RSS?!

RSS is one thing that I had no experience with prior to this assignment. I signed myself up and was surprised at how easy and intuitive everything was. It's incredibly easy to subscribe and get yourself set up, which is really nice. If you want to follow someone you just have to search their name in the bar and it will provide you with lots of different options for you to subscribe to. Also, if you stumble across a page you like it's as easy as pressing a subscribe key or copy and pasting the web address into Google Reader. You can also import whole lists to your RSS (i.e. your twitter contacts). With all these different ways of adding subscriptions and adding more as you go RSS is very easy to use.



One reason that RSS is incredibly handy is that by compiling all of the sources you usually check on the internet everyday, you can simply go to google reader and have all of those pages updates come to you, so to speak. It's as easy as 1 click instead of 10. However, you don't get to see any other kinds of updates to the pages, and you don't get to view the layout and design of the website which are usually integral parts in each website's 'tone'. Also, there are some kinds of sites that you can't incorporate into your RSS feed. So on one hand I think it's easy having everything in one place but it takes a lot of the character out of things so I will probably not use Google Reader in the future.

I like the fact that the Google Reader is an online program because it's so lightweight and convenient. Most people nowadays have a google account, so all it takes is logging in and you're ready to go. Also since it is online it can constantly adapt and grow, and I'm sure that RSS feeds will continue to adapt and become more and more innovative. If it was a piece of offline software it would quickly become out of date, and need to be replaced, especially since this technology is so new and experimental still.

So in summary I don't think RSS is something I will be subscribing to personally, but I am definitely going to be keeping an eye on it to see where it takes things, and if it leads us into even newer social media innovations in the future.