Turns out the IE team paid a visit to the Mozilla team, and rather than a mud fight, they decided to use the same feed icon. Kodus.
A small thing that won’t make headline news, but my guess is something this small would make a huge difference. It lowers the barrier for less technical people to start using feed subscriptions. If I have to explain what RSS means, one more time …
Now, here’s another suggestion. Live Bookmarks in Firefox/Thunderbird … not the best feed reader in the world. Useful on those five must read feeds, but that’s about it. Most people will have to look elsewhere, which sadly means, copying and pasting URLs. Another technical barrier.
FeedBurner gets us one step closer, I really like what they’re doing, but it has a small sphere of influence. Why can’t we get the same functionality in the browser? Let the user pick a feed reader, online or client app, and redirect a click on the feed icon to create a new subscription. Want to add this blog’s feed to your bloglines account? Just click the little orange icon.
Sounds like a simple extension, but really this should be part of the browser. Simple yet amazingly useful, and not that complicated to do. Plus, just like the search bar in Firefox, you can always go and download new subscription services.
Correction: Apparently this is no. 3 post on Memeorandum.
Elegance and Efficacy