Dave Winer Archive

My column on InformationWeek this week asks the following question, “Will 2010 Mean The End Of The Full RSS Feed?”

Here’s a snippet from the column, “Over the past few months I’ve noticed more media sites (e.g. blogs, news sites, etc.) moving to partial RSS feeds. The New York Times only offers partial RSS feeds. InformationWeek runs partial RSS feeds. However most blogs are still offering full RSS feeds.

As Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and other social services have grown, so has the ability for these services to send good quality, monetizable traffic to media sites. Users who complained for years that they would only read content in a full RSS feed are clicking links inside social streams like never before. Many media sites post all of their links inside their social media streams. And once a user reaches the media site, they are more likely to interact with the site which drives even more pageviews and in turn, revenue.”

Former RSS user Robert Scoble is now sharing links via Twitter (and therefore Friendfeed). Users are clicking on his shared links and the users are taken to the respective full, rich, advertising-heavy media sites.

Naturally readers will make a lot of noise if their favorite blog removes full feeds. From our research in the CenterNetworks Labs, we’ve determined that the typical “noise” period on the Internet lasts two weeks. After that readers will be clicking links in partial feeds and will read the content on the full, chock full of ads media site. Typically one of the arguments related to partial feeds is around mobile reading. With the new crop of mobile devices including the Droid, iPhone 3Gs and the new Google Nexus One, mobile browsing is much smoother than how mobile browsers displayed content years ago.

One of the main reasons I see the feed switch coming this year is because in-feed advertising has basically been non-existant. The nice revenue stream that the old pre-Google Feedburner was providing is gone. Media sites will need to replace that source of income somehow.

Over the next week I am planning to take a deeper look at how one of the popular content scraper media sites uses partial RSS feeds for maximum revenue benefit.

Please have no fear…full RSS feeds will still be available — to receive them you will pay $1/feed.

I know what it’s like to be addicted. I was addicted to IRC in the mid-90s. It was a tough time – the bot wars, the ping floods, the no sleeping due to insecurity over potential nick loss, the network splits. It was tough. After a while, my friends came together and got me on some weekly injections and today I can say that I am no longer an addict. Ten days and counting.

Yesterday I posted some ideas on how to deal with the Twitter outage today. I received a variety of emails in my email client about how scared some were to live without their "fix" for 12 hours. I won’t post their names here as some are highly relevant folks in the Internet world and could have their reputations damaged. I just hope that we dont get to the point where we need a McRobertson Report to get the addicted people to stand up. Think about all of the people who lost a chance to be something because of those who pushed them aside because of Twitterdiction.

Some of my closest Internet buddies seem to be infected or on the verge of infection with Twitterdiction. Jeremiah Owyang has a pretty bad case of it, at least he gets paid to sit on Twitter. Jason Calacanis has a mild case of it – how do I know? Simple, when it’s down he gets the shakes because he has no way to get his dog photos to his sheep. Robert Scoble had the disease but I got him the meds and he is off it now which is great news that there is a cure! Marshall Kirkpatrick is close to the edge – even suggesting that Twitter pays his rent. I can’t even get Twitter to find me a date!

Yet these cases of Twitterdiction fall short compared to the entry from Dave Winer this morning. I have never met Dave though I would really like to as he seems like a smart, swell guy. We had a blast on the IRC channel during TC40 – he made the presentations fun. I enjoy reading his entries. But I think he forgot to take his meds today.

Some notes from his entry:

• What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time?
• What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time?
• Same with the phone network. Imagine if all the cell phones and land lines went down for scheduled maintenence for 12 hours. Again, it’s unthinkable.

In the comments Rachel Clarke suggests that more people outside the U.S. are using Twitter than inside the U.S. Side note, I had coffee with Rachel yesterday – she’s very bright and she might be developing a mild case of Twitterdiction but nowhere as bad as any of the other mentioned individuals.

So back to Dave. Is he really comparing Twitter to the Web in general? Or to phone service? All I can do is LOL. Twitter is ONLY a layer of communication. If it goes down, you just revert to the other 1,509,020 methods of communication. The unfortunate thing is that Dave is also speaking for many others who also suffer from this disease. Don’t worry Dave, by tomorrow Twitter will be back! (actually it hasn’t gone down yet from what I can tell)

Dave, send me your address. I’d be happy to help you out during the medication period to help you get over your Twitterdiction.

And to anyone wondering, I am working up a mega batch of the medication which I will bring to SXSW this year as I am sure we will need to get it out in large doses.