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What the hell happened to blogs.msdn.com?

Tuesday, September 07 2004 - blog

Over the weekend, blogs.msdn.com made a big change. I think somebody accidentally turned the SuckOTron 6000 up a few notches.

Suddenly, there are no more full-content RSS feeds. Everything’s down to about a 100 characters and a super-irritating “read more” link. HELLO, MS: THIS IS BOGUS. GIVE US BACK FULL-CONTENT FEEDS PRONTO. YOU HAVE JUST SERIOUSLY DECREASED THE USABILITY OF YOUR SYSTEM FOR THOSE OF USE WHO READ BLOGS IN AN AGGREGATOR. This sucks. This really, really, sucks and you should put things back to the way they were.

In the blogosphere, there is hardly anything more irritating that an abbreviated RSS feed. The WHOLE PURPOSE of an RSS aggregator is so that I don’t have to open my freaking web browser to 100 different pages. By having the content right there in my aggregator, I can skim an entire article in the time it takes to open up a new web browser. By not including full content in the RSS feed, you take away some of the productivity gains that RSS offers.

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#1 Scott Allen on 9.07.2004 at 10:25 PM

I want to second Steve's motion. The Suck-osity of a 'read more' link is a solid 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.

#2 Steve Maine on 9.08.2004 at 10:54 AM

Would I be willing to pay for the bandwidth I use? Sure.

#3 John Dowdell on 9.08.2004 at 2:51 PM

Try a browser with tabbed bookmark groups, and serverside aggregation. Gets you away from the IE windowing/efficiency problems.(Some bloggers are essayists, but most are more link-heavy... and comments and trackback info is vital... an XML version helps with some needs (particularly the original summary of recent site content changes!!) but does not suffice for all needs.)"The WHOLE PURPOSE of an RSS aggregator..." Proving the assertion might be difficult.jd/mm

#4 Steve Maine on 9.08.2004 at 3:27 PM

John: what do you think the purpose of an RSS aggregator is?Without full content, I don't think RSS aggregators are much more than dynamically updating bookmark collections. There's the potential for being so much more.The biggest advangtage that I see to RSS is the ability to passively collect content in the background while I'm doing other things. When I'm ready to read stuff, it's there waiting for me. I don't have to spend time waiting for that content to download. I estimate that for most articles, I can skim the entire article and determine if I'm interested in its content in about 2-3 seconds. At this rate, the time cost of downloading the content on-demand (even in a server-aggregated environment) approaches the time cost of consuming the article. That's bad. I want to spend my time finding and reading interesting things, not waiting for potentially interesting things to download.Partial-content feeds ruin this for me.

#5 Paul Watson on 9.09.2004 at 1:32 AM

Since when was the entire purpose of RSS to read full articles in your aggregator? I use it to find interesting articles and then read them fully on the website.

#6 sebastien.lambla@bouygtel.fr (TheTechnologist) on 9.09.2004 at 2:25 AM

I absolutely agree. RSS Feed without full content is useless. The role of an aggregator IS to prevent me from having to open a browser in the first place.You know what is going to happen if all the big providers switch to summary only mode? Well the aggregators authors will do what is good for their clients, a.k.a me. And they will jsut download the web page. I believe an article in RSS format is much smaller than the same one in HTML, with the graphics and all useless rendering. What do you think?

#7 stefan demetz on 9.17.2004 at 11:37 AM

dotnetjunkies.com/.../25896.aspx

#8 Steve Maine on 9.17.2004 at 1:23 PM

Last time I looked, RSS stood for "Really Simple Syndication", not "Really Simple Summarization". I'll concede that I don't know what Dave was thinking when he created the protocol. I have my views on what it was intended for, he has his, and I'm sure they're different. However, getting into a debate over what RSS was *intended* for is not that interesting.Focusing on what RSS actually *is* (i.e., how people are using it in the wild) is much more interesting. Fact of the matter is that a lot of people are publishing full-text feeds, and a lot of people like it. Regardless of whatever RSS was intended to be, it's morphed into a full-text distribution protocol. I don't buy your argument about full-text feeds lowering productivity. Yes, they cost bandwidth but as a user I don't notice that. Even if they take a longer time to download, that all happens in the background. In theory, abbreviated feeds would work -- if everyone was disciplined enough to write good abstracts of their posts. But hardly anybody actually does that. Check out this post for the long version of my argument: hyperthink.net/.../PermaLink,guid,