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Why only pushing abstracts through RSS feeds is an absurdity

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I’m the new happy owner of an iPhone. One of the first thing that I did was trying to find the right application to bring back all of the feeds that I carefully manage on my Google RSS reader. Because living in Brooklyn means sometime fairly long commutes, reading trade news and the bloggers that matter to me when traveling was critical.
And the app that I found works fairly well (seamlessly download all of the latest articles when I’m connected, that I can then “comfortably read” while commuting).

But the problem that I have is that a bunch of publishers (never bloggers I have to say, either by lack of tech knowledge or maybe because they’re just more open to the social web) think it is smart to parse their feeds and only include abstracts. Here are the usual reasons brought on and why it doesn’t make sense:

– “We need to have the user on our site, if not, people tend to not go anymore to our site…”
Who cares where the media is consumed? The key thing is make sure that you aggregate all of the analytics (and not only your site’s analytics). Most of the analytical packages now include that as a standard. And you might even learn interesting things about your audience (where is the media consumed, through what device or what platform etc.). In the end game, what matters is that the user is in contact with your brand, whether connected or disconnected.

– “We’re losing money since we can’t serve ads…”
While that was true for a long time, there’s more and more solutions coming down the road for publishers to monetize their RSS audience (see the good article from Dosh Dosh on that). And even if it’s not fully perfect, you can actually come up with new interesting packages for your advertisers that would, for example. include location-based services / promotions / coupons etc.

– “Our content is beautiful and should really be consumed on a full screen rather than a micro device…”
True again for a long time but the irruption of smart phones and e-readers is going to revolutionize that radically in terms of media consumption usage while potentially increase the rendering of your content (you might even stretch that argument to say that in some large e-readers that include color, the rendering will be ultimately better than through the current web experience).

There’s also a couple of downsides on the abstract method. The main one (realized from my own use) is that I tend to skip the feeds that are just a couple of lines long. It’s very very frustrating to start reading the abstract, get excited and then being unable to finish the article. Sure, I can always save it for later, but unless that 3 lines abstract was crazy interesting, I’ll never go back to it. So, first effect, I don’t use these feeds anymore (and therefore, I actually stop reading that specific publication, relying on the rest of the feeds to get me informed – good example at Silicon Alley Insider).

You have to follow your users instead of trying to shoehorn them into what you believe is good for you.
In the long run, I realized that with the help of an e-reader and/or a smartphone, I actually consume more media than before. It’s an exciting feeling to board on a plane with no internet connection (that’s getting rare though) and know that you’ll be able to catch up on all these great articles you’ve been saving for a moment like that, a moment when you’re not connected. And that’s also probably a moment where you, as a media company, want to be in the mind of the mind-free user, especially when that user is actually available to connect with your brand.

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Towards creating richer data streams between Internet users

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I’ve been thinking about that for a while: how painful and multi-tasking it takes accomplish the day to day task that you’re accomplishing every day on the web.
Let me be concrete and consider these situations:

  • You’re talking with a friend on Google Talk and you want to send him a couple of pictures from Flickr while talking about a new restaurant and he wants to paste a map in the conversation
  • You’re tweeting about a great place you’ve been last night that you want to recommend and want to include in your post a shorten URL back to this place website as well as the location map
  • You’re blogging on a specific subject and want to include videos, some related links and tags and some pictures that are currently hosted on an outside service.
  • You’re reading an article and want to tweet about it while including a shorten URL back to it and include some other tweeter users in in.

These operations are all part of creating “enriched web streams” that mix and match photo, text, video, social networks signals etc. But to make that happen, most of the time, the average user will  have to open multiples browsers, cut and paste, login to some accounts, struggle with the limitations of each formats etc.

So obviously, when I got a demo from Google on Google Waves, I was very excited at the project underlying motto: to easily enrich the online conversations you might have, add or remove participants, facilitate sharing and communication (even in different languages). And the demo really works: you start to understand how this richer conversation can potentially change the way we communicate with each other on the web (and even keep track of these online enriched streams). Here’s the full video of the demo of the product. It’s a 1 hour and 20 minutes video but it’s really worth it:

The other very interesting project underway is The Mozilla Labs Ubiquity Project. It’s a slightly different scope and objective: the goal is to make your life easier when you’re using the Internet, just like having on your side a little robot facilitating a lot of your most usual tasks.The project is totally open to anyone to contribute, faithful in that to the spirit of the Mozilla Foundation.

The reason I’m linking the two projects is that they’re both, in their own ways, going to help us enrich the way we’re using the Internet. They also both contribute in blurring the classic frontiers between desktop apps, software and online apps. Here’s a quick video explaining the Ubiquity project (that is just starting…).

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