Has Syndication Gone Mainstream?
by Patrick Ruffini :: February 17th, 2007 11:11 amScott Karp is skeptical that widgets will ever see broad mainstream adoption, arguing that they’re very similar to RSS:
But I was struck by how widgets, like RSS, are really more of a boon for online publishers than for average folks. Widgets, like RSS, are great for syndicating information, or in the case of widgets, also application functions. But for average users, they are only useful for aggregating on a start page, and really, how often do most people change their start pages?
The inability of anyone to explain widgets or RSS in terms that the average person can understand is really striking.
I’m more bullish on widgets than I am on RSS.
Last month, I pegged the RSS universe in the U.S. at 3.5 million. I did this by looking at Nielsen’s monthly unique number for Feedburner. If you want to work backwards from another point of reference, dividing Bloglines uniques by Bloglines marketshare also yields a number in the low millions.
Considering that there’s no one blogosphere that numbers more than 3-4 million (rightosphere, leftosphere, techosphere, celebosphere, etc.) that’s probably not bad.
But I agree that there is a mainstream wall around RSS. I didn’t fully embrace it until doing my job depended on it. Clicking on my Favorites is a habit I have yet to fully break. I also think there’s something not-quite-sticky about non-human aggregators. Memeorandum probably has a very devoted following, but its monthly uniques are in the low tens of thousands. Contrast with the human touch of Drudge. And if Drudge had an RSS feed, would you subscribe? I’m sure I would, as knowing what’s on Drudge now drives my world, but an average user wouldn’t. The experience of maybe spotting the flashing siren is just too compelling.
Widgets I think have more potential. MySpace users may not know how to put hyperlinks in their blogs, but they get widgets. Our experience with this on the last Presidential campaign was similar. It was 2003. People were putting out these little XML buttons on their blogs, but nobody really got what they were. Mainstream RSS readers were virtually unheard of, to say nothing of an easy way to incorporate RSS headlines on other blogs.
So we settled on building a news widget people could embed on their blogs. The reviewers called them lame, but more than 5,000 sites were running them, and we consistently saw a 10-15% traffic boost on all our news stories — and our news items were pretty well trafficked. Why this approach? Because you had to be a programmer to know how to embed RSS headlines on your blog; you only had to cut and paste one line of code to use a widget. People instinctively got that, and they continue to get it as demonstrated by the YouTubeization of everything.
Jeremy Zawodny has a contrarian take on widgets from a coder & security perspective. That’s something I can certainly understand. If you’re going to serve widgets, you’d better make sure your hosting is bulletproof.
Widgets are a bit messy and the early adopters snipe at them. That’s the clearest sign they’ve gone mainstream.
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Tagged: jeremy zawodny 
rss scott karp widgets
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