[chiefalchemist]

This is the crux, isn't it? We might even say it was dead when they named it RSS. That wasn't consumer friendly enough.

The general idea was certainly sound. But as much as publishers offered it they were never comfortable (read: in favor of) so much of their contented being consimed without a visit, or at the very least without any analytics. Total feed subscribers just wasn't good enough.

[zanny]

Users shouldn't have needed to know the name. They should have just seen the logo, clicked it, and been magically subscribed through whatever their reader of choice is. In most cases that is and was how it worked... works.

The problem was always getting users on board with it. From inception the kind of person that would struggle to use RSS and lead to its eventual downfall was using webmail and thought their browser was the entire PC besides Solitare back in the early 2000s. For them, getting some arcane "where should we open this link" when you clicked a subscribe button with the RSS logo completely shut them down. I'm not sure if Firefox's "live bookmarks" ever worked intuitively.

Add on to that I'm not sure if IE or Safari ever supported RSS, had a reader, or anything of the ilk and it was DOA. The remotely informed user would have just used Google Reader, but there was no mechanism (and I don't think there even is one today?) to transparently feed RSS links into a webapp reader.

I know at at least one point Firefox was defaulting RSS to Google Reader, but I don't think IE or Safari ever did, and that was at least 60% of the browser market at the time not providing a usable experience for a syndication format. Thats how it ends up dead on arrival.

[chiefalchemist]

> "Users shouldn't have needed to know the name."

How would they communicate with each other about it then? These things don't expand in a vacuum. Perhaps not in a modern social media sense, but there is always a network effect.

Calling it RSS was too plain and too clinical.

[taeric]

This is the elephant in the room here. With google reader, they actually had a good integration with google buzz so that I could have a small social circle around some posts. I could put a comment on an RSS item and my friends and I could have a conversation on it.

Then, they killed it hoping to get everyone discussing things in a plus feed. Something I have no interest in. Especially because I can't really see the discussions in my email.

Which is ultimately what is killing things here. Many of us built up real workflows for correspondence using email. It works great for that. Instead of trying to help build on these correspondence workflows, companies would rather find ways of owning that correspondence, such that now I have to use Facebook or Google Plus or whatever in order to have basic back and forths with friends/family/strangers.

[chiefalchemist]

Agreed. That said the typical email UI could easily become an RSS reader.

- Sender = publisher / source - Subject = title + author - Body = body

The same can be said for SMS.

Shifting the email client to a one-stop comms dashboard would make a lot of sense (to me). Add in drag & drop to a TODO list(s) and I'm more effective and happier.

[contextfree]

IE had a reader (introduced in IE7 I think). There was some sort of support in Outlook as well.

[sergers]

RSS feeds still in Outlook, but it's the first feature I disable.

Don't need unused folders in my mail directory trees.