I added a new feature to my "internet property" Smashingline. You can now get updates when new race results are posted through a news reader like Google Reader. Web feeds are commonly known as "RSS" and are represented by a icon (technically RSS is a specific type of web feed and Smashingline uses Atom syndication).
Previously new race results were announced through Facebook and Twitter I added RSS because of changes made by Facebook to how items appear on people's "News Feed," you know the thing that used to be called your "Wall." If you used Facebook years ago you know that all your friends' posts used to appear there. When "Facebook Fan Pages" were added you could "become a fan" and all the page's posts also appeared on your Wall. Eventually Facebook changed "Wall" to "News Feed," those "Facebook Fan Pages" became "Facebook Pages," and instead of being a fan of a page you now "Like" them. But most crucially Facebook also decided that users were getting too many posts for them to peruse so they created "EdgeRank" which is an algorithm that attempts to filter incoming posts and only show the "most relevant" ones on a person's News Feed.
Since then Facebook has tinkered with EdgeRank attempting to find the optimal mix of posts you actually care about versus advertising. This tinkering has only accelerated since Facebook's IPO. This past September Facebook announced "promoted posts" where the poster pays to increase the likelihood that their post will appear in a News Feed. The converse is that if you don't pay your posts are less likely to be seen. The most insidious part of all this is that when people "Like" a Facebook Page most of them probably believe that they will get all of the posts from the page. Most of us thought that Like was analogous to "Follow" on Twitter, unfortunately that's not so and Facebook user's are probably not getting information from organizations they are interested in.
Since Smashingline does not make money I will not be paying to promote posts (in fact I have to pay Google every month for resource usage on their App Engine platform). RSS web feeds, a pre-Facebook part of the internet, are the solution to this problem. RSS takes away the power Facebook currently has over what information people see and puts it in the hands of people and the organizations they have a relationship with. It has been suggested that Twitter and Google+ are alternatives but they both have the same problem: ultimately another entity decides what information you get. With RSS there is no gatekeeper between a person and the information they are interested in.
There are a variety of news readers freely available. Google Reader is probably the most well-known. It is very easy to add a news feed to Google Reader and after that you won't miss information from web pages you're interested in. And if you have a web site or blog you should be sure that web feeds are enabled for it, your readers will thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment