Ditch The Digital Itch: Drop Feed Readers Today

Me before this article:
This is going to be stupid. I love my reader, and it is totally impractical to use my email for something like reading feeds.

Me after this article:
Oh… well, I’m pretty dumb. This makes way, way, way more sense.

Thanks for a great insight. I’m going to try it for a month!

Well I’m going to think about it - because I think you’re brilliant - but I don’t agree, not in terms of my own reading anyway.

I like skimming in a feed - I can tell in seconds if I want to read something or not. I don’t want all of that in my in box. I slow down to read about 10 posts a day - but it’s different blogs most days.

I take your point that casual readers might prefer this option though.

Nick,

Interesting idea. I may consider it - the idea of aggregating everything in one place appeals to me. The overload I don’t have - with my current feed subscriptions, I have tagged the folks I really like - such as you - and then I have the untagged ones.

The tagged ones get attention, just as the email would. I’d likely have the same number of email subs as I do for the tagged ones in my reader. My untagged ones, I skim when I’m having a pint on Friday night - and in a sense, I’d likely do the same thing anyway, by going to a bunch of different web sites.

But as I’ve said - the “one Inbox to rule them all” - I like that. You’ve practically sold me on that.

-Brett

PS - maybe you’ll inspire someone to have folks sign up for *snail mail* updates, like in the good old days of newsletters!

Hmmm, you might just be right. I’m always adding rss feed icons to my website(s), I’ve added numerous links to several readers and dashboards. But, in real life I just read my e-mail.

Good intentions, but I think your logic is slightly flawed. Feed readers and RSS are simply tools, as is an email client.

You list all the problems people have in this information heavy time we live in, but the focus should be on the habits and priorities rather than the tools. The person who subscribes to over 300 feeds in their feed reader can just as easily flood their inbox and be just as overwhelmed.

And when you say, “Not only are news readers harder to keep on top of than email, but they provide a distraction from your workflow that’s tough to resist”, I would wonder how getting an email update would be any less distracting (I’d think it was worse)?

Don’t want to sound too negative here—you’ve got some good truth in here. And if a person did as you suggested, and in the process pruned away all the useless feeds that were not benefitting them in any way … well, that would be progress.

But if it was simply a swap of feed reader for email client, the problem is just being shuffled around, not resolved.

You know, I do click “mark all as read” an awful lot… Perhaps this would force me to narrow down my choices because clearly 120 feeds is way too much. I’ve started setting my alarm an hour earlier each morning just to skim the headlines.

On the flip, with Google Reader I am learning how to speed read, so if I ever become an actor… Hmm…

:)

@Pat - Thanks for giving it a shot Pat, for dropping the RSS button on your own site, and for pulling me up on the email that’s sent out to new commenters! I’ve updated it now.

@Joanna Young - Naturally, you’re absolutely right to use whatever works for you and I thoroughly respect people’s right to choose. Of course, I’d argue that if you wouldn’t want a blog delivered to your inbox, it shouldn’t be in your feed reader either! You still have to process it either way, and it might as well all come to the same place, I say.

Once you get used to it, I found that skimming posts by email fits into my daily workflow much better than a news reader; it’s just as fast, and it cuts down the split of attention between various apps.

@Brett Legree - That’s part of the beauty of it, Brett. The filters, starring, tagging and archiving system that’s built into most feed readers already exists in our email clients! By using news readers, we’re only duplicating existing functionality while dividing our efforts between two applications.

I actually thought about offering snail mail updates for my new blog at 44forks.com. It’s still an option!

@Edde Beket - I always fall back on email too. I think it says a lot that many of us abandon our feed readers eventually.

@chris - Thanks, Chris. I agree with you that habits are important, but am a firm believer that the tools we use shape the habits we form.

I’m not simply advocating that heavy feed reader users switch their 300 feeds over to email. Instead, they’ll find that they pick only their favourite ones to subscribe to by email, simply by changing the tool they use to digest incoming news. The result is that they’ll form the habit to read only the blogs that they genuinely enjoy, and they’ll start to process and read updates in a way that’s not overly time consuming, and that doesn’t interfere with their daily workflow.

If I receive an email update for a post but don’t have time to read it now, I’ll simply star it to read later — it fits right into my existing workflow. If I love a post and want to refer to it later, I’ll label it and archive it — just as I would an important email.

The tools we use are more important to habit forming than many of us imagine.

@Nick Cernis - I agree—tools can help to shape our habits.

But your workflow you just described could be just as easy for someone else using a feed reader. I think that is really just personal preference.

This is more of a scenario where rather than choosing between several tools, maybe we’d be better off deciding if we should get rid of all the tools ;)

Nick,

Exactly! To be honest, I would argue that by going with email, it would be even better since email clients and email in general is a much more mature format than RSS readers.

One place for everything was what really came through in the message (as per my email back to you).

BTW - 44forks is really a good blog.

Great idea. I actually did this by accident a while back, as I just did not have time to even use my system of having a short list of feeds to read each day. Soon it was taking an hour a day to read all that stuff. And a lot of it was the same.
So I got ruthless and went to my faves and sub’d by e-mail. Those posts come to a special folder in my e-mail client (Thunderbird) called (wait for it) “Feeds”. Now I get about 15-20 updates a day. Some I read, some I click over and comment (like this one).

Great idea and I think it will catch on. In fact I designed Business Development in Context to be best utilized by e-mail sub. I even went so far as to make each category available by e-mail or RSS if you don’t want to get all of the posts or posts in categories you don’t care for.

Another thought - this might be really handy if you were on the move with a phone or something.

I mean, my phone picks up mail and it can see a lot of web sites. But using Google Reader… no way…

@chris - Ha! Ditch all the tools, eh. Personally, I couldn’t live without a kettle. :D

The workflow I described differs in several other ways, the largest one being a fundamental change in reading habits.

Subscribing by email transforms updates from active decisions (”Do I have any feeds to read?”) to passive ones (”If I’ve got stuff to read, it will just get pushed to me. I’ll relax.”). The latter is much closer to the model that was originally intended for RSS — a push service, not a pull-me, divert-me one.

I’d suggest that the reader vs email debate is not just a case of personal preference, but that it extends to quite a big marketing and promotional decision. By unifying the message — that ’subscribing’ just means getting email updates — and reducing the options in our page headers, we’d be simplifying the process for all, encouraging more subscribers, and reducing the complexity and hurdles for those who’d rather have less acronyms and learning curves in their lives.

As a bonus, we’d have the extra space to build prettier sites, more time because we’re not off on a crusade to teach everyone about benefits that don’t exist, and better working practices because we can let browser manufacturers standardise the location of subscription buttons for those who want them, instead of having web designers like me scatter them all over the place like discarded fish bits. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what the icons look like.

Or perhaps we all just need to subscribe to some fresh air instead. I’m coming around to your idea about dropping all the tools!

@Brett Legree - Just got your email. Thanks for giving it a shot, and for the kind words about 44forks. You’re a gent.

Hey Nick et al,

Here’s the personal problem I have with this idea. I already archive emails left and right, because I just don’t care.

When an email comes in, I feel like I either have to read it right then or archive it. I like the separateness of a reader, because I can go to it when I have time.

So while I think your idea is a good one, it would mean I read no blogs. My life would be way too productive. And I would cry.

P.S. I am totally stealing your The Leaders of The Grand Association For Making Everything More Complicated Than It Needs To Be (TLOTGAFMEMCTINTBABC). That rocks.

@Nick Cernis - Okay, not ALL the tools.

The funniest part is here we are, people with blogs telling others to stop reading blogs (or at least too many blogs). That’s what I call putting the needs of others ahead of our own interests ;)

@chris - You are completely preaching to the (secular) choir for me - I am a “casual reader” (although it does use up several hours a day as I surf around reading blogs) and I never figured out RSS, so I just e-subscribe to about 5 blogs that I like, with the idea that the blogs I really like will give me links and paths to other blogs I might like to read on an occasional basis.

And I like knowing that if I am just too busy, I can delete (without reading!) my subscription blog emails and go visit the sites another day.

@Nick,

You’re a gent too - and to hear that from a gent, means a lot. Chivalry isn’t dead by a long shot.

I think it will be fun to try this, which upon a bit of further thought leads me to…

@Amy,

Yeah, I thought of that too - I’m a ruthless Inbox Zero kind of guy (thanks to Merlin Mann), so my thought would be to create an extra tag called Feeds (as someone up above had suggested), and then have anything tagged like that go into a separate folder.

I will do that during my testing. Then I can read those at my leisure.

Ack! And I just switched to NetNewsWire from Google Reader the other day :)

Brett — I’m wondering though how creating a separate folder in my email and going over there to read it later is any different than going over to my feed reader to read it later. Maybe I’m missing something. :-)

I agree. Though as a non-subscriber to er… anything, I probably don’t have a legitimate opinion :)

I remember when you started blogging, many moons (months!) ago, and saying “what’s RSS?” You told me it was this dead good thing with the widgity button, and I was like “Huh?”

I prefer to visit the sites of the blogs I like to read, then I can just catch up on things that interest me about once a week or so, without getting bored of reading the same things from different people.

PS. Does it make my comments more valid if I write them here for all the world to see, rather than shouting them across the office when you’ve got your headphones on?

@Amy,

I suppose it isn’t really any different - could just be personal preference. Though the more I think about it, the email client I use for IMAP backup is really good - can make a task out of an email and so forth. So I could conceivably make a task out of a blog post or a comment.

I’ll see how it works.

And besides, you have an iPhone, which is so much nicer than my Chocolate…

@Stephen - My preference is to have everything come into the inbox and filter it by hand, but I can see why your approach to filtering feeds automatically in Thunderbird is a great option for many.

I also like the idea as a site owner of offering email subscriptions to certain sections of bigger sites. The BBC’s site would certainly benefit from it! Thanks for the inspiration.

@Amy Derby - Steal away! TLOTGAFMEMCTINTBABC would be proud.

I used to use a feed reader to separate blog posts from email but, having tried both now, I’ve realised there’s no actual benefit in doing so. I think the separation is purely psychological.

Neglect a feed reader for a short while and it soon becomes a pit full of rotting posts. At least when receiving them as email, you’re filing as you go, and you’re forced to pick your subscriptions more carefully. It genuinely makes for a better experience.

Give it a shot! I promise the world won’t implode.

@chris - Ha! You’re right of course. It is funny that I’m suggesting people focus on the blogs they love. I thought carefully before publishing this post, but genuinely feel it’s the way to go. I don’t just do this for the numbers!

It’s a shame that it’s not realistic to read every blog, but at least we’re more likely to care about the blogs we read by email. If everyone did so, subscribing would be an even more wonderful compliment!

Thanks for adding your thoughts and humour to the discussion.

@Noelle - So pleased to hear from someone who’s already doing it, and glad that it works so well for you too.

@Amy Derby and Brett - I recommend that you don’t try to filter or tag posts unless you need to refer to them in future. If you’ve skimmed a post title and think it looks interesting, but don’t have time to read it, just star and archive it (Gmail) and come back to it alongside your other starred items.

Obsessive filing and tagging just gets in the way of the beauty and simplicity of it. You wouldn’t tag fish when scuba diving, would you? I wouldn’t, anyway.

@Hayley - I confess. I was a fool not to listen to you. What can I say? You are, it seems, occasionally right.

That was easier to admit than I thought.

Re: the headphones thing. At least we get to pretend that we have sensible conversations this way. Not that we’re fooling ourselves…

I have been considering this precise issue in recent weeks: how should I present value content (articles/blog posts), and offer updates to that content, on my soon to be upgraded business website.

My anecdotal experience with clients so far has shown that a good proportion of people outside of the technology/online content world still do not really understand blogs or feed readers. If their target clients are in that space they are interested in having one for their own website, but that doesn’t mean they use it themselves.

I decided that it made more sense for my target clients to publish my content in a newsletter/magazine style and to offer email as the primary delivery method. Of course those who understand and want RSS can easily access that option too.

As you said Nick, this is an important marketing and promotional decision. Thanks for the new perspective.

Well, I for one could not agree less.

I’m a fan of my feed reader. Really! I’ve got about a dozen feeds, and get maybe twenty to thirty messages a day, most of them from my local news station’s web site. I skim the posts as they come in every day, ignore most of them, but decide then and there whether to read, click through to leave the new tab open to read later, or ignore. Then I hit the “Mark All As Read” button, and the queue is cleared. No big piles of awaiting messages, like what happens with my email.

I hope despite your opposition to RSS feeds you’ll continue to offer them for this site. I wouldn’t want to lose you. But I don’t want more emails clogging up my inbox.

I agree with your logic.

I’ve used several feed readers over the years. Adding new blogs to read is easy. So I get into overload, then move on to another.

Now I depend on email subscriptions.

If I find myself deleting before reading, eventually I unsubscribe. Subscribing to hundreds via email doesn’t ever come into it.

Half the reason I use RSS as opposed to email updates is that email is meant to be immediate and personal. RSS is meant to be ignored until desired and is fairly obviously public.

(also, I can’t handle images in my email, whereas that’s half the point with RSS!)

Also, services like Squidoo pull from RSS feeds regularly to populate pages with content from feeds — and you can’t do that with email!

I don’t see how email subscriptions are superior — it just sounds like more clutter to me.

You put forth a reasonable, thoughtful argument with clear, informed points, which, unfortunately I disagree with entirely.

1) RSS vs. EMail is merely shifting load from one tool to another, from one designed to display periodic web contend, to one that was not.

I’m reminded of a story about the Who drummer Keith Moon, who was told by his doctor that if he continued to drink scotch he wouldn’t live to see 40. So Moon switched to drinking Cognac.

2) I have no idea how old you are (I’m 39), but you need to get ready to shake your cane at the young kids in your petunias when I tell you this.

Email is dead. The generation coming along behind us doesn’t care about email. They don’t use it except where required by things like emailed receipts and verifications. They don’t use it, because it’s not immediate enough.

When they take control and wheel us off to our old folks homes, email as it exists today will be long gone. I’m talking about a generation that uses text messages, IM, myspace and facebook, because email is too detached, too abstract. They want conversations NOW.

3) Blaming RSS readers for interrupting your time is like blaming a hammer because you hit your thumb. The right tool and the right process allow a much faster, more streamlined consumption of data.

I use Google Reader, after having used, in order, NewsGator and NetNewsWire, then after determining that application based readers made no sense at all, I switched to online solutions namely Bloglines, and a self hosted copy of gregarious.

I am subscribed to just under 400 feeds. I get between 700 and 900 entries per day. My total time spent “in reader” each day is significantly less than I spend in GMail for my personal mail, and Exchange for work.

I view all new items in one list (keyboard shortcut ‘g a’) and then scroll down the list rapidly one story at a time (keyboard shortcut ‘j’ goes to next item).

Any story which catches my attention gets a middle mouse button click to open in a background new tab in Firefox. When I’m done, and out of reader, I’ve got 10-20 tabs to go through and read. I do very little reading in reader, only enough to determine if something is worth reading further.

If you want me to read your entry, it had better grab me from the title and/or first sentence or two, or at least a picture which can make me stop and dig a bit deeper. It’s almost subconscious, and on days where nothing is grabbing me, I’m hitting the next item in under a second.

Think I miss stuff by not reading the nuances of an argument? Maybe, but your post made the cut solely from the title when I scanned my feeds this afternoon, I had no idea what your specific arguments were until I read the article many hours later.

So, I enjoyed your article, but find your premise flawed. You’re blaming the tool, when the real culprit is the process.

Oh my God, I love you.

(Please advise Hailey that I say this in the least threatening way possible.)

Wow. I had this brilliant response and then Chris Thompson wrote it, and well.

Email IS geriatric. Why would you want to move valuable content (ie blogs you like enough to subscribe to) to the noisy trash heap of your inbox?

I have never felt that my feedreader has any lifestyle drawbacks at all. I’m genuinely shocked so many people actually agree with your suggestion!

Sounds like the problem is an inability to stick to only worthwhile feeds.

I have be the voice of complete and utter disagreement - email would not work for me whatsoever.

For me, reading and responding to blogs is a completely different action from dealing with emails. My emails are task oriented generally. For the most part they require actions. Blogs are information oriented and require only responses. You generally have no to-dos based on the blogs you read, but I’d say that many of your to-dos come from email messages back and forth with people.

Another reason email subscriptions wouldn’t work for me: I organize my feeds. I follow about 150 feeds and when I tried to follow them all without categories, I felt unproductive, wasted a good part of my day and didn’t read a whole bunch.

Now that I have them broken down into categories (I use the FireFix plugin Brief), I set aside a block of time, skim the feeds in a category, opening in new tabs the ones I want to read in more depth, close the Brief tab, then go through each new tab, providing comments.

I then go away and do other work then repeat the above later for the next category. I currently have 4 categories and my 150 feeds with comments take me about 2.5 hours to go through (unlike the 4 hours it used to take me when my feeds were disorganized).

I also use a specific email for subscribing to comments. That way my email stays task-oriented and I can choose (a few times a day) to go view other comments on the blogs I’ve commented on in a specific focused block of time.

To me, your suggestion would increase multi-tasking - encouraging the brain to hop from subject to subject, activity to activity, which in my case severely limits my productivity (not to mention makes me super-cranky).

But, all that being said, if it works for you then woo hoo! Just don’t expect me to delete my RSS button any time soon.

Cheers,
Alex

(Wow, that was a long comment! The Professional Organizer will now step down from his soap-box ;) )

Yeah, e-mail newsletters weren’t spammy or anything, and are really easy to unsubscribe from when they start irritating you with too many frequent updates, then forcing you to jump through badly-designed CGI hoops and recite any number of passwords, mail confirmations and other assorted bullshit to unsubscribe. With feed readers, you hit unsubscribe and the reader stops sending HTTP GET requests. Done.

Of course, the best solution to too many blog posts is to unsubscribe from the endless rounds of dull blogs about fiddling with your to-do lists, masturbating over Web 2.0 companies and gawping at crappily photoshopped Macintosh tablets.

I consider news readers a sort of digital penance for the stupid. If you can’t figure out “right click on orange icon, copy link, paste in ‘Subscribe’ panel of newsreader”, I don’t care. No amount of spammy e-mail newsletters will save a person from his chronic and incurable stupidity.

Chris Thompson said it far more eloquently but, basically: you’re on serious crack.

Having read your post (and all the subsequent comments) I sat and considered whether reading blogs via email would make my life better. The answer is without doubt no.

I try to keep my blog subscriptions (in NetNewsWire) to around 30 so that they don’t get too out of hand. I have them refreshed every 4 hours and I would estimate I receive maybe 60 or so updates a day. Many of these are news headlines and just receive a quick glance without actually opening the article. Anything that looks interesting I open in a tab, usually to be read later with a cup of tea when I have more time.

I don’t receive a great deal of email but what I do receive I usually consider to be quite important. It is refreshed every hour. I’m not comfortable with anything less frequent for fear of missing something urgent.

So you see my problem. I’m not willing to look at blogs every hour as it’s too distracting (even if it’s just to scan them) and I’m not willing to leave email to every four hours. I would also be worried an important email got missed amongst all the blog updates.

I understand your point that moving blogs to your email would force you to rationalise the amount of blogs you subscribe to. But that can just as easily be done within a feed reader. Here’s an interesting discussion on how it can be done: http://forum.worklifecreativity.net/index.php/topic,148.0.html

In my mind email and RSS feeds are very different. email is a necessity that needs dealt with on a regular basis. RSS feeds are leisure reading, the digital equivalent of newspapers and magazines. I feel merging them all into one would complicate my life.

Hey Nick,

As South Africans we have to be very careful how we use our bandwidth as it’s highly expensive in comparison to other countries around the world - we’re catching up, but at a snail’s pace.

So for me in particular using Google’s Reader is far more efficient from a cost/bandwidth point of view because I can quickly spot an article I’m interested in by it’s title and summary. If it doesn’t catch my eye, I ignore it and look at the next title - I’ve only got about 20-odd subscriptions to various sites and friend’s blogs and I don’t read all the articles from all my subscriptions - had I opted to receive them all via email I would have been bombarded with a lot of data I would not necessarily have wanted and it would end up costing me more - or as is the case with us in South Africa, end up being capped and disconnected from the International websites until the next month or I would need to purchase a booster package to keep me going.

Just my 2-cents from our part of the WWW :-)

I would say it depends on the user level and setup you use. I have my news reader integrated into the mail application and the webbrowser. It’s all one piece of software, and the news feeds look exactly like emails to me. I can set up the update interval of the feeds, and I will try to set it a bit higher due to your text. But I won’t delete the feeds, as they make it much more organized to read. And if I click on a link inside a feed, I get the web content in the same application.

What app that is? It’s the opera browser. It’s email client has an integrated news reader.

Note: I’m not talking about those who need to read a ton of blogs per day for work. In that case, a reader is the only way to go. But for me, I’ve switched to email because I changed how I work and no longer depend on blogs… in the process, I took back my life.

I can see the problem some people may be having with getting blog updates via email.

They might be depending on just the one email package.

I use three.

Working emails mainly come in via gmail (whatever their email address).

Friends and family come via Mac mail.

Trials come via yahoo.co.uk (just to make sure they won’t send me junk).

So during a work day I can just check my work mail if I so please.

But whatever you use, it’s your choice.

@Chris Thompson - Email is not dead. The “next generation” you speak of who only communicate via text and IM just haven’t got fed up with it yet.

When I was 17-18, we sent texts to each other all the time and ICQ (is that even still going?) was blinging constantly when I was at a computer. But then I had to start making some money, and that kinda eats into the time otherwise spent “communicating”.

I’m not a big personal emailer, I prefer to phone my friends, or visit them, but if it’s working hours, I know they’ll get my email when they get chance rather than having it interrupt their task, like a ringing phone does.

But I think email is great for business use, and keeping track of client conversations is very important. I’d hate to be concerned with making binding agreements via twitter!

“I’d hate to be concerned with making binding agreements via twitter!”

You got that right. I had one client who started sending over jobs via her mobile (even though I fussed about it). After one snafu (which I had her pay for), that was the end of that.

Email is handy in my business (graphic / web design).

But what if I don’t want to give my email address out?

RSS allows you to consume content from a site without content provider knowing anything about you. The email approach means you have to to trust the site owner not to abuse your email list, or accidentally reveal it to others who may abuse it.

If the issue is really that you want “one inbox to rule them all” then just get a feed reader that integrates with your email client. I currently use RSSPopper in Outlook, so everything is in one place. Similar to other commenters, I put feeds into their own folder, so I just can skim headlines and not worry about missing anything. Real emails needs a little more attention.

Well what a debate we have here…

First off the point about just putting email subscriptions on a web page and letting RSS subscriptions be handled by the browser, is a brilliant idea. As a designer myself I have been trying to figure out what to do about this. I am working on a website in partnership with someone else and they themselves don’t even know what RSS let alone half the people that will read it. This makes so much sense.

As for ditching the feed reading… It’s interesting , I have a few concerns about it. Like it cluttering up my inbox that i use for talking and Communication , I also use an email notifier so that would mean getting heaps of emails coming through?

What is needed (and may exist) is a service that allows you to turn your RSS feeds into emails in a very customizable way. This way you can manage the feed load. For example I may decide to have all my feeds about web and graphic design put into one weekly mailer and emailed me on Friday. Just like a newsletter. Other sites I may get update every few days. I could have different stuff coming through on different days. That idea might be something i’ll look into.

Heartfelt thanks to all for joining the discussion so far. It’s great to get a range of perspectives on this, and it shows how diverse and interesting you all are!
—

@Rebecca Leigh - Thanks, Rebecca. I agree that the decision to promote feed vs email is heavily linked to your target audience. It’s not something many people give much thought to, though. Well done for being the exception to the rule!

@Ted Slampyak - The Put Things Off feed is still there — it’s what powers the email updates, after all. Anyone who wants it can use the RSS button in their browsers, and existing news reader subscribers will still get updates, of course.

I’m not against the technology itself — I just think that the way it’s being promoted and consumed is worth exploring and re-evaluating.

@cat - I had the same experience: moving between several feed readers to manage subscriptions, hoping that one might suit me better than the other. In the end I fell back on email too. For me, it just fits so well.

@Rachel Keslensky - I’m not calling for RSS itself to be dropped. I fully recognise its value for syndication between machines and compiling information for aggregation sites. I’m not sure that the way Squidoo uses feeds adds any real value, though. From what I’ve seen to date, it’s become a kind of marketing mecca to make a quick buck. But that’s another discussion entirely!

@Chris Thompson - Thanks for your thoughts, which show both insight and wit. I’ll whizz through some of your points quickly.

RSS vs. EMail is merely shifting load from one tool to another

Absolutely. That’s the point: by using email instead of feed readers, we encourage better reading and filtering habits.

Email is dead. The generation coming along behind us doesn’t care about email. They don’t use it except where required by things like emailed receipts and verifications.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Every time new methods of communication come in, someone proclaims the older ones will die. They said the mailbox would die when email came in. I don’t think email is dead. I think what happens is that the options for communication simply continue to grow over time, which means that email has a lower mind share.

I agree that there’s been a shift from email to social networking sites as a way to communicate with friends. I think email still has a huge role to play, though, even if its function shifts from messaging to notification. I’ve never met anyone who’s stopped using email altogether. I’ve met plenty who are using it more than ever, though. The ‘mobile revolution’ is changing people’s opinion of email — it’s become more like IM in many respects. Just ask anyone with an iPhone.

They don’t use it, because it’s not immediate enough.

A partial shift to on-demand communication is certainly happening, but I’m not sure that it’s a generational thing. I know 50-year olds who use Skype and Facebook, as well as 18-year olds who won’t use anything except email, even with their personal comms, because they like to have a record of everything. It’s simply personal preference: to hint that no-one under a given age uses email because its not instant enough is perhaps a little too generalised.

Blaming RSS readers for interrupting your time is like blaming a hammer because you hit your thumb. The right tool and the right process allow a much faster, more streamlined consumption of data.

Ha! I don’t get along with hammers, either. Perhaps there’s a pattern emerging.

The process is so heavily influenced by the tool you use, I don’t think you can separate the two. For me, email encourages habits that feed readers don’t. I fully understand that it might not be the same for everyone, though.

I am subscribed to just under 400 feeds. I get between 700 and 900 entries per day.

Do you enjoy sifting through it every day? Seriously — I’m interested to learn whether people are doing it for pleasure or through a sense of duty. I say this as a former feedaholic. It took me a while, but I realised that it was becoming an utter chore and recognised that I wasn’t gaining anything from that time.

Now I subscribe to less than 20 blogs by email, all of which I thoroughly enjoy reading in full. If I want to skim 700 stories to catch up, I use sites like http://alltop.com once a month or less.

@Naomi Dunford - Right back atcha!

@Ken L -

Email IS geriatric

Yeah? Sheesh. And I’m too old to get a Young Person’s Railcard, now too.

Geriatric at 26. What’s the world coming to, eh?

@Tom Morris - You’ll find almost every email update service offers one-click unsubscription now. The ones that don’t will have to come around to the idea!

I consider news readers a sort of digital penance for the stupid. If you can’t figure out “right click on orange icon, copy link, paste in ‘Subscribe’ panel of newsreader”, I don’t care.

It’s not just about increasing access and lowering the barriers to entry, although that’s a big part of it. To say you don’t care about making life easy for others is a little sad, frankly. Presumably you don’t think the blind deserve net access either. Creating barriers to uptake through some sense of superiority or bullish ignorance isn’t healthy for anyone. Publishers and potential readers both suffer.

@Team Spirit - No drugs here. I’m all-natural home-grown crazy, me.

@Rachel Murphy -

I understand your point that moving blogs to your email would force you to rationalise the amount of blogs you subscribe to. But that can just as easily be done within a feed reader.

Sure. I don’t think it’s simply a case of cutting down, though; I genuinely feel that separating feeds from email offers no benefit. There’s no harm in filtering and highlighting incoming subscriptions in your email account, if that offers the same psychological protection, though. It achieves a similar degree of separation, but with the added convenience of having it all in one place, whilst removing the twitch factor.

I appreciate that it’s very much a personal choice. I think more people could try both to make a more informed decision, though. I may not like the idea of chocolate-coated chicken, but I’d give it a shot.

@Alex Fayle | Someday Syndrome -

My emails are task oriented generally. For the most part they require actions. Blogs are information oriented and require only responses.

I’d suggest that there’s very little difference. Aren’t the actions your emails require also often responses? Isn’t a blog post essentially just a message to a large group of people? Does the message change because it’s read in a feed reader instead of an email account? I think there’s a lot of crossover here to explore.

@Demitri - Thanks for the comment on bandwidth in South Africa. It’s not something I’d considered and, while many email clients give options for those with limited bandwidth (like only fetching post subjects and not the whole message), I can see why feed readers make sense for you.

@Jochen - I used to be a massive Opera fan and really wanted to love the integration of web, mail, and feeds, but found that the user experience let it down in the end, as is often the problem with any kind of converged software or hardware. Perhaps I need to try the latest version!

@Gaivn Clarke -

But what if I don’t want to give my email address out?

Use a throw-away email address, or use Gmail. With Gmail, you can automatically create as many addresses as you like just by using a plus sign in your address: if you subscribed to Put Things Off using yourgmailaddress+pto@gmail.com and I sold the address in future (I never would), you can simply filter all mail to that address to your junk folder.

Don’t worry about giving your email address out : just rely on high-tech spam filtering like the kind Gmail and Yahoo offer.

@Smarky -

the point about just putting email subscriptions on a web page and letting RSS subscriptions be handled by the browser, is a brilliant idea.

Thanks, Smarky. I think it makes sense too. I wouldn’t put a “print this page” button in my site header, either. If people want that functionality, it’s right there in the browser.

What is needed (and may exist) is a service that allows you to turn your RSS feeds into emails in a very customizable way.

I agree that digests and other forms of customisable email/feed updates would be a great option for many site owners. I’m still looking into all the options here. If anyone finds a service that provides them, do drop a comment here.

—
Thanks again for your thoughts, all. If anyone’s umming and erring, give email updates from your favourite sites a shot for a month and develop your own informed opinion.

Heaven forbid anyone simply take my word for it! Please do give it a shot, though.

Originally Posted By PatMe before this article:
This is going to be stupid. I love my reader, and it is totally impractical to use my email for something like reading feeds.

Me after this article:
Ohâ�¦ well, I’m pretty dumb. This makes way, way, way more sense.

Thanks for a great insight. I’m going to try it for a month!

That was pretty much my train of thought, too!

Another great article, Nick. I’m going to give this a shot for one month - I hope you’re right, or I’m flying over to England to have you personally clean out my inbox!

@Chris - Manager’s Sandbox - Ha! Thanks, Chris. Do try it out. Just be very selective about the sites you subscribe to.

If you want to fly over, you’re welcome any time! I’d owe you an inbox detox for your troubles, I reckon.

I have to say, and I’m trying to be kind, that this idea is a fantasy. I thought that before reading your post, and even more after. I can’t think of a way to detour my productivity more effectively than what you suggest, and for a large majority of people that user rss readers, your idea is so impossible that I had to look at the calendar and make sure it wasn’t april 1st.

There’s already been good points against this idea, so I’ll try and keep this short.

Yes, for some people what you’re describing is better than using a separate reader. These people shouldn’t have been using a reader in the first place.

It’s a good idea if you don’t understand readers. The comments are loaded by people that obviously don’t understand how rss works and therefore conclude you’re idea is great.

I mean, not to pick on anyone, but:

“I’ve used several feed readers over the years. Adding new blogs to read is easy. So I get into overload, then move on to another.”

They’re full, so they move on? That’s no different than getting too much email so you switch from thunderbird to outlook. She should be using a reader. She shouldn’t even look at a reader.

If you only have a few websites to cover, then yes, a reader is over kill. If rss simply isn’t that important to you, then yes, don’t use a reader.

But for someone that has many feeds (and your assumption that people with lots of feeds are addicted, that they can’t possibly be using them and enjoying them, is condescending) pouring them into an email box is absurd. Mixing my email, which is very important to me, with the amount of news I want to read is absurd.

I use rss every day, for sites that update multiple times a day. I don’t want that mixed with my email. And while email has some tools already included that help with rss, they are lacking (for a hard core rss user) many tools that my rss reader has.

As I said before, points I would make have already been made, but let me end with this. They holy grail of ‘one box’ for ANYTHING is an illusion for most people. It’s why Outlook is so bloated. The right tool for the right job, with integration, is superior than the one box that does everything, but nothing great.

So if you’re pointing at a certain segment of user and saying, email is all you need. Fine. If you’re saying, for a large segment of rss readers, that email can do it all, you’re wrong. There’s no evolution coming. Readers are getting better every year, and email is no match today, nor will it ever be.

One analogy I forgot.

I have to get to work every day. I use a compact car that’s great on fuel. I also have to haul dirt every day at work. I use a dump truck for that.

The same is true for email and rss. You’re saying they’re similar, so they can use the same tool. But each is better for their job. The small differences make a difference. I don’t want to drive to work in a dump truck, and I don’t want to haul dirt with my compact car.

The fact that I’m now using one vehicle instead of two means little. The right vehicle makes the job easier and more enjoyable.

Thanks for your thoughts, Dan. The feed reader equals dump truck analogy certainly had me smiling, although I’m not sure you intended it to come out that way!

The goal was simply to highlight how email updates have been relegated to second place, when they’ve always been a much simpler alternative.

I’m happy for everyone to use whatever setup works for them, of course. I’m not expecting to change the world — just make people think and spark a short discussion.

@Nick Cernis

@Nick Cernis

Absolutely. That’s the point: by using email instead of feed readers, we encourage better reading and filtering habits.

Reading and Filtering are process, not application.

In a world where 90% of all email traffic is spam and even a company with the resources of Google can’t keep Viagra ads out of my inbox, it seems a highly dubious argument that email is going to promote either.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Every time new methods of communication come in, someone proclaims the older ones will die. They said the mailbox would die when email came in. I don’t think email is dead. I think what happens is that the options for communication simply continue to grow over time, which means that email has a lower mind share.

I committed the sin of speaking in absolutes, mea culpa. “Electronic Mail” will not go away. But the form it will take will look much more like Facebook than the US postal service.

To your point about the mailbox going away, at least in my life (39, Married, Father of three, mortgage, two car payments, etc.) I’m not convinced it hasn’t. Once you strip out the junk mail, my mailbox at the curb receives paper copies of bills that I already received digitally several days before, often that have been already paid through online banking. My kids get birthday cards from elderly aunts with no computers. Occasionally I’ll receive a catalog from some place that I’d purchased something from their website.

I can’t tell you the last time I actually put something out to mail, or even bought stamps. Perhaps I’m rare, but if the US Postal Service folded up its tent tomorrow, I wouldn’t be impacted in the slightest.

to hint that no-one under a given age uses email because its not instant enough is perhaps a little too generalised.

See above for my sheepish admission of engaging in blanket statements. I was over reaching. “no-one” is not correct.

But the “market” is going to steer towards the largest demographic. As the father of a 12 year old, a 10 year old, husband of an elementary teacher, and in turn exposed to dozens of that generation, I can tell you, it skews VERY heavy in that direction.

My son has unlimited text messages on his cell phone, which I didn’t want to give him in the first place. That’s how they communicate. And lest you think I’m in some part of the country that puts my kids in some unique, affluent demographic, I live in farm country Ohio, east of Cincinnati (Where Twain claimed everything happens five years late). There’s a kid who drives his tractor to high school. Seriously.

Do you enjoy sifting through it every day? Seriously — I’m interested to learn whether people are doing it for pleasure or through a sense of duty.

It’s not about enjoying it or not, I simply don’t notice it. Seriously. I spend time brushing my teeth, I spend time screening feeds.

I suspect that you’re overestimating the time I spend. This morning when I logged in I had around 400 new items in Google Reader. I was through them in about ten minutes, maybe a bit longer. With the keyboard shortcuts, I literally sit with my finger on the J key, which is “next item” in GReader. Today the stream was far more noise than signal, and I only forked off about five tabs out of that 400 items.

One advantage of having a huge number of feeds is duplication. Many times the same story will show on five different sites, referring to some event, some news, some new site or doodad or geegaw. My mental filters are largely instinctive, and something REALLY has to grab me to stop me from skipping past. I may not register something as interesting on a site and skip it, and I’m OK with that. But I always notice when I see the same information in multiple places.

The whole thing takes no more effort than hitting J more than once per second for about ten minutes. I feel no plodding sense of duty at having to get through items to clear them, because there’s so little involved in it.

During the day, during odd breaks, I would read one of those tabs I forked off. It didn’t interrupt me, didn’t distract me, but was there as a diversion when I was ready for them. Honestly, one of those tabs is still sitting there unread some 14 hours later. I’ll probably read it next.

I love and respect Merlin Mann, and his Inbox Zero. It’s a similar concept to what you write about, that email has become this monstrous thief of attention. If you read deep into Merlin’s writings, however, he doesn’t propose changing email, per se, but instead talks about changing… you. Your process, the way you think, feel, and interact with email.

Email’s still there, even for Merlin, but the way he interacts with it, and the power over him that he gives it are much different.

On a side note, allow me to say that I’m glad there are still places where two people can disagree, and discuss it, like rational human beings. Damn near everywhere else this would have devolved to name calling very quickly. Kudos.

@Chris Thompson - Thanks for taking the time to reply, Chris, and for doing so with such healthy regard!

Today the stream was far more noise than signal, and I only forked off about five tabs out of that 400 items.

One advantage of having a huge number of feeds is duplication. Many times the same story will show on five different sites, referring to some event, some news, some new site or doodad or geegaw.

I think you point to three of the things that turn me off feed readers right there:

a) The high noise to signal ratio;
b) The amount of duplicate content;
c) The negligible benefits of reading much of that content.

If only 5 out of 400 items a day are worth reading on a semi-consistent basis, and 2 of those 5 are simply telling me about a new geegaw, I’d be asking myself whether it was really worth 15 minutes a day ad infinitum just to keep up with it. But I suppose that’s a very personal choice.

I love and respect Merlin Mann, and his Inbox Zero. It’s a similar concept to what you write about, that email has become this monstrous thief of attention. If you read deep into Merlin’s writings, however, he doesn’t propose changing email, per se, but instead talks about changing… you. Your process, the way you think, feel, and interact with email.

Sure. Maybe there’s a process that would make keeping on top of 400 news items 7 days a week much easier for me, but I spent 4 years experimenting and was never comfortable with it. I’m a bit of a Greek myths geek, and feed readers always remind me of Sisyphus, heaving a stone up a hill for all eternity, only to have it roll to the bottom when he reached the top; all that work for little reward.

Perhaps my email processes and habits are just more finely tuned, or maybe I’m just getting old before my time!

Regardless of my own choice, my feeling is still that email encourages better habits than feed readers for all; there is a more pronounced reward for reading and filing. There’s also a higher value in taking an active interest in your subscriptions to prune out the noise makers, rather than skimming the same 400 items day-upon-day like a tired prospector, sieving in the dirt of a raging stream in the hope of striking gold.

I disagree with this. I have all my feeds set up on 3 panes on iGoogle.

It gives me the top 3 entries on each feed, and is set as my home page.

I can quick scan, click the articles im interested in, and ignore the rest. its quick and really handy.

My email, on the other hand, is doing my head in!
I get bombarded with news letters from the likes of a popular financial site, sometimes as many as 3 per day from the afore mentioned alone, each one jam packed with numerous articles that i have to click through to the site to read in full anyway. I don’t have the time for all this.

If im particularly interested in an article on a particular site, I can alway browse to the home page and see what else is going on.

I hate my Email sometimes

I’ve given this some more thought and I have come to the conclusion so far, that this post is correct however the tools are lacking to make it possible.

Having the updates ‘Pushed’ to me via email works. But I can not have every update from every site I am interested in emailed to me as it is updated. Or even weekly updates per site doesn’t work too good.

What is needed is a way to turn RSS feeds into email (and then you don’t have to hope the site has an email option) and you need to be able to group your RSS feeds into categories so you can have some sent as a weekly newsletter (perhaps on different days for the different categories) and have some sites email maybe 3 times a week only if updated. This restricts the email coming in but keeps this concept possible.

I’ve done some research and it appears Google Reader allows you to group RSS feeds and then create a single RSS feed from the group. Now all you need is a way to email this to yourself on a certain schedule. It looks like zookoda.com may have a system to do this. However this then seems to be getting rather complicated.

I’m going to have to have a real think/review of how i subscribe and view web content.

@James Williams - I used to use iGoogle like that too, but started travelling more and using different machines; it works OK if you only use one Mac/PC, though.

@Smarky - Thanks for the update, Smarky. Zookoda looks great for site owners. MailChimp offers an RSS to email service (here) but it’s not free.

–
Interesting aside and admission: I removed the RSS buttons from 44forks and Put Things Off. 24 hours later, I’d received 12 emails asking how people could subscribe to one or the other site. I’ve reinstated the RSS button to reduce my time spent fielding tech support enquiries! Oh well…

If you are on a slow dial-up connection (yes we do exist still) then RSS feeds are a must. I do try to purge at least one a day from my sub list though until I get down to my minimum.

“…feed readers always remind me of Sisyphus, heaving a stone up a hill for all eternity, only to have it roll to the bottom when he reached the top; all that work for little reward.”

I’m with you there.

And when you consider…

1) the fact that a lot of what goes around is regurgitated from one blog to the next.

2) there are only a handful of great blogs on any one subject.

So all you really need to do is subscribe to the top blogs.

Adding google alerts fills in any holes (I usually have 5 different alerts).

Then, if you want to know more (and you have the time), google. Simple.

I didn’t read any of the comments, but … what exactly is the point in cluttering my (reserved for productive use and actual communication) with something that’s easily put off into an organizational unit of its own, the feed reader?

If I want to read blogs or news and I can afford the time, I start my feed reader. There’s categories that I can skim all at once, and there’s easy subscription and unsubscription from one central point.

If I can’t afford the time, I still check all my email, because important stuff goes there.

If you can’t afford the time, ever, then indeed you should ditch feed readers. But maybe, then, you shouldn’t even read blogs. Although myself, I’m convinced that a) there is no such thing as very few most important blogs that I could subscribe to, and b) spending time when I can afford it is a very good thing.

So in the end, feed readers are, for me, a time management tool. One that email, which, as we know, doesn’t scale at all, could never be.

@Nick Cernis - looks like you’ll need to keep both options to keep everyone happy :-)

If nothing else, you’ve definitely managed to get an interesting (and civilized) debate going with your topic on RSS.

While I love a contentious post, and while I do think that the whole subscribe by reader, or by email (and by the way join my email list as well) thing is totally flawed - there’s no way in hell I am going to volunteer for more stuff in my inbox. I don’t give a crap about marking all as read anyway, which is proof that we’re all whistling in the wind with all this blog stuff, really…

Late to the party, but only because I was so stunned.

I think you’re nuts, Nick. This post blames a tool, switches four quarters for a dollar and removes all responsibility from people to control their own addictions. Good god.

And this from the man who wrote Inbox Heaven? I thought the point was to empty our inboxes, not fill them again?

There’s also the question of the generalization here - all people should love email! I fucking hate it, dude. I get so many emails already I’d go insane loading that up more.

I think people just need to pick the tool that works for them (Basecamp or Active Collab? Gmail or Outlook? Ford or Chevy?) and manage their addictions properly (cut the drugs, folks, and yes, feed reading counts).

I think also that claiming there are no benefits to feed reading is silly, too. There are no more benefits than email, certainly - and filtering as emails come in is NOT a benefit for me, that’s a distraction I don’t need.

But it was a great post to read regardless! Cheers!

nice graphic (figure A) but i can draw the same image with email instead of rss.

1. get tricked
2. enter e-mail addy
3. become 1000+ new Mails in a week (omg!)
4. select all + mark as read or easier: rmb on folder and select “mark folder as read!”

no subscription mails anymore :)

I’m totally with you here - I’ve tried a few feed readers and end up feeling confused everytime - I much prefer having content come straight to my email. Certainly works for me! Thanks!

Complete crazy talk.

My feed reader is in the same program as my email client, on the same screen, with the items perfectly pigeonholed into subject area so I can prioritise. I like having the slight separation between things I’m likely to have to respond to because they were personally sent to me and stuff that I can participate if I’m inspired.

Yes, if I get behind, I have to either drop some feeds or mark all read and move on from there, but how is that a problem? And, if I am getting behind, I’d rather be doing so only on my blog backlog than declare email bankruptcy on all communication.

I don’t read blogs that don’t let me subscribe via RSS, it’s that simple.

That has a lot of truth in it and coincides with my personal experiences. Scanning hundreds of feeds ist just impossible and does not bring any information benefit.

Hey, Nick

I’m pretty much right there with you. Back in August, I wrote, “Why I Prefer Email to RSS for Reading Blogs.”

My three main reasons:

1. There’s no “discover new blogs” button or link.
2. I usually only get one email per day, per blog.
3. It reduces my daily applications and tasks.

Using email saves me time and stress.

Excellent point of view.

Nick-

I as pointed to this post while reading a forum discussion about a particular blogging software’s lack of “subscribe by email” function.

One really big reason that RSS is better than email for subscribing to blogs is the legal one. In many countries, anti-spamming laws are changing the way bulk email (which is what email updates are really classed as) is handled. Some countries require that the email originator first validate the subscriber’s email, and then must provide a nice opt-out mechanism for future email. This is to prevent someone from subscribing other people’s email up…

A second (related) issue is information protection laws. I am not sure how a blogger using a hosted service can protect that big database of email addresses…or if a self hosted blogger would want the liability…

Thirdly, if self hosting, an ISP may have a different idea of “bulk email” than you do… A while back I managed a subscription based newsletter via a mailing list. My ISP (after a complaint) accused me of bulk emailing, and suspended my account. Even though it was a well managed, opt-in newsletter, I was guilty until I could demonstrate innocence.

RSS subscription takes care of all these issues.

-Rob A>

This suggestion is simply obsurd. Everyday you find more and more “help” posts on how to deal with email overload and get less of it period. Now your suggestion we get more?

I’m with Chris Thompson on this and like Lily, I simply will not follow a blog/site that doesn’t have feeds.

Great idea. I deleted a lot of feeds and switched the rest to Blog Alerts. What I miss there is an overview over my subscribed feeds.

Meanwhile I’m testing FeedBlitz (http://www.feedblitz.com/) which offers the same service but with additional features like OPML import and user interface for your subscriptions.

To add another point to the “against” field: serving RSS feeds via HTTP is: a) dead simple, and b) very cost-effective (it’s just another “page” on your site).
On the other hand, sending emails can be VERY expensive. Delivering site updates via email several times a day to 10.000+ subscribers is not something that everyone can afford. And on top of that, the kind of infrastructure you need is much more complex than your standard webserver.
Have you considered this?

@ste - Custom solutions may be (marginally) harder, but for the majority of publishers, FeedBurner works just fine — it’s free, takes 5 minutes to set up, and entrusts the security/data protection issues to a third party.

In the spirit of experimentation, I switched some blogs from my feedreader to e-mail. I switched back within a week. Drove me nuts to get more e-mail! My feedreader is much more efficient.