I’ve been playing around with RSS feeds for a while now, but never really felt like I ‘got them’, or that I was really using them properly.

Either I tried to track too many sites, meaning there was too much information coming in (and a constantly growing mountain of unread news- making me feel like I was missing, rather than reading more), or with less sites I was still having to check sites to see what my feed reader had missed.

Then there’s the problem with keeping things synchronized; when your feed reader is full of ‘unread’ articles that you’ve actually read outside the reader (either just from web browsing, or on a different computer) then it takes more time to manage your feeds- not less.

On the desktop, next to my unread emails, “to do” lists and web browser (with bookmarks to the websites that the feeds are pulling information from), another reminder that there’s things going on that I’ve not yet read about- even on the limited selection of sites that I’ve chosen to follow- isn’t really something that I need.

But that’s changed now. I think I’ve found a way to ‘consume’ them that fits in much better with my day-to-day activities. It turns out that the main problem wasn’t with the readers I was using or the feeds I was following; it was the device I was reading them on. On the desktop, feed readers just don’t work for me too well. But on the mobile, they are perfect.

Firstly, it’s more snack-sized. If I want to just fill a few minutes waiting for a train checking the headlines, then it’s easy. If something catches my eye, I can read the summary. If I don’t have time to read an interesting looking article, I can save it for later. If I’ve got more time on my hands (and a signal, of course) then I can jump through to the website and read the whole thing.

On the desktop, there are drawbacks; I’ve got time to check the actual websites- If I’m reading a news feed that only has a summary of the story, then I’ll end up going to the website anyway. If I’m already using the computer, then the constant flow of new infomation can be a distraction- along with email, instant messages, Facebook etc. RSS is supposed to make you more efficient- not less! If I’m not using the computer then I’ve got to get out the laptop or move to my desktop and switch it on. With a mobile, it’s already on- again, time saved. Something I hadn’t expected was for my mobile to become my preferred way of accessing online news when I’m at home; even though I’ve got a laptop I can use anywhere in the flat and a desktop PC connected to a large screen, my mobile is increasingly the first thing I reach for when I want to go online. Often, by the time my laptop has started up, I could have done what I wanted to do on my phone.

Along with the convenience and speed that I can get started, two things that becomes increasingly important on the feed side of things are;
1) The importance of the headline. In a sea of headlines, there’s not much of an opportunity for the journalist to grab my attention and pull me in, so it’s got to tell enough of the story to catch my attention, leaving me wanting to know more. When I’m writing, I like cryptic headlines that make perfect sense after reading the article- so together, they make up a holistic whole. But for an RSS-based audience, the headline isn’t a part of the article; it’s a kind of trailer that needs to pull the audience in. (I think this is something the BBC.co.uk’s editorial team needs to learn- great articles, but the headlines get lost in a sea of other sources.)

2) It tends to make me read more blog posts. The reason for this is actually pretty clear; commercial sites exist to sell advertising, so the purpose of the feed is to draw people into the site; the headline catches your eye, a short summary gets your attention, so you go to see the adverts (and read the full story while you’re there…)

Bloggers (as a general rule of thumb) are less concerned about advertising. They just write to be read- not to drive traffic, so blog feeds tend to have the full article. This means that if I’m underground or out of signal (for whatever reason), I can still read it there and then- when I’m interested in it. The consequence for the blogger is that I’m more likely to become a regular reader, as I’ll be following them whenever they publish posts rather than whenever it pops into my head to visit their site, or I come across a link. There’s also the issue that I don’t have to wait for the adverts, graphics etc. to load over the slower mobile connection.

The application that I’m using is
NetNewsWire; this is a free application that uses the Newsgator feed service. It’s not quite perfect- I’d like to have more control of how Clippings (the stories you mark up to read later) are organized from the phone, like tagging them and putting them into folders- at the moment, I have to visit the website to do that. It would also be useful- although no doubt prohibitively intensive on memory and bandwidth- if it downloaded graphics along with the text of the feeds. I’m sure that these are issues that the developers are working on, and I’m looking forward to seeing some more updates. (Incidentally it’s what I use to gather the mobile news in the sidebar on this blog- although obviously if you’re reading this in RSS form you can’t see that.) There’s also the added bonus that when I’m underground, I can read my choice of news instead of picking up a copy of the Metro…

So right now, it’s great- without a doubt the most useful 3rd party applications on my iPhone, and more useful to me than included apps like stocks news and weather forecasts.

I’m going to keep this site updated with some other pointers to some great apps, but this one is definitely the one I’d miss most if it were to go.

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