Kevin Burton responds to Scoble’s prediction that RSS will continue to grow in part because of IE 7 and Vista. I agree with, and take issue with both viewpoints.
RSS will continue to grow, but it will come organically and be a result of greater support. RSS will grow very similar to how email and IM grew. It is not because influencers are using it (as Scoble suggests), but rather because people hate to miss important information. More and more important information is becoming available via RSS. This is similar to how you started to be able to get credit card statements via email.
Not wanting to miss information is also why Kevin Burton is right. People like aggregated content like TailRank and Vox friends. They also like to keep up with their friend’s pictures at Flickr, information about their favorite band on MySpace, events taking place in their city, etc. It is great that there are sites to aggregate these pieces of information together, but each of those sites also publish RSS feeds.
When IE 7 and Vista release a growing number of average consumers will have easy access to consuming RSS. When Mac releases Leopard there will be improved RSS support in Safari (and the current support is pretty great). Firefox 2 honors the ‘default aggregator’ on OSX and will do the same with Windows as soon as Vista brings Microsoft up to date.
Once all of those people have such easy access then they will gradually start using RSS. Some people will get hooked, some people will only use it marginally. The thing I am absolutely certain of is that RSS usage will continue to grow rapidly throughout 2007.
