Simon’s Blog

There’s currently a discussion going on between Elizabeth Lane Lawley and Robert Scoble centered on the question: do we need tools that let help people deal with large numbers of RSS/Atom feeds. Robert believe we do need such tools, and Elizabeth disagrees; she believes Robert is an edge-case. Elizabeth has put forward an intelligent and reasoned argument to support her case. However, I have to say, I’m with Scoble on this one.

As Robert says,

She says: “Someone who reads 840 blogs is an edge case.”

Here, let’s look at it another way. Do you ever go to Google News? That’s showing something like 10,000 news sources. So, you gonna call everyone an edge case who reads 10,000 news sources?

I think this quote gets pretty close to the heart of the matter. Think about this question for a second: how do you get to see information on the Net that’s interesting/useful to you? Well, over the last ten years or so, we’ve seen a truly incredible increase in the number of web-sites on the Net. As result, tools (search engines) have been (and are being) developed that help people deal with the fact that there is an impossibly large volume of web content out there.

That’s great. But now, another question: how will you get to see information on the Net that’s interesting/useful to you in the future?

My belief is that, often, you’re going to have it “automagically” delivered to you; rather than you always having to go out looking for it, as you do now, on the web. And what’s going to let this happen are RSS and Atom (and related technologies). So, I don’t think Robert Scoble is an edge case by wanting to read 840 feeds. On the contrary, I would say he’s only just scratching the surface of what people are going to want to do in the future.

What we need then, are new scalable tools (both back-end systems and user-intefaces) that help people deal effectively with as many (or as few) feeds as they want. And all I’ll say at this point is: watch this space…