~ 3,000 real mails over the last 2 years) doesn’t kill it, something else will. Ordinary people aren’t even terribly good at using email! How many useful subject lines do you see? (Especially in the thread of a conversation.)
For what it’s worth, it took me a while to get RSS. Eventually, it was Google Reader (coupled with the RSS icon in the Firefox address bar) that hooked me.
Oh, and finally: RSS puts the content delivery in the hands of the customer, not the, er, deliverer. I choose to allow you to send me information. If I don’t like it, I stop getting the feed, or just ignore it. On/Off. Simple as. (This is pure permission marketing, and it means that you know that the only people reading your message are people that are interested in it, and that allows you to tailor your content.)
Serhei
on 02 Nov 07Well, 37signals’ goal isn’t to be the people who finally take new technologies into the mainstream; their goal is to be people who make web applications.
Tomahawk
on 02 Nov 07I live and die by RSS. I’m a big procrastinator, and I work in the IT field, so for me it makes sense. I used to subscribe to all of those newsletters notifying about the new updates and/or articles, but I found I was getting over 20 emails a day. I wouldn’t really call any of it spam either because I asked to be notified and emailed, bu the problem is sometimes I just don’t want to look at a computer (tired, vacation, etc.) and when I cam back I would have hundreds of emails in my inbox that I would never get to. Two years ago I created a new email account with Gmail, and I’ve started using iGoogle to now just read the feeds (I also prefer this term). The difference is like night and day, I now get maybe 5-10 emails a day, half of them being personal emails…..big difference. Then I just follow all the techie/blog updates via iGoogle whenever I want. It really annoys me now when I see new products for IT’s that come out that still rely upon email as there way of notifying me of something (antivirus alerts, server reports, etc.). I really wish there was some easy way to create a mailbox, and then have an application which could then turn all incoming emails into a feed which all of us admins could then subscribe to…it would really make my inbox less cluttered.
MI
on 03 Nov 07@IMil: The naive spam filtering rule that I put in wasn’t meant to be comprehensive, and it’s certainly not used on our support email adddress. It’s only purpose is to clean up my personal email some, and since I don’t correspond with anyone that is going to trip it accidentally, I’m willing to take the false positive risk.
@Dave Rosen: No, you can’t bold in Campfire. Jason put asterisks on either side of the “way too” when he said it in CF, but when Matt pasted it into the blog, the Textile filter treated it as bold.
This discussion is closed.