In its June 11, 2007 print issue, Business Week published some very interesting U.S. social media usage data based on a recent Forrester Research report.
Not surprisingly, the younger an Internet user, the more likely that he or she uses one or multiple forms of social media. While anywhere between 37 to 70 percent of the 18 to 21 year-olds read or write blogs, listen to podcasts, use social networking sites such as MySpace.com or watch peer-generated videos (YouTube.com), that usage percentage goes down into the low double digits for seniors over 62. Similarly, 70% of seniors are “Inactives” whereas only 17 percent of the youth is in that category.
There’s one exception: Really Simple Syndication (RSS). Its usage is constant across all seven different age segments. Unfortunately, it’s very low at around 15 percent.
The low uptake of RSS is puzzling, since I cannot even imagine my life on the Web without RSS any longer. I would rather live without YouTube or podcasts than without RSS!
So why are adoption rates of RSS so low? I assume most new RSS users will quickly amass a big collection of RSS articles, but then find the management of these articles and feeds unwieldy and drop RSS altogether. Or they do not really see any additional value in having web content downloaded pro-actively rather than them having to go to individual sites to retrieve it.
What they miss is the power of stored searches, also called “watches”. For example, I subscribe to a wide number of political RSS feeds, from New York Times to other U.S. news sites to the Economist and additional international news sites. The content of all of these RSS feeds gets dumped into one big folder called “Politics”. I then define a search against this folder, e.g., for a keyword called “Iraq”, and store the search in a Watch folder. Thus, to keep current with news from Iraq, I only have to go to my Iraq watch folder and see all the articles from the various feeds that pertain to Iraq.
I use the same system to keep up with news about my employer, hobbies, sports, technology and other interests. By not having to go to individual sites, but “having filtered news come to me”, I drastically cut the time needed to keep up with what I’m interested in. I hardly spend more than 10-15 minutes on any watch folder, while still feeling much better informed than when RSS was not around.
Which is why RSS is so important to me. If you adopt a similar system, I’m sure you will stick with RSS as well!
Did Apple sell out the iPhone, as predicted by everyone? Not sure, but I checked availability on Apple’s site this morning. At least all of stores in California are green — meaning there is availability.
