Merlin Mann has some very good ideas on improving the RSS user experience. Both revolve around the fact that a user’s interaction with an RSS feed has three phases (subscribing to the feed, reading new items coming through the feed for a while, and finally unsubscribing), and while much has been said and done about the first two, the last one has been pretty much neglected so far.
There are many reasons why people unsubscribe from RSS feeds:
- Their interest and the feed’s topic don’t match any more
- They were just test driving the feed and decided they didn’t like it after all
- The feed has gone dead and is no longer updated
- The feed is only of temporary interest by its nature, like comment feeds for individual blog entries, or FedEx delivery feeds (a nice example noted by Merlin).
Wading through your subscriptions and hunting for ones you’d like to kill is no fun and likely to get neglected. That’s why I think Merlin’s idea of temporary subscriptions is powerful.
I want to go a bit further and try to reframe the problem. An RSS reader doesn’t manage subscriptions. It manages items I’m interested in. Interest can be temporary. It has levels. It depends on context. I want an RSS reader that makes this explicit.