Just as I was playing around with a mobile RSS reader called Smaato News this morning, I spotted this opinion piece by IT Week's Kelvyn Taylor, talking about how feature creep is in danger of making RSS too complex at exactly the point it starts to get mainstream users.
"RSS is in total chaos from a user’s point of view. Some sites just give me the headline and a one-line summary, others give a longer extract. Some even give me the entire story, with pictures, web hotlinks and even embedded YouTube videos. There are multimedia RSS feeds that direct your reader to a file rather than a web page, and how these are handled depends on the reader software. And, inevitably, adverts are starting to sneak their way in as well."
It's true, and it's worrying for anyone hoping mobile RSS is going to be big too. Will the current generation of mobile readers be able to cope with these different types of feeds? Will users end up selling their houses to cope with the ensuing data charges?
Taylor's suggestion that the problems could be solved by services asking users what they want and then giving it to them is eminently sensible (i.e. unlikely to happen), but it certainly needs to be sorted if mobile RSS is going to take off in any meaningful way.
Not sure about Smaato News yet, by the way. It's installed on my Vario II, but seems to be having some kind of connectivity problem sucking the feeds down. I'm persevering though. Any recommendations on other mobile RSS readers would be more than welcome too, while I'm at it.