RSS – Push vs Pull

For those of you who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and a lot of you would be using it, perhaps unknowingly.

How so?

RSS is a major part of how iTunes works particularly when checking for new podcasts and the update features contained within other pieces of software use RSS to check for new revisions and other information such as a list of the bugfixes.

There are other uses for RSS, such as:

• tracking posts in a thread or forum in an online discussion board,
• receiving the latest articles from a news website.

Firefox Address Bar

Internet Explorer Address Bar

In your web browser, you may have noticed a little orange icon (such as those in the above screenshots taken from Firefox 3.6.3 and Internet Explorer 8). That icon lets you know that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for that particular page using an RSS client. Personally, I use Microsoft Outlook as my RSS client as it helps centralise my e-mail, calendar, tasks and other feeds all in the one place. I also use Google Reader for when I am away from my desktop computer.

One of the advantages of using an RSS feed is that clients can pull the information whenever possible. When I want to review technology news that broke overnight, I just need to fire up my RSS reader and it is all there waiting for me. More often than not, the RSS feed will contain three or four lines of the article with a link to go to the website to read the rest of the article. This can be a great way if you want to skim for a particular subject or otherwise separate the noise from topics of interest.

Compare RSS against having to visit a bunch of different websites to harvest all of this information in the first place then trying to work out if it was all worthwhile? In my opinion, RSS helps people make better use of their time as well as force content publishers to make their articles more enticing. If I haven’t been grabbed by an article in the first few sentences, more often than not I will move on.

So if you don’t actively use RSS, maybe consider giving it a shot. It might be a bit tricky first up but you may grow to appreciate what it can do for you.

Tomorrow, I will look at the guts of how RSS works, so stay tuned!