blog.philcrissman.com

Been thinking a lot about markets and technology. What I’ve noticed is that if you are somewhat of an early adopter, and if you tend to hang out with a great many other early adopters — even if said “hanging out” is just in places like Twitter or irc — it’s very easy to forget that the average internet user does not even know what RSS is.

Stop for a minute and think about that. I’m pretty sure the average user of the internet not only doesn’t know what RSS is, but doesn’t care, and probably would not understand what the big deal is, anyways. This user is not dumb—it’s just that either:

• they don’t have any pains or problems that RSS would be a solution for. Or…
• no one has successfully explained or demonstrated how RSS could or would be a solution to some pain or problem they are facing.

And many people don’t need RSS in the way someone like Scoble uses it. Imagine this conversation:

Me: You know, you really need to start using RSS. It will make your life easier.

Non-geek: Really? Sounds interesting; how so?

Me: Well, you’ll be able to track hundreds of blogs and news feeds in a lot more efficient fashion…

Non-geek: (interupting) Why the hell would I want to do that?

RSS is just one example.

Another might be Google. You might hear someone say how Google is this huge force that dominates the internet, and how all our data is there.

The average user would probably be a little confused by this statement; they might use Gmail, but they just as likely (maybe even more likely) use the Yahoo! or hotmail account they’ve had for years, or maybe their email from work, or possibly even (gasp!) an AOL account, or simply the account provided by their ISP, including the crufty html interface the ISP provides to access said email. They probably don’t use GoogleTalk, Google documents, Google Reader (no need for RSS, remember) or any of the other Google tools and applications. They might have a blog which they may or may not regularly use, but that blog is as (or more) likely to be on MySpace, Xanga, or LiveJournal than on Blogger. Google, to this user, is just a search engine, and a company that sells text ads. They probably know that it’s the most popular search engine, but that’s likely to be about it.

So, Google “taking over the world” isn’t really realistic to this person. (If only they knew. ;-) )

Anyways, back to things like RSS. I think these will continue to grow as tools and will become more ubiquitous, and yes, the average user will be using them.

But they probably won’t know they’re using them.

The key to widespread adoption will be the creation of tools that solve problems or make life easier in ways that people understand without having to read up on what RSS is, or Atom. Don’t even let people see lists of RSS 0.99, 1.0, 2.0… they’re liable to think that this is one thing which just got updated a few times, and telling them that it’s actually several projects that could even be seen as competing standards is only likely to cloud the issue.

No, don’t even tell people they’re using it at all, any more than you tell people who are new to the internet that they’re using HTTP and that their browser is rendering HTML and various other markup or programming languages. No, you just teach them to type into the address bar, to recognize and click links, to use “tab” to get through forms, possibly some keyboard shortcuts. They don’t care if it’s HTTP under the hood or not. It’s the Internet; get them to ebay.

I used to think that the answer (if one was needed) lay in educating people about what RSS is. I don’t really think that anymore.

The answer is solving the users’ problems. If that solution uses RSS, Ruby, Python, REST, web services, or whatever—nobody cares!

(Nobody except you and me; unless, of course, you don’t. I’ve assumed throughout this whole post that the reader is also an early(ish) adopter of RSS and related technologies, which is actually the same assumption that I’m warning against. My bad.)