To all those who’ve been writing recently about the future of the web and where it’s going next, I say, “hold on a second.”

I’m not sure that everyone knows where we’re at. I’m not sure everyone knows what’s been created so far. I think there are a lot of basic, valuable tools that are right underneath people’s noses, but they don’t know how to use them.

There are all kinds of buttons popping up on your favorite websites these days like ShareThis, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and [insert more here], but so few people have any idea what these things are. It’s like the collective web viewing public woke up one day to Web 2.0 widget chicken pox and everyone just decided not to scratch. What is all this stuff?

I’ve been informally polling my friends lately and found them reasonably unaware of what any of this stuff does. Are they a wholly web/software centric crowd? No, not entirely. Does that matter? Yes. That’s exactly the point. If no one knows what these things are, how in the world will they get used?

We all know that developers know how to use RSS. Or, as the joelonsoftware.com sidebar states, “We also have one of those RSS thingamajiggies. If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky.” For non developers though, I feel like it’s the opposite. You’re lucky if you know what readers are, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

See that orange button just under my picture? Looks familiar, doesn’t it?   These buttons are all over the web. They’re on blogs. They’re on newspapers, sports sites, job boards, forums, calendars…

I wont try to explain what feeds or readers are because Wikipedia can do that. But Wikipedia doesn’t really tell you what these things do, or at least, not in a way most non-PhD computer scientists can understand. I think it’s really as simple as telling people that “Feeds deliver your favorite website’s content to you so you don’t have to keep coming back to the site.” Or “Readers are your personally constructed web newspaper.”

I don’t think Wikipedia’s the right place to tell people either. How about some of our Web 2.0 chicken pock’d sites start doing the explaining? Companies, developers, and entrepreneurs are creating an amazing set of tools, but only a fraction of web users know what’s going on. People would love to know what this stuff does. Tell them.

For those of you who don’t use those RSS thingamajiggies, here’s how you can get started. Find yourself a reader. If you’re a Gmail user, you’re in luck. You already have one. Click on that top-left link that says “Reader” (or “More” > “Reader”). Done. If you don’t use Gmail, or if you want to shop around, try a few out.

Once you’ve set up your reader, click on one of those orange (or green) subscription buttons you see on your next visit to your favorite website. Then, do it for a few other sites.

Clicking on one of these links does one of two things, either:

a.) You see a bunch of crazy code that scares you and must surely mean that something’s broken. (It’s not, though I’m really sick of this). Just add the subscription manually in your reader (”Add Subscription”). or

b.) You’re asked to add this feed to your reader with a click of a button. That’s it.

Now, rinse and repeat with your other favorite sites and watch your personal content get delivered to you.

It’s simple and convenient, but the internet viewing public has barely started to use these tools. They see these RSS buttons and widgets all over the web but have no idea what they are. People don’t often click on buttons when they aren’t sure what they do.

You know how you can read a book and skip over words you don’t understand? You can get along just fine without the word and going to the OED isn’t worth your time? It’s something like that.

Why haven’t more publishers made their readership more aware of their RSS feeds? I think there are at least two reasons. For one, they’ll lose their viewership and those eyes are driving their advertising revenue. This can be solved by adding ads to feeds, which some blogs already use. Readers could also offer advertising alongside feeds and share the profit with the content creators.

The second reason I don’t think you don’t hear more about feeds from a lot of websites is that feed readers rob publishers of their brand. People kind of like their brands.

With those two problems solved, why wouldn’t publishers want to alert their users to more and better ways to consume their content? In fact, if any early entrepreneurs out there are looking for an idea, these might be worthwhile problems to tackle.

I’d love to see someone smartly combine an email inbox and a reader. There are opportunities for different types of aggregation and different types of data for distribution. As more people grow to understand feeds, they’ll be more and more ideas and varied uses for this technology.

I think this is all great for entrepreneurs. I think there’s an enormous opportunity to ignore the urge to be the next best thing, and instead, focus on those things that we already have that just aren’t being utilized properly. I think these tools need to mature a bit more. Developers, entrepreneurs, and companies need to better publicize the benefits of their tools. I’d love to see start seeing a greater intersection between developers and non developers, but I’ll leave that for another post. Go try that new fangled feed reader out.

Posted in Blogging, Entrepreneur, Ideas, Web 2.0 Comments