The Interface is Where Innovations Find Value

Steve Rubel at micropersuasion has written a short but interesting post about why Google is not providing RSS feeds…yet. He supposes that it’s because RSS feeds keep people away from web sites: they don’t have to visit the site in order to read the feed. He suggests that this scares Google because they make so much of their money off of advertising, and if the feed, as opposed to the site, contains the valuable information then users will never need to spend time on those sites where they’ll see advertising. (Rubel goes on to predict that Google will do feeds, but have advertisements in them).

This is interesting because feeds are an obvious improvement in user experience over simply surfing to web sites to check for new content. If you haven’t yet subscribed to any, I predict RSS feeds will be coming to an interface near you. However, with RSS as an improved delivery format, (or an improved discovery format), what we’ve really done is innovate the interface, or rather, changed it completely. In this case, we’ve moved away from the web site as an interface to a intermediate, RSS reader instead. It it the improved interface that is valuable, not the technology. Any technology that would provide for that interface would be well-used…RSS, Atom, or some other format.

Take that view with this interesting tidbit about Google maps posted by Jason Kottke today, containing what I think is a very interesting notion: that most significant advances in software are actually advances in user experience. (Via Bokardo)