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Full RSS feeds – I was serious the last time, too.

Fred Oliveira on September 26, 2006 Comments (17)

Almost a year ago I did a quick post titled “Post full feeds. Please” – and I was serious. At the time (it really wasn’t that long ago but it seems like ages in the internet), about 60% of blogs were full feeds, and the number grew steadily. Now it seems we’re getting back to summaries everywhere (much due to the advent of ads in blogs), and that feels like regressing. Here’s why.

My process with RSS feeds is as follows:

  • I don’t have much time, thus
  • I don’t read all posts on all the blogs I subscribe to.
  • I scan my news reader for things I care about and read them
  • If I have something to say, I click through to the page and comment
  • Whenever I see summaries, I think “no time to click all stories to figure out if I care, so I unsubscribe”
  • I click the “unsubscribe” button

Some people have time to spend reading whole posts – most people don’t. And most people don’t care about most posts anyway, meaning the overall satisfaction resulting in clicking through every single post to get one important piece of information is extremely low. And like most people, I choose not to be unsatisfied.

We’re at a time when information overload is at its peak. RSS is being used by millions of people because it makes sense – it relieves us from having to visit every single site we care about to get the news we want. If it doesn’t do that properly and publishers don’t understand our needs as users, we don’t need to stick around. We can move to people who get it. Right?

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Comments on this post

Matt Gifford

I’m guessing that this was brought on by TechCrunch’s move to summaries. In TechCrunch’s case, this is easily bypassed if you know the default URL for WordPress’s RSS feed.

keith bohanna

With you on this Fred. I kinda take it as an insult to me that someone will only give me a snippet and then expects me to follow them back.

Granted I enjoy visiting the original blogs from time to time – however I would prefer that to be when I choose and not when forced to do so.

keith

Andre Ribeirinho

I was not using full feeds until a few weeks ago, testing if people would go to the website to read the full post. Of course they didn’t. So I moved back.

I’m with full feeds now but I think that there’s a lot of content on the website that should be able to be included in a main feed so that people could be notified when something is new. But then again you can always post something when you change something.

As to using the feed to do some advertising I see no harm at all. It’s one more way (besides the posts) to get all your readers to know what you’re up too.

Chris Saad

I totally agree. We have found that full feeds are actually more useful for users using the measured disruption methodology of Touchstone. With less content the engine has less to analyze and the user has less to see in the heads up display.

I vote Full Content Feeds (again) too!

Mind Booster Noori

Some time ago a big discussion was made on this by Debian developers (tracked on Planet Debian): some of them prefer full content feeds and some other summary feeds. I also think that full content feeds are better: specially if you think that you can see a full feed however you want (like seeing only a summary), and with a sumary you can’t…

couldnt say it better at Am I Famous Now?

[...] I really couldn’t : please full feeds or I’ll unsubscribe. No.matter.how.much.I.like.your.writing. Do you really feel your content is that exclusive that you think protecting it with a partial feed? Or do you really care that much about pageviews? [...]

Pete Shaw

I’m gonna play the “Bullshit Card”.

You don’t have much time and you scan through your feeds. Sounds like an ideal situation for summaries to me.

Fred

Play bullshit card, I play rebuttal. Fact is when I scan through my feeds, I read the titles (which is why they count) and screenshots if it applies to the kind of feed I’m looking at. It isn’t an ideal situation for summaries because even if I did read the summary, it wouldn’t be the 3 first lines of a lenghty post that would tell me if it was worth my while or not. I’m not saying you don’t have a point, but I am saying it doesn’t apply to me or the majority of people.

Full RSS Feeds « Nels Wadycki

[...] The topic of Full RSS feeds is something that comes up every once in a while… Usually I have to bug sports blogs about it since they’re not always the most techno-savvy. [...]

doug

With the ability to insert ads into RSS feeds, I’m not sure why sites would feel the need to do summaries for revenue purposes (of course, RSS feed CTRs may be dismal? I don’t know).

Amy Gahran has an excellent post on this a while back. She concludes that if you have to choose one, do summaries.

Jason Walker

I agree, full posts or out you go. I do a much better job summarizing whats important _to me_ than the author would anyway.

Paul Irish

Gifford very smart!

full feeds. neccesary. truth.

Candice Harris

I think you are right about it. Why not to save time for people who want to get the information which is interesting for them but not just accumulating in the RSS feeds.

Oskar Syahbana

Starting a year ago, I provided full feed for my users. Of course there’s a drawback on this (such as my content got copied by bitacle — violation of fair use et al) but still, I like the idea that my bandwith is “saved” somehow.

Bandwith is costly you know :)

Toby Matejovsky

I wholeheartedly agree. Short feeds are frustrating and ignore the huge convenience of aggregating *all* your news in one place. The worst are feeds that only provide a title. Feeds with a few lines are nearly as bad. I’ve unsubscribed and entirely stopped visiting some sites that I liked based purely on this fact.

Support Full Feeds!

bangitliketmac » Blog Archive » Full RSS Feeds!

[...] RSS feeds should have all the information contained in the real story. Man I hate feeds that only have a title, or just have a couple sentences. WeBreakStuff.com posted about this again: Full RSS Feeds to read the full article. Go here to digg the post. [...]

mobifeeds - the development weblog » Blog Archive » Publishers who don’t understand the medium they’re in

[...] Full RSS feeds – I was serious the last time, too. September, 2006 [...]

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