June 16th, 2005

The Ups and Downs of Full-Text RSS Feeds

by Joshua Porter  |   7 Comments  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/125

Up until a few days ago, I had a partial text feed on Bokardo. This wasn’t because I planned it that way ahead of time, it was because that was the default action and I had no reason to change it. Also, I didn’t have anybody asking me to change. In my own feed reading habits, I didn’t particularly have an attitude one way or another: I would read a post if it interested me.

That last sentence has to be a lie, or at least a glossing over of facts. What I must mean is that I didn’t notice all the times that I didn’t click through to the site because I wasn’t compelled to do so by an interesting lead, a relevant topic, or a trust in the author. To be fair, I also didn’t notice when I started to read a full-text entry and then stopped out of boredom. Even so, full-text feeds have to affect the experience in some way. This is because that no matter how small the step is, the mere fact that we have to click to get more information is a barrier to going forward.

Steve Gillmor is adamant about full-text feeds, as seen in this bit he wrote to compell Om Malik to use them. His argument, from what I can tell, is that so many people offer full-text feeds that he doesn’t have time for sites that don’t offer one (“time is money”). To recast it into attention terms: his attention is too valuable for him to go down the rabbit hole and click through to a site.

The jury is still out on them. Lockergnome’s Chris Pirillo recently changed away from them, citing the fact that there are many posts pointing to posts pointing to posts. Steve Rubel, as well as some vocal commentators on the announcement post, are suggesting a different explanation: that Pirillo is trying to get more advertising money by making folks visit his site directly.

I’m torn, too. The tension is between providing a full-text feed that provides a better user experience vs. a partial feed that drives more people to my site in an attempt at showing them all the other content that is there. I have to point out, however, that I do not have the same issue that Pirillo has: I have no advertisements to change or dilute your user experience. I’m very happy about that.

This often happens when advertisements are involved. When someone offers advertising, they become slaves to it. When we are rewarded for a certain behavior, we continue that behavior. Unfortunately, what happens is not always in the best interest not of users, but in the best interest of advertisers. As pockets are lined, messages and branding are diluted.

So, for me, several things are clear: Full-text feeds…

  • Provide a better user experience
  • Put more power in the user’s hands, letting them visit the site at their leisure
  • Strengthen the brand by making it easier to access content
  • Are iffy for advertising (currently) Here’s a discussion on MarketingStudies

There is another item that I can’t add: Full-text feeds decrease traffic to the site. The reason why is that since I went full-text, my traffic has increased! This could be a coincidence, of course. I may have had more inlinking around that time, or my content all of a sudden became more interesting, or a story got picked up on Google, or well, maybe the full-text feeds actually improve the user experience enough to get people interested…

At any rate, I’m sticking with the full-text feeds. A side-effect of this is that I have to innovate where the users are. So, I’ll be playing around more on the RSS end of things. As you saw in my last post, and as you’ll see more in the future, I’ve added links at the bottom to “join the discussion”. Because that’s what I want: a discussion. Someone reading my post and moving on to someone else’s might strengthen my brand, but I would love them to join the conversation, too. On the other hand, maybe not everyone enjoys a conversation as much as me. So, either way is OK.

Going forward, I’m really anxious to see how these changes affect your experiences. If they’ve improved your experience or made it worse, let me know.

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Comments

1.  Flotsam 11:12am, Thu 16th, 2005

It’s not a problem for me either way. Any article that I want to read gets opened in browser tabs as I trawl through the feeds in my RSS reader. By the time I’ve reached the end of the feed list the pages are all open and ready to read.

The sites I won’t read are those that only have a headline that’s neither attention grabbing or informative.

2.  Peter Boersma 3:30am, Fri 17th, 2005

I say keep the full-text feed!

However, your argument that full-text feeds “strengthen the brand” isn’t necessarily true; the texts may be seen in a different light when surrounded by the context of other texts, coloring and images, and related links that appear on the site.

3.  NatC 6:13am, Fri 17th, 2005

4 comments here (I kept adding more one after the other):

1/ Wait until you have ads on your site, and you’ll even split the *POSTS* on multiple pages, as most online magazines are doing nowadays.

2/ I don’t want to read posts in an aggregator. I need to feel the entire site, and be able to switch easily to any linked site, so that it makes an entire conversation or discovery path on its own. That needs to happen outside of the aggregator, that I view as the source for these conversations or discovery paths… a source I’m going back to on a high frequency, so that I’d better leave it open in its own tab, and open new tabs for visiting the sites anyway.

3/ I love when a brief entry caughts my attention, and that I’m left to click to discover even more richness. RSS reading is a treasure hunt, don’t give the gold chest too early. If you give it to me in my aggregator, it does not even look like any gold – it’s just all grey.

4/ So is a post text all that you’re looking for? Where is the conversation happening then? Well, forget about this comment if you don’t care :-)
I don’t mean that full-text feeds are preventing from reading or using comments, but that if you want full-text in your aggregator in order to appreciate a post’s value to you, then you should not forget the comments either. My opinion is that a small catching paragraph is fine for deciding or not to “take the risk” to go further. The remaining part is the adventure.

4.  cori schlegel 12:35am, Sun 26th, 2005

Catching up to some back content Joshua, and I saw this…. As I’ve commented elsewhere I love the full-text feed, and I still click through to your site.

Also interesting to note is that Chris Pirillo switched back to full-text several days after the post you linked to (http://chris.pirillo.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/26/886557.html).

5.  pdtar 7:55pm, Mon 4th, 2005

I certainly prefer full feeds and find myself still visiting sites regularly. I don’t reject partial feeds outright but kick them to the curb at the first irritation where they seem to disappear from my universe.