Orkut tries to bring RSS to the masses
Though RSS has been around for a long time, it’s not very close to being as ubiquitous as Yahoo Mail, MySpace or Orkut for that matter. Google seems to have taken a step in the right direction by introducing a rather simplistic feed reader within Orkut.
Strategically speaking, integrating RSS feeds into Orkut seems to be a good move. What any technology new or old needs to succeed is wide spread consumer adoption and what Orkut brings to the table is a huge big user base with a statistically significant geek population. As with all things new, the early adopters of this feature are bound to be geeks, adding their RSS feeds on their profiles.
According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, “People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook”. Though I couldn’t find any statistics for Orkut usage off hand, I’m sure we can infer that Orkut follows a similar trend, which means that the average Orkut user won’t go without noticing these RSS feeds.
Like they say in the PR world “Any publicity is good publicity”. What we’re going to see is a larger adoption of RSS, though you can pretty much say that the users would graduate from the Orkut feed reader to more advanced RSS aggregators like Bloglines or Google Reader. All in all, I feel that we blogger should rejoice, for we’re gonna get may more readers.
