There’s some RSS bashing going on over at 37 Signals. Greg Story mentions that RSS is sucking the fun and sense of discovery out of the Internet. He pines for the days when we’d surf aimlessly amidst plenty of horrendous “Geocities” web sites (hey, I had one of those with Chico) and uncover a few gems. Random surfing can be fun, but…

The web continues to amass content, and I usually don’t have time to randomly surf the web. There are sites that I would visit on a daily basis, and as such I subscribe to those sites’ RSS feeds instead. Everything I want to read is retrieved and sorted for me by my feed aggregator of choice, Google Reader. As new items are posted on those sites, Google Reader gets them for me. I could be in front of any computer in the world with an Internet connection, and all of my feeds are there waiting for me. Sure, I may not see the sites’ colour schemes, layout, sexy new rounded corners on their nav bar, etc. That doesn’t bother me; it’s the content that I’m after in most cases. If I want to see the design, I can easily get to the original site from Google Reader. And it doesn’t stop with text. I subscribe to audio and video podcasts (should I say “netcasts” instead?) via iTunes, which is again, driven by RSS.

RSS = convenience. It enables the content I’m interested in to be delivered to me, and eliminates the manual task of going out and getting it myself. Back in the good ol’ days, it was a fun game to guess who could be calling everytime the phone rang. Now, thanks to caller ID, we can see who’s calling us and refuse to answer if it’s a telemarketer, prank call or just somebody we don’t feel like talking to at that moment. There came a point where the telephone transitioned from novelty to commodity to neccessity. Our lives become more complicated as time marches on, and anything thing that can save time and weed out the distractions and dead-ends is welcome, IMO. RSS saves time for me on the web- pure and simple.

On an nostalgic aside, I remember having the Pointcast and BackWeb clients installed on my computer when I was in university. It was 1998 and “push technology” was all the rage. While they were pretty big clients and the data often took a while to download on a 28.8Kbps dorm room dial-up connection, the idea worked reasonably well. Thanks to lightweight XML, RSS is welcome improvment to “push”.

PS: Subscribe to my feed 🙂