The future ain’t bright for web designers

November 23rd, 2005

a.k.a. – The Second Coming of Content and RSS feeds

Microsoft started a buzz with their Creative Commons licensed Simple Sharing Extensions, an upgrade of RSS/ATOM syndication idea which turns feeds into multi-directional forms of communication.

I don’t know how much of an improvement this will be. It might be a dud, it might grow big. I really don’t know. So far, the scenarios where it might be used, as mentioned by Ray Ozzie from MS (link above), aren’t exactly something to get all excited about. I have a few ideas but I think I’ll wait and see it evolve before I try doing anything with it.

Why do I think web designers won’t have it easy in the future?

The web, or rather the content, is moving away from the traditional (I guess by now we can call it traditional) web presentations in html/flash to syndicated feeds.

Or as
Fred Wilson puts it:

RSS is a new medium. It’s not like the web any more than the web was like print. Remember back in the late 90s when the media execs tried to use the web to sell more papers? It doesn’t work. Content wants to be consumed in the media its delivered in.

So RSS content is not going to be used to send people to the web. It’s going to be consumed in the RSS medium, whatever that turns out to be.

With content slowly moving away from the “designed” presentation of the web into a simple text based feed what do the web designers end up with?

Content is king. That was always true but now its true in a slighly different way. It gets chopped up, mashed together and served in numerous outlets like Tech.Memeorandum, Delicious or simply stolen.

You may start out with the idea of your content being nicely laid out in the carefully set up design of a website but with everything moving towards syndication you loose all control over the content as it takes on a life of its own. It will be used and abused in numerous ways beyond your control. You cannot count on it staying where it is the way you left it.

The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website’s content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a “place” where data “is” and other sites “point” to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why “go” to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream.

source: Adam Green – 2006: The Year the Web Explodes

The way things are going at the moment it really looks as if the future of the media is:

1 – Microchunk it – Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 – Free it – Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.
3 – Syndicate it – Let anyone take it and run with it.
4 – Monetize it – Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.

The content is atomizing. What really matters is not the whole, it’s not the layout. It is the individual in a feed. The whole package might not be much to look at but a single item could end up in places you’ve never imagined possible.

A Focus on the Item – FeedBurner Blog

Today, commercial publishers sometimes find themselves deciding how atomic to make their feeds. Should they distribute twenty feeds, each general and well subscribed, or should they distribute thousands of feeds, each very specific, atomic and targeted? Some publishers even provide forms that drive the creation of individually assembled feeds.

We believe these choices will prove artificial in the long run, and since feeds are now widely searched, shared, and passed around from one person to the next via web-based aggregators or opml reading lists, it’s probably wise today to distribute a more limited collection of broadly subscribed feeds. We believe the choices surrounding feed focus are artificial because ultimately, it is the atomic unit of measure in the feed — the item — that is the most important and requires significant attention.

What do web designers end up with in the long run?