What’s wrong with RSS readers?

Pointing to a post at Digital Inisghts, Dave Winer offers his insight on what’s wrong with most RSS readers.

One of the first rules of software design is also the primary rule of business — ‘The user is always right.’

Most RSS readers remind the user, all the time, how wrong he or she is. Or inadequate or lazy or behind in their work.

Who needs that. I sure don’t. And if I’m designing software that I’m using myself, and it’s always telling me how I’m fucking up, you can be sure I’m going to want to change the software, not the user.

Think about it this way. Suppose you read the paper every day. What if at the top of the paper it told you how many articles from previous issues you hadn’t read. Whoa. When you subscribed to the paper did you mean to imply that you would read all the articles?

Emphatically: News is not email.

Unlike email, every article is not necessarily something you should read, or even look at……

Try this one out. Imagine you’re fishing, and there was some nerd on the other side of the river, shouting at you, the number of fish that went by that you didn’t catch. How long before you’d want to kill the nerd??”

How we doing Jesse?

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