To those of us who use an RSS reader it’s hard to imagine life without it.
But, we have to keep in mind that these are far from mainstream tools today. Think about your extended family: how many of them would be able to subscribe to an RSS feed without your help?
In the last couple of weeks I’ve introduced a few different people to Google Reader. Hopefully it will make it much easier for them to keep up with the various sites they are interested in.
I found this nice “Getting Started” guide on lifehack.org:
How to get started with Google Reader
Sometimes it’s the technology we geeks take for granted that really has the potential to make a difference.
Extra for experts:
Firefox users will be familiar with the page which asked you to choose between Google Homepage and Google Reader when you use the built-in feed detection to subscribe to a new feed. I don’t use Google Homepage so this is a redundant step. With a simple about:config change you can skip this altogether.
I’m not a complete geek, but reasonably technically savvy. But it wasn’t until someone showed me how to set up google reader, to have a subscribe button on my toolbar, that I really got into RSS.
It’s fantastic, RSS. But getting it set up is absolutely not intuitive. Separate reader applications like NetNewsWire are quite confusing (IMHO).
So while we all enthuse about the things that make our lives simpler and possibly more interesting, I’m sure we’re in a relatively small percentile of people who have actually managed to get our RSS reader set up!
Brenda, I agree! It does get a little unweildy to use some of the RSS newsreaders. The easiest ones I have used are Google Reader and Bloglines. :)
Maybe I should try to help people learn how to use RSS and save themselves from all of those extra clicks! :)