For people who like gaming, their games (or online environments) are their main interface to the Web. This has been true for some time, and unremarked upon.

There are other new interfaces that many people depend upon. The iTunes player can be an interface, when linked to Apple's Music Store. Any music player, or multimedia player, is a separate Web interface, which may or may not connect to a Web page at any time. People who swap files use those programs as interfaces.

The point is in many niches the Web browser has already been replaced as the main interface to the Internet. Microsoft's five-year campaign to dislodge Netscape was worthless, which may be why they're letting Firefox run off with so much market share.

And now, even readers are getting their own, separate interface, the RSS reader.

I use FeedDemon. Steve Stroh uses NetNewsWire on his Mac and calls it fabulous. This field has yet to shake out.

I have noticed some big differences occur in my work when I'm using FeedDemon instead of the browser as my interface to the Web:

• I'm seeing more content, faster.
• I'm seeing fewer ads.
• I'm finding great differences among sources in how they react to readers. Some post just a few sentences to the reader, others let the whole article run. The latter sites are seeing far fewer "hits" on their pages than the former, thus far fewer page-views overall, and far-fewer ad reads.
• Publishers are waking up to this by shortening, even eliminating, the text that goes into the "newspaper" format of feedreaders. The Wall Street Journal is especially aggressive in this. US News is especially lenient.

Steve Stroh has more after the break:

With a feedreader (a "newsreader" for me, will always be an app that reads Usenet Newsgroups) you have access to vastly more amounts of information that you can track much more intensively in "realtime". For example, Moore's Lore is in my "Misc. Quick Reads" folder that I track pretty closely over the course of a day... with 112 other RSS sources of info. Over the course of a day there's probably 600+ articles that pass through that folder. Every few hours I take 10-15 minutes to plow through the 100+ articles that pile up there, the vast majority of which I don't take the time time to read. But because I'm *aware* of each article that's posted, NOW I tend to catch the vast majority of the "gems", like when a friend posts to their personal blog... which I didn't used to have time to check regularly.

So, with RSS, every post counts if you want to be paid attention to. There is one blog I watch, who I won't name, who maddeningly insists on mixing inane personal details in with his very valuable technical articles. I don't read any of the personal stuff at all - just see the headlines, but when he posts a technical article, I see it. He's one of the exceptions; I've dumped others who mix TOO much personal in with the good stuff; the signal to noise ratio on those isn't worth fighting through.

With an RSS feedreader, you quickly learn who the "me too" bloggers are who don't offer any real content of their own, just propagate what others write. I weeded out those 20 or so because I no longer needed them to act as a gatekeeper - I could watch the same things they're watching in realtime now.

Just because you offer RSS doesn't mean that you don't view a web site
- far from it. Those sites that have the best info I visit often to read the entire story (only a few put the entire story out on RSS in the abstract), and thus am exposed to the ads, etc. But there are a number of sites who've implemented RSS poorly and only offer headlines and no abstract, or ten words or so; those sites I don't visit often at all because I'm not seeing much of value from just a headline (but again, I do now tend to see the "gems" now). It seems to me that RSS, well implemented, substantially increases eyeballs on a web page rather than decreasing it.

In my browser bookmarks, I keep a short list of sites that I visit periodically that haven't implemented RSS at all. I'm gradually whittling down that list because very few of them offer content that I can't get the equivalent of elsewhere. I'm doing an overall comparison with those sites, and when I do visit them manually, I find myself knowing that I've read the stories days ago in RSS (not the same exact articles. New developments are covered widely, and I have enough diverse sources of news that I tend to catch wind of developments now,even without madly refreshing those sites. One example I don't bother with except once in a blue moon is Drudge Report; if he did RSS I'd add it to my list and when he posts stories of interest to me, I'd visit
his site to read the entire story (and thus be exposed to his ads). As it stands now... I very rarely visit it. (just checked; no indications he does RSS).

RSS feedreaders let you aggregate the feeds any way you want. In addition to "Misc. Quick Reads", I have "BWIA Quick Reads" for quick updates on Broadband Wireless news (5 sources) and then a much bigger folder called "BWIA" with nearly 100 sources... and an embarrassing nearly 4,000 articles yet unread.

Another thing that's cool about RSS is that it's perfectly compatible with private / paid content. NetNewsWire has an option for username and password to access an RSS feed, and there are some that I would be willing to pay for if I could get them in RSS instead of having to visit the site manually - Doonesbury comes to mind. (Cool... just thought to check - User Friendly has one RSS. Added. Kevin and Kell doesn't. Bummer.)

I'm about to start using the companion product to NetNewsWire called MarsEdit to get blogging again. It's a blog editor application... and oh my gosh, I REALLY didn't get it about writing a blog until I saw IT in action. But that's another story.

These items are more fun when someone else does the heavy-lifting Does that make me a me-too blog?