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Feeds: Friend or Foe?

Posted on July 1, 2008 by C Lin
Culture, Design

For those of you who are living under a rock, an RSS or Atom feed is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content from for example a blog, news site etc. in a standardized format. You have seen the little orange icon on blogs or the blue icon in the new Firefox window. Let’s say you have a favorite blog that you read everyday. You can subscribe to its feeds by clicking on the icon and then selecting a type of reader that you want all of your content to appear on. This gives people quick and at a glance access to updated content.

I love the convenience of feeds and there is a list I subscribe to. But one question: why are most of the reader’s feeds so ugly? I know that it is just content that users are signing up for. After all, that is the whole point of a feed. But what does that mean for designers who labor over sites knowing that for some viewers it will boil down to a mere feed? There’s no control over how they’ll look in the end. Feeds do not have distinguishing design elements; they are simply content. Feeds are sites without a face. How does this affect design? And what does it mean to have zero control over how your content is seen? Is it liberating or is it frustrating?

Personally, I find the convenience of feeds overpowering my frustration. But in the end, I am still annoyed that my feeds don’t look very good. And I find myself really missing the face of my favorite site’s personality.