This week I kicked off a discussion about what the brand name of RSS should be, going forward. It’s generated a lot of great discussion, including some excellent comments on my blog. And funnily enough, I’m now convinced that in fact RSS is not the right term to market to the masses. ‘Web feeds’ is the term I like the most, although the abbreviated ‘feeds’ is also fine. Mike Torres, Program Manager on MSN Spaces, made a very good point when he said that using the term ‘web feeds’ for RSS is akin to using ‘web pages’ to refer to HTML files.
Ed Bott also made an excellent point when he said: “The reason some people at Microsoft are exploring alternatives to RSS is because people don’t understand the term.”
But most interesting to note is the turnaround in the IE7 Team at Microsoft. They originally had an orange RSS feed button in the demo that Robert Scoble filmed just before Gnomedex in June (I specifically mentioned that in my post at the time). But now it seems Microsoft has abandoned the orange RSS button and gone with a stylized orange logo:
And to prove I’m not just drinking the Microsoft kool-aid, Yahoo is also using the term ‘feeds’ more to describe RSS. See this post referencing the “feeds module” of Yahoo 360 (hat-tip Havi). Needless to say, Google is using ‘feeds’ as their main term – and ignores the orange buttons altogether.
So sorry Dave and Robert, but it looks like the tide has turned. All 3 bigco’s are using ‘feeds’ and the majority of people that commented on my post are too. The people have spoken – feeds is it.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)