Yahoo Mail tries RSS ... is it a revolution or a step back?
Yahoo is testing incorporating RSS feed reading into Yahoo Mail. As much as I think this might be a good move forward for Yahoo catching the blogging and RSS wave, I'm not convinced that your e-mail application is the best place to read your feeds.
I used to love Newsgator, that is when I still liked using Outlook, but frankly I found that having my feeds with my e-mail didn't let me partition my info gathering well enough. I even tried the new RSS capabilities in Thunderbird 1.5RC ... still nope.
Granted, I'm in the small number of people who read and check a ton of feeds (don't ask how many, it's scary), but in my mind RSS represents a different information paradigm.
Luckily I'm not alone in this quandary ... Stowe Boyd sees the inherent problem in the current crop of RSS readers. I'm also glad I wasn't able to finish this on Wednesday ... I've had several days to mull over the whole RSS problem.
I swear I haven't used one RSS reader for more than 6 months ... that includes our own Lektora. Lektora worked for me when I had 200-300 feeds. Now it just isn't fast enough. Frankly it wasn't designed for me. And that's okay. Again we're looking at a new paradigm of information absorption. E-mail is finally moving into a cool workflow model (even though we're now all drowning in too much of it). RSS has enabled us to "visit" lots of websites without having to "visit" them. The problem is that we haven't quite found the way to display the information so our brains can grok and gist it. Personally I like the newspaper view (Lektora and others have this) when I'm pretty sure that the wheat/chaff ratio pushes more towards "wheat". I like to skim just headlines when the balance tips in the other direction (or I'm pressed for time).
So, where did Yahoo go wrong? They think RSS is like e-mail. That you'll want to "read" the results of feeds as they come in. Do they have any idea how prolific some good bloggers are? Jeez when Scoble (or I) get on a tear we can crank out 10 posts in the space of a couple hours. We don't "read" RSS like e-mail. We scan. We skim. We read when it interesting (side note ... this is why good headlines are really important. While I try to be cheeky you --generally--know what I'm talking about).
So how do I "function in the flow"? Combination of e-mail (yeah I get good tips by e-mail), Omea Reader and Google Desktop search web clips (I have to clear it out once and a while ...). Kind of a kludgey system ... but for now ...
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