Examples of News that you would miss using only RSS and or Google Reader
Google Reader is a highly recommended tool to browse News feeds. But not every bit of information and also not every News on the Web is available as an RSS feed. Now you could argue that in this case you just do not care about those pieces of information because there is anyhow too much information on the Web available. This is certainly true. But are you not interested in:
- great buying opportunities on Apple.com,
- your chance to save money after shopping on Amazon or
- search results that Google found some days after you done a search?
For more details please read on.
Amazon post order price guarantee
Amazon offers a post order price guarantee:
“If Amazon.com’s price for an already-released item decreases within 30 days after we ship the item to you, we’ll be glad to refund the difference in price if you contact us.”
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If I would have bought the Radioshark2 three weeks ago (screen shot on the left) I would be able to get $6 (screen shot right) back from Amazon.
It can not be a surprise that there is no RSS feed (or email notification) from Amazon that would make it simple for any customer to automatically make use of the post order price guarantee.
URL of page to be checked:
Place your ordered products on your wish list and check regularly for price changes after you ordered (at the end of the article I am mentioning a tool that can do the monitoring automatically for you).
Apples refurbished shop
Apple offers refurbished products for reduced prices. Items come and and go. Sometimes you have to be quick, so those who notice it earlier have a better chance. In the screen shot you can see in yellow a new offering for a refurbished black MacBook.
Apple does not seem to offer a feed for its refurbished offerings.
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URL of page to be checked regularly:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=44BD9AA1&nclm=CertifiedMac
Google search result updates
It looks like Google does not offer (yet) RSS feeds for search results. There are situations where it is for sure interesting to see if Google found in the meantime something new regarding the query you already sent some time ago. Only the highlighted search result item in the screen shot below is new, Google found it just some hours ago.
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URL of page to be checked:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search By restricting the “date” of your search (advanced search options) Google will only show the newest results.
Techmeme news
This feels wrong. Techmeme has feeds. So why is there an issue accessing it with Google Reader?
Simply because the layout of Techmeme contains a certain information about importance and context that is lost if I am in comparison reading the same news with Google Reader.
Not convinced?
See below Techmeme in Google Reader on the left and on the right the Techmeme page itself. Obviously the highlighting of changes on the Techmeme page is an important factor for guidance/reading (a tool that automatically checks pages for changes and highlights those changes in yellow is mentioned below).
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Tools to automatically monitor Web pages for changes
There are several tools available to monitor Web pages automatically so that you are alerted as soon as something of relevance is changing on those pages. I am using myself a shareware tool named Website-Watcher (starts at 30 EUR). I like it, but it is not necessarily the ideal solution for everyone. It is is a fat client application that needs to be installed and it has a lot of features that make it sometimes complex to use. The support of Website-Watcher is fantastic.
Closing comment
There will be always reasons (also business related: see the Amazon example above) why the information that I am interested in is not “flowing” to me in the simplest possible way. This article is demonstrating with concrete examples that efforts are required to not miss relevant and interesting pieces of free available information. Although tools exist to help in this situation there is in our opinion an opportunity for someone to come up with an even easier to use (and therefore better) solution.
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Dezember 31st, 2007 at 1:03 am and is filed under Identified Issues, Recommended Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Januar 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Interesting post. I’m an enthusiastic GoogleReader user and I keep being impressed by all the inovative features they keep adding while retaining the overall simplicity of the interface. Not fully convinced by their initial collaborative approach (sharing posts made them appear on “my” shared page, which could be rss’d by friends - too recursive in my view), but the latest update (tying theReader to other buddy-lists-centric apps like GTalk) seems to make more sense already - and it’s something my mother could understand - RSS desperately needs to be “dummified”.
IMHO the most striking missing feature is the ability to add authenticated (private) feeds, which makes the Reader useless in conjunction with 37signals’ fabulous Basecamp apps, and excludes business use in general.