Full/Partial Feed Debate

The times they are a-changin’.

This post seems to be older than 17 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.

Robert Scoble is having a discussion on full versus partial feeds (see his links here, here, and here).

I agree with Scoble and I don’t subscribe to feeds that only have partial text. And there were some really good feeds that I had to delete. But my time is valuable and I only have a limited amount of time between classes to glance at my feed reader (I use JetBrains Omea Reader 2.0, which is free and the best one I’ve found of yet). If I have to spend time reading a small primer and then clicking on a link and waiting for that load (with all it’s wonderful graphics), then I’m not a happy camper.

I would assume the whole point of partial feeds is to draw the user to the site, a marketing gimmick of sorts. With me and countless others, it’s having the opposite effect and driving viewers away. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, not Rich Site Summary (at least in my book).

Some of my friends have blogs that only provide partial feeds and I tell them that I won’t subscribe unless they use a blog service that allows full feeds. I even offer to help them move over to a new blog service (like WordPress.com).

[tags]Robert Scoble, RSS, feed, full versus partial, WordPress.com, Omea Reader[/tags]

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