There has been a wave of Internet folks bemoaning the death of RSS. They’re getting it wrong. RSS is not dying exactly, but its fate is expected and appropriate.

For those of you who need a refresher on what RSS is, see my post on RSS demystified.

Why RSS sucks

There are some big reasons why RSS sucks. Most of it actually has to do with RSS readers.

On the surface, RSS seems really kind of awesome. “I can get updates from all of my favorite sites all in one spot.” Many people in fact do want to browse less so they can get on with their lives.

But many of us do not know our limits and find ourselves hoarding information through RSS readers like Google Reader. There is no cost or immediate consequences involved with subscribing to RSS feeds for everything that the Web has to offer. But then we find ourselves with an RSS reader list so long that it’s paralyzing to try and keep up.

Lastly, an RSS reader is yet another inbox. Lately, I’ve found it to be stressful to have so many inboxes to check up on: email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Netflix queue, podcasts, DVR queue, voicemail, text messages, OmniFocus, and the physical inbox on my desk. Enough is enough.

Seriously, all of these queues have turned my life’s purpose into unbolding all of the new shit.

Problem: RSS has been about the technology, not the user

RSS to this point has been about the technology, not necessarily about the users of the technology. If you have trouble understanding that statement, look at what RSS widgets used to look like:

So confusing. Sure, most sites didn’t show that many widgets, but many of the icons on their own are confusing unless you understand what RSS or XML are.

What does RSS mean? What about XML? What does it have to do with coffee cups and pills? Really, the only good buttons have said “Subscribe,” but I can imagine how confusing it would be to click that button and get a bunch of XML back. What do I do with that?

Good uses for RSS

Here are some valid uses for RSS. Notice that none of them really involve adding a little RSS icon to your interface. All of these uses are really about masking the technology behind the features. RSS enables the feature but isn’t the feature itself.

1. “Subscribe by email” option

RSS at one time was a hopeful attempt at replacing email (or at least minimizing it). Google Wave was also an attempt to replace email. But people love their email! It’s not going away anytime soon.

Services like FeedBurner allow you to send daily emails to subscribers with a digest of the latest items from your feed. You create a post on your blog, and people receive notification about it via email within a day.

The user doesn’t know or care that RSS is powering this mechanism. They just know that they’re receiving updates from your site.

2. Automatically tweet links to your new articles or blog posts on Twitter

Services like Twitterfeed and FeedBurner (again) can watch your site’s RSS feed and tweet links to your new articles automatically. People following you on Twitter see your tweets, not an RSS feed.

Again, the user doesn’t know or care that RSS is powering this. They use Twitter, not Google Reader.

3. Podcasts

When you subscribe to a podcast in iTunes, you’re technically subscribing to RSS. There’s a chance that you may not have even known that, dear reader.

Again, people call that a podcast, not RSS. Heck, podcasts even have their own icon that I bet more people recognize than RSS’s.

4. News and link streams on your site

With some programming, you can mash up any number of RSS feeds and display the latest headlines on your site. Use an interface like Yahoo! Pipes, publish that feed, and use it to power a news stream on your site.

Again, visitors will see the news stream, but they won’t know or care that it’s powered by RSS.

Again, notice a theme here?

All of my suggestions above are about using RSS for what it is: a technology. RSS as a technology is only a means to an end. It is not a feature.

The users of the Web have spoken. Highlighting this particular technology just isn’t effective with your normal everyday person. So stop it.

Technorati Tags: email, Email Marketing, emails, feed, feedburner, feeds, google, really simple syndication, rss, rss feed, rss feeds, Technology, user experience, xml

“Artists” can think abstractly and design solutions that really feel good. Customers enjoy using their websites and applications. When you look at how this person’s work is designed under the hood, it often makes sense and feels good as well, though it may not always be “perfect.”

“Robots” obsess over details that often don’t end up mattering to anyone other than themselves. They often worry more about getting something to work than how it’s going to work for the end user. When you look at what this person’s work under the hood, it tends to be over-engineered.

Artists are very hard to control and measure. It’s also harder to keep them happy and interested when they’re in your employ.

Robots are easy to control and measure. They’re happy to check off items in a bug tracker and generally get things working, though their products are often an ugly experience (not always).

A couple of points.

1. The first group is more valuable and rare. It is a challenge to keep artists happy, but you should do everything in your power to do so.
2. There are trade-offs involved with hiring either.

It depends on what you want and need, I suppose.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, programmers, programming, web developer, web developers, web development, web programmers, web programming

The analysts call it an online marketing suite. And once analysts put a name on something like they did with this 2 years ago, you can bet that a lot of companies are building a solution.

Here’s the problem: these solutions are going to be expensive. And because the word “enterprise” will more than likely be attached, these solutions will not be user friendly. They will be clunky, unintuitive, and slow. Mark my words. Try out some of the stuff that’s out there today like Omniture (if you have tens of thousands of dollars in your budget to implement them, that is).

Another problem. These suites will need to have a wide range of features:

• Web analytics/conversion management
• Search keyword management
• Content collaboration/integration/management
• User experience management
• Dashboards and automated reports
• Campaign management
• Data mining flexibility
• E-commerce integration/management
• Social media management
• CRM integration/management

Note that the word management indicates the need for measurable results. Not just pretty charts to look at and go “Hmm…”

The list of features could go on from there. And the list will grow as the Facebooks, Twitters, and Googles create additional channels in the online marketing landscape.

The root of the problem is that online marketing suite providers will bolt on additional features, not worrying much about the user experience or how marketers need to think and work to get their jobs done. And they will continue to make it all so complex that you need to hire professional services just to keep it working. Boooooo.

Until something affordable and effective emerges, internet marketing consultants will continue to have it sweet. Inefficient, fragmented tools will allow for more billable hours and will introduce a greater cost of entry to those who want to become experts. And this will become a problem as businesses will demand more accountability and measurable results for less money.

It’s a great time to be one of the few that understand how it all works. The days are numbered for the fakes who pretend that they know what they’re doing, though I must admit that there will still be quite a few days left for them.

The revolution will be data driven. That’s for sure. And it will require opinionated tools that get the job done without trying to cater to petty feature requests.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, internet marketing, internet marketing suite, marketing, online marketing, online marketing suite, Technology, web analytics

I find it ironic that I wanted corporate communications to be more like Facebook, and then Google announced Wave a couple weeks later.

This video shows where it’s all headed, whether Google is the winner or not. (They have a really good shot at this though.) Even if you only watch 15-20 minutes of the video, you’ll see where we’re headed.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, communication, communications, email, glass case, google, information technology, internet marketing, it, open source, wave

It’s estimated that 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved around the world each day. In light of this, Carnegie Mellon has created a program called reCAPTCHA that actually puts all of this superfluous work to use.

When a user fills out a CAPTCHA generated by reCAPTCHA, they are helping academics digitize words in books. The system generates 2 words to solve in the CAPTCHA. Here’s their description on how it works:

The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

I’ve been using reCAPTCHA for over a year now on various sites that I’ve built (including the comments section of this blog), and it feels good to know that we’re all doing a little bit to help make more information accessible to everyone. Cheers to Carnegie Mellon for this innovative idea.

Technorati Tags: books, captcha, carnegie mellon, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, college, design, education, glass case, information, information science, information technology, internet marketing, it, library, ocr, recaptcha, scanning, university, web development

Your intranet could show a stream of alerts for key events (55 orders placed before lunch, a critical backup just completed, Richard is going on vacation tomorrow, etc.) as well as communication between team members.

And it could give your team members a chance to express themselves a little personally. Why not take the water cooler aspect of Facebook and focus it on helping your employees build closer relationships?

It’s interesting thinking of the ways that business information can be displayed and interacted with. This is becoming a new passion of mine. It also makes me realize how uncreative I am compared to the visionaries of companies like Facebook.

Technorati Tags: business, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, corporate, data visualization, Design, design, enterprise, enterprise 2.0, facebook, glass case, innovation, internet marketing, intranet, it, Social Media, systems, Technology, web 2.0

I work for a fairly large company during the day. People there act completely different than the entrepreneurs that I work with at night. Everybody at the day job is afraid, and it often forces them to make bad choices.

This is especially true concerning technology choices. Everything that we use is, at best, sub-par. Our IT group usually chooses technology based on what’s compatible with the rest of our infrastructure, or they choose based on who has the best support. I agree that these are important factors, but then the people who must use this technology end up suffering, and they rarely get any say in what’s chosen.

There are these massive ERP, CRM, and CMS systems, and their interfaces look like they were designed by entry-level designers. In one interface, a checkmark means “help.” Check = Help? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, wouldn’t you realize that the standard for “help” is a question mark? And in a complex interface that causes users to seek help more often than others, they’ve even hidden the help!

Companies like Oracle make a killing selling solutions like these. No wonder why their support is so good. If it wasn’t, then they’d be out of business. And then they get to charge companies more money to support this stuff.

New businesses have it good. We can start from scratch and use software that’s compatible with humans. But it does make me wonder if one day our choices will create a painful legacy much like the Fortune 1,000 is experiencing today. The most resilient IT groups will make sure that that never happens.

Are you working with such an IT group? Sure, IT is hard, and it’s expensive. But there is a surplus of talent out there right now, and it’s probably for the best that the less-talented will end up needing to seek other lines of work.

Technorati Tags: ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, enterprise, glass case, information technology, it, software

When that time comes, you will need to step into the realm of managing a software project. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to have a successful project as a programmer may try persuading you into believing.

Frustration at both ends of the table

This infamous cartoon sums it all up (click to enlarge):

Building software is a very abstract process. If you think about it, you can’t really touch, feel, or hold software. It’s this thing that floats in a computer somewhere, stores information, and makes things appear on the screen.

It would be great to know exactly what you’re getting up front, but unfortunately a successful software project cannot be predicted like that. Something will ultimately happen that changes the direction of the project. And if you don’t catch it early on, you’re going to be frustrated, you’re going to waste time, you’re going to waste money, and your software developer is going to be frustrated as well. Nobody ends up happy.

Agile software development to the rescue

Some technology agencies will describe themselves as “agile” without really knowing what that means. Or they may mask it with a process that appears to be agile but isn’t really.

To make the definition as simple as possible, agile software development is a way to communicate and refresh expectations throughout the entire development process. This is done with constant communication between the developer and the business owner. And it involves constantly iterating and improving based on the business owner’s feedback.

What agile is not

If your process involves explaining requirements, receiving a lengthy requirements document, and signing an unmoveable contract for those requirements, then the process is not agile.

If a requirements document drafted at the beginning of the process is your only chance to communicate with your programmer, then you’re going to end up receiving software that doesn’t fit your needs. Imagine a scenario where you spend a lot of time defining requirements, and then you receive your software 6 months later. You’re likely to be surprised by the nonsense that those kooky programmers will end up producing.

Pains of agile development

Probably the biggest danger that you can get into with agile development is to be too loosy-goosy. I’ve heard someone joke before that agile development is for teams that don’t want to plan anything anymore. That’s not the truth in many cases. The point is to develop a small part of the project, react to it, and quickly adjust to needed changes.

It’s not like there can’t be a “master plan” and schedule. It’s just that keeping rigidity is not realistic for these types of projects. There are too many risks and unknowns before the project even begins, no matter how hard you try to explain things before development begins.

One thing that can hurt too is how realistic things get for the business. Having Feature X can quickly become a lot more trouble than expected. So agile development forces you as a business owner to decide whether it’s worth the trouble—and the extra budget—to continue development.

In a way, this methodology really helps you to prioritize and live with sunk costs that could have ended up going out of control. When things are tight, this can be painful, even if it is healthy and helpful.

Comfort of a contract

I just wanted to take a few minutes to educate you on another option and to debunk misconceptions on what agile development is. You can still hire developers on a rigid contract if that’s what makes you most comfortable. But you may also be stilting your relationship with your programmers, and you may actually be blowing your money low quality output.

Technorati Tags: agile, agile development, agile software development, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, development, software

Think about the process of buying a computer in the 90s. We worried about things like megahertz, RAM, and hard drive size.

Now look at the iPhone, which has been wildly successful. But can you tell me how many megahertz or gigahertz it is? Do you know how much memory it has? Apple simply doesn’t market these facts.

The game has changed. Ben Schneiderman coined this era as “the new computing.” Our expectations of technology are not based on what’s under the hood. They’re now based on what the technology can do for us. Instead of trying to replace us with robots, we’re now using technology to help us do our jobs better.

But with this shift, we have a new set of expectations, and I think the iPhone is a great example of this. We want for our technology to be intuitive, easy to use. We want for it to be beautiful. And we want for it to get out of our way.

This is how your website and web services need to act. They need to get out of the way. They need to help people get to the information that they’re looking for so that they can get on with their lives.

Technorati Tags: apple, ben schneiderman, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, hci, iPhone, leonardo's laptop, marketing, Technology, usability, usability engineering, user experience, ux, ux design

At first, I thought I had made a mistake. An exclamation point icon? Bold red text? All of these visual cues tell a completely different story than what the message says.

What do your messages really say in context with visuals? And do you really want for your message to make someone feel undeserved panic, even if it’s just for a couple seconds?

Technorati Tags: design, marketing, Technology, usability, web usability