MSNFOUND is so sad... | The Coffeehouse

eagle

Quick jump to MSNFOUND before it is lost forever!

Rossj

eagle wrote:

Quick jump to MSNFOUND before it is lost forever!

I can't believe this site is still up. There is something seriously wrong with Microsoft Marketing at the moment.

eagle

The people Microsoft hires to do “Marketing” haven’t a clue as to what Marketing is!

I think Heather should come here to C9 and explain why the people who created MSNFOUND were hired!

She doesn't alow discussion on her blog, it’s her “happy place”!

rhm

eagle wrote:

Quick jump to MSNFOUND before it is lost forever!

What is it?

eagle

It's a "happy place"!

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

You didn't see my rant, did you?

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/02/19.html#a9456

Sigh.

eagle

We want to see the video!

Aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh

The "people" responsible FOR msnfound should be INSERTED here.

Shaded
Mean ugly geek with axe

Holey canoles THAT was the cause of the rant?

Ok, I apologize for what I said about showing restraint.

I would be screaming fired as well. Read faced, tearing up and breaking blood vessels in my eyes type of screaming.

For some reason I don't consider MSN part of Microsoft. They seems to belong in the AOL family more than Microsoft family.

They're more like Microsoft's ... mentally challenged offspring...

manickernel
anticipate consequences..

Scoble,

In following your links I hit this which is great, thanks.

Cider
Daze-d & Confused

Its a fricking daft site, to be sure. Utterly pointless. I think its summed up by doing a google search on "msnfound" and the most common return is "Robert Scoble says to msnfound.com: you're fired"!

I don't particularly agree with the statement that RSS feeds are everything. I think they are an important interface but I think that there is a lot more to a site than just RSS feeds. Take Channel 9, as a good example. Would it have been any sort of success if it had just been the videos and nothing more? A moderate one. However, it is the community and "culture of feedback" that has led to Channel 9 being what it is. I'd doubt RSS has little to do with C9 at all.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

I think C9 had a confluence of things that made it good. But RSS is a major one. Certainly one of the top five. Channel 9 wouldn't be a "channel" without RSS.

Heck, I was just reading the local newspaper and it was talking about RSS on the front page of their lifestyle section.

A really cool example? Get http://www.dopplerradio.net and subscribe to the videos feed. That's so killer. Especially if you have a portable media center or a SmartPhone.

lars

eagle wrote:

Quick jump to MSNFOUND before it is lost forever!

Holy cow! That's the most pathetic over the top marketing site I've seen in years. The lasting impression can be summed up in one word: "fake". Big Smile

eagle

So does that mean you won't be subscribing to the RSS feed, whenever it's added?

Manip

Scooble wrote:

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

I can't say I like that very much... RSS is one technology and most people don't use them/it at all. In fact less than 5% of web-visitors actively use it or even know what it is. So to suggest that all Microsoft sites should have RSS is silly and that statement has very little to do with what's best for Microsoft Marketing and a lot more to do with your personal (might I say irrational?) feelings towards RSS.

Also, RSS is only for geeks or 'new net society' geeks (bloggers). I'm a geek and I can't figure out how it's useful... Also, in 1998 the web was just for geeks, things change, but you can't ignore the reality and I doubt RSS is going to survive very long anyhow.

PS - What is that site about, I can't figure it out ... I don't plan to re-visit any time soon I can tell you... :o

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

I have to agree with Manip on this one. RSS is fun and useful, but it doesn't pass the grandma test.

The only people I know who subscribe seriously to RSS feeds are:

1) People who try it out for a few days and get bored with it
2) People who are so web savvy (re: addicted) that RSS gives them the ability to process much more information than they could by manually hitting each important website.

I fall in catagory 2, btw, so RSS appeals to me, but grandma doesn't get it and she sure as heck won't be setting up SharpReader any time soon.

And, lastly, let us not forget that while most of us geeks feel that the web is so far reaching and invasive that it must be Important (with a capital I), a giant majority of the world doesn't have working plumbing.

RSS is important to people who use RSS. Nothing more, nothing less.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

You totally missed my point.

I totally agree that grandma isn't into RSS today.

But the connectors in society are.

And, RSS is on the front page of today's Seattle PI (living section) newspaper today, so your grandma will be getting into it soon.

Oh, and if you are reading blogs in a web browser you are wasting your time. Hours of your time.

But, maybe you have time to waste. I don't.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Oh, and by the end of next year I'd expect all browsers to have RSS built in.

So, grandma is coming soon!

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Manip: you honestly can't figure out why RSS is useful?

OK, here's a challenge. I'll give you 100 sites to read. I'll read the same sites. You need to keep up.

You read in a browser. I read in, say, Onfolio 2.0. http://www.onfolio.com/beta/

Now, here's the thing. Every night we need to write a blog explaining what we find.

Here's where I kick your behind:

1) I only need to read the sites that have published something in the past 24 hours. You need to read every one. Hint: in my aggregator only about 35% of the bloggers post something in the past 24 hours.
2) I only need to read the new content. It's bold. You, on the other hand, need to read every single page and figure out what's changed over the past 24 hours.
3) I don't need to recalibrate my eyes to different fonts for each site like you do, or deal with color backgrounds or blinky color crap.
4) I can read offline in a plane, or at the park where there's no wifi. You need to be online.

Get it yet? Try it out. Then you'll understand.

Oh, and there are some services, like http://www.pubsub.com that basically require you to get into RSS.

And we aren't even gonna get into podcasting or vcasting like what we do here on Channel 9.

harumscarum
out of memory

The only company I have seen that is bringing rss to the average user is yahoo. With the ff toolbar a blue plus sign appears on sights that have an rss feed. I can add these sites and then on my "myyahoo" page I have a list of all rss feeds and their current content on "myyahoo" page..

Just because rss is in the Seattle Times does not mean rss is going to invade America. While the technology is cool no one, except for yahoo IMO has tried to push it to the masses. End users are attached to their web browsers if the browser can not do what Onfolio can do then they are not going to use it.

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

scobleizer wrote:

You totally missed my point.

I totally agree that grandma isn't into RSS today.

But the connectors in society are.

And, RSS is on the front page of today's Seattle PI (living section) newspaper today, so your grandma will be getting into it soon.

Oh, and if you are reading blogs in a web browser you are wasting your time. Hours of your time.

But, maybe you have time to waste. I don't.

And you missed mine : )

The site that was referenced in the beginning of this article would never have appealed to the kind of people who use RSS readers. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the pathetic attempts to appeal to Gen X'ers from the 90s.

And guess what, most people don't read 100 websites a day.

You do and I do but MOST PEOPLE don't.

MOST PEOPLE will see a little rss icon on the front page of their hometown newspaper and assume it's some kind of web advertisement.

MOST PEOPLE will wait for weird cousin Johnny to send them the important articles.

MOST PEOPLE don't have time to waste online period.

Finally, I don't think I implied that I have time to waste, I DO think that RSS is important to me, but I would rather drive railroad spike through my temple before I would sign up for an RSS feed from a marketing site. I doubt I'm the only one here who feels that way.

androidi

RSS may be needed for Scoble to create buzz, but that's not the point. The point here is that the site in question has other, more serious, problems.

I would also like to ask, what kind of idea is to have popup links on the site?

Popup is a way of saying "You're not in control of your browser". Especially in IE as the popups create new windows to clutter up the taskbar.

I'll also question the matter that background RSS polling would become popular:

Suppose you play games and have low end broadband. Now when you are playing some game you notice that every "hour" there is annoying lag, what do you do?

If MS is going to implement RSS polling for browser, I hope they do it properly:

Create a scenario where user has only Very Crappy 256/128 kbps bandwidth (rural area), needs to have low latency constantly in a 3rd party app which the OS is not aware of requiring low latency. Now have hundreds of subscribed frequently updating RSS feeds update during a game session, some with video content. If the updates hit at about the same time window, I guarantee that the Joe Gamer will take a note.

Practical way of avoiding the issue would be to by default disable updating RSS feeds while some app has taken fullscreen control (no taskbar). Course they could distribute the feed updates evenly, but it would have to be made sure not to cause any latency/perf hits even if the feed would have a video file inside.

Any bets whether the IE/OS RSS team will be smart enough to test RSS performance where multiple feeds contain video, audio and update during FPS game? I bet you they won't.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Ahh, that's a change from before when you said you didn't get RSS. You DO get RSS.

As to signing up for RSS from a marketing site?

Well, isn't Channel 9 a marketing site?

You're right that most people won't want to read 100 sites (actually, I'm keeping up with more than 2000 blogs/1250 RSS feeds, but that's another story).

Now, how will those people who don't read many feeds, or don't know what RSS is, find out about those sites?

Email, right? But from where? From their friends who read Slashdot, or who read Channel 9, or who hang out on Instapundit or Boing Boing, or some site like that.

See, this is where RSS is important. If you don't help out the connectors they won't link to you (or will be far less likely to).

If you don't get your hot site on BoingBoing or MetaFilter or Instapundit you'll have no chance of getting into the email or IM word-of-mouth networks.

Now, http://www.msnfound.com probably cost us $100,000 (maybe less if we're lucky, but I doubt it).

How much more would it have cost to add RSS? Another $1,000? Why not take the extra 1% to do something right and make sure everyone will like it?

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Harumscarum: myMSN now has RSS too.

And did you miss http://www.bloglines.com ? Even your mom can use that.

Rossj

scobleizer wrote:

But the connectors in society are.

I hear you say this quite a lot Robert, and I just thought it might be useful to clarify. You mean tech society?

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Rossj wrote:

scobleizer wrote:
But the connectors in society are.

I hear you say this quite a lot Robert, and I just thought it might be useful to clarify. You mean tech society?

I'll let Scoble add his answer, but I'll push mine in, too:
As Scoble said, those of us who aren't getting our sites and news via RSS feeds are getting them through other means - email from friends, word-of-mouth and sites we frequent. All these are a vector for spreading viral information - ideas, silly videos, urban legends and other cultural memes. This has always been going on, but with communication getting broader and faster (newspapers, then radio, TV and personal sites and EMail) these things have been getting faster and more widespread. Blogs and RSS Feeds are the natural evolution of this - I push information, someone else pulls it. Information is transferred without all the overhead. How many people subscribe to BoingBoing? Tens of thousands, at the very least - that's a much more potent vector of 'infection' than anything we've had before. All those people who are sending out emails or telling them friends - more and more of THEM are getting their news through RSS feeds.
So what happens is that those people who DO get RSS - none of whom are my grandmother, that's true - do determine, eventually, the information that my grandmother gets (though I've taught her well, and she erases most joke/video/meme emails she receives Smiley

)

Where was I? Oh, right. RSS good. No RSS bad.