This week I kicked off a discussion about what the
brand name of RSS should be, going forward. It’s
generated a lot of great discussion, including some excellent comments
on my blog. And
funnily enough, I’m now convinced that in fact RSS is not the right term to
market to the masses. ‘Web feeds’ is the term I like the most, although the
abbreviated ‘feeds’ is also fine. Mike
Torres, Program Manager on MSN Spaces,
made a very good point when he said that using the term ‘web feeds’ for RSS is akin to using ‘web pages’ to refer to HTML files.
Ed Bott also made an excellent point when he
said: “The reason some people at Microsoft are exploring alternatives to RSS is because
people don’t understand the term.”
But most interesting to note is the turnaround in the IE7 Team at Microsoft.
They originally had an orange RSS feed button in the demo that Robert Scoble
filmed just before Gnomedex in June (I specifically mentioned that in my post at the
time). But now it seems Microsoft has abandoned the orange RSS button and gone
with a stylized orange logo:
And to prove I’m not just drinking the Microsoft kool-aid, Yahoo is also
using the term ‘feeds’ more to describe RSS. See this
post referencing the “feeds module” of Yahoo
360 (hat-tip Havi).
Needless to say, Google
is using ‘feeds’ as their main term – and ignores the orange buttons
altogether.
So sorry
Dave and Robert,
but it looks like the tide has turned. All 3 bigco’s are using ‘feeds’ and the majority of people that commented on my post are too. The people have spoken – feeds is it.
