I’ve been catching up on my RSS feeds lately. A new thing for me. It has actually been a fairly disappointing experience. Well over half my RSS feeds are truncated, forcing you to click through to a site. I tend to browse most of my feeds using Google Reader mobile on the Nokia E71. This is a pain in the ass.
I understand that people need to drive traffic to increase advertising revenue. But are our body of long-tail publishers so desperate to drive traffic that they’re willing to bastardise the cleanest form of information transfer we’ve seen this decade?
A truncated RSS feed is useless to me. I can’t repackage, recredit or reproduce that information in any way. Isn’t that what the protocol is all about?
To make matters worse, when you’re reading RSS through something like Google Reader on the mobile — clicking through to original websites puts your browsing experience in the hands of each different website. Google Reader is clean, simple and quick. Each page is usually no more than 2kb. Push through to an original site and you run into a myriad of problems. Different browsers rendering differently. Google trying to republish your HTML in mobile friendly format and failing. Google switching to German (yikes!). Du bist next page, JA?
It’s a crappy experience. And it all started with a truncated feed.
Your views?
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