The majority of broken feeds I discovered were the result of blogs or websites that have changed their RSS feed or did something to their RSS feed that resulted in me not seeing any of their content for the last few months or even over a year.

If you are a blogger or website owner – the first best practice is you should be subscribed to your own RSS feed and checking it regularly. This is a good way to see what others are seeing when they subscribe to your RSS feed. If it breaks or is not updating correctly – you will likely see this behavior yourself and be able to respond and fix.

The next best practice is that if you absolutely have to change your RSS feed for whatever reason, you should look at putting in some sort of redirect that will redirect users automatically who are subscribed to your old RSS feed URL to the new RSS feed URL. This will result in no user action for folks subscribed to your RSS feed and they will continue to see updates as expected without knowing your feed even changed.

Of course there are also SEO (search engine optimization) issues if your RSS feed is busted too.

And just posted about how bloggers are (and should) be using RSS to push their content out to social networking services like Twitter and Facebook. If your RSS feed is busted, guess what? You’re content isn’t hitting these services and you’re likely losing exposure to the stuff you write.

The problem with RSS was that it never quite got to the point where it was something easily understood by the average person visiting a blog. My mom would never understand the concept of “subscribing” to an RSS feed of a blog or “subscribing to a blog”. It was easier for them to just add that blog to their Favorites (or Bookmarks) in their browser so they can revisit in the future. Along comes Twitter and Facebook which makes it extremely easy for people to consume information and easy for bloggers to push their blog posts out for people to read. The average person understands the concept of following someone on Twitter. Following someone could mean following a person or following a website. Most websites today automatically push their blog posts out to at least Twitter. And that’s where most people consume the content people blog.

But with bloggers pushing their content to Twitter – do you really think there is someone manually tweeting when a new post is published?

No.

At least not likely.

This is where RSS comes in.

Social networks today have become quite good at aggregating information from a variety of sources – including RSS. It’s almost a standard option. There are a bunch of services offered in Twitter’s extensive ecosystem that will take your blog’s RSS feed and automatically tweet it. My favorite is Twitterfeed. And both Facebook and Windows Live offer the ability for you to configure an RSS feed to bring in anything you publish to your blog and display it in your news feed. As a blogger and someone who runs a few blogs, I want to be able to push my content out to the major social networks for people to consume and as easily as possible. Today RSS allows me to do that.

RSS today is more important to content publishers like bloggers than it is to anyone else. It is very important for pushing blog content out to important services like Twitter, Facebook, or Windows Live for people to consume their content. It’s just no longer important for bloggers to recommend people “subscribe” to their blogs. Instead, the recommendation is to follow them (the blogger or blog) on Twitter.

Side note: The advantage to Twitter that is really exciting to me as a blogger is that its much more interactive. My Twitter feed is a place I can push my content to people that follow me but also interact with them and discuss my content beyond the comments section of my blog.

Now I say RSS is important today. It may not be very important in the future though. Actually, it probably won’t. If you look at Twitter, Facebook, Windows Live, and other social networks like Foursquare – they are all developing APIs that web developers can use to tap directly (and more integrate more deeply) into their services. Blog platforms are beginning to take advantage of this. Blogs and websites in general are looking at becoming more integrated into these services. In the future, it is likely a simple RSS feed won’t be enough. Actually – it won’t.

It will be interesting to watch this space in the next year or two.

Anybody know of a major website that is no longer publicly offering an RSS feed but instead asks their readers to follow them on Twitter or “like” their Facebook Page?

UPDATE: I tested the Tweet Button myself. Doesn’t seem to be showing the number of “tweets” that have been posted from the button although if I click on the number “O” it shows my test. Weird. Not sure what the deal is.

UPDATE 2: Now it seems to be working. It seems there is a slight delay? Are others experiencing a delay in tweet counts?

When I was investigating using Posterous for my blog, Posterous’s CEO Sachin Agarwal had tweeted about taking in bug feedback. I jokingly replied to him that I thought not supporting Windows Live Writer was a bug (although I was being serious in that they should support Writer). His response to me on what I considered some valid and honest feedback was that he considers using Windows “a bug”. That kind of put me off a bit. Granted, I’m a bit biased. I know Sachin worked at Apple, supports their products 100% (just like I do with Microsoft), and is “inspired” by Apple and has never owned a PC according to his Twitter profile. But seriously… what kind of response was that? So Posterous is going to ignore the huge customer base that uses Windows today (it looks like Posterous doesn’t support IE8 either)? On Windows – Windows Live Writer is simply the best blogging tool available. It would be a huge benefit to Posterous to support it in my opinion and create additional value to people looking to move to Posterous. Perhaps he misunderstood my initial reply as being a bit snarky and if that’s the case – I do apologize. But if Sachin considers using Windows a bug – I take that as a heavy sign Posterous will likely not be doing anything special like supporting Windows Live Writer for Posterous – at least officially. Scott Lovegrove has made a plugin for Windows Live Writer that enables using Writer to post to Posterous blogs. Scott’s plugin works well. But I was looking for official support. It looks like Posterous is also focused on competing with the likes of Twitpic anyway. I wish them luck.

So in short – I’m sticking to WordPress as the blog platform of choice for my personal blog.

For me, I have a hard time not believing that this acquisition is only just the beginning for Twitter in terms of developing and or owning their own official Twitter clients on multiple platforms. I predict that in the coming months, we’ll hear more about Twitter doing official clients for the PC, Mac, Android, Windows Phone 7, etc. Twitter previously announced Twitter for Blackberry. Will Twitter look to acquire someone like TweetDeck next?

So what does this mean for third party developers and their apps?

Will Twitter use their official client apps to take advantage of exclusive features they develop that no third party app can utilize?

It will be interesting to see what happens in this space in the next few months.

In WordPress 3.0, they are introducing a brand new default theme called “Twenty Ten” which offers several customization features. I’m trying the new theme out right now. So far I really like it. I’m going to test out the theme’s new customization features over the weekend. I think investing less time in trying to develop my own theme from scratch and perhaps doing some actual blogging might be beneficial.

I’m not an expert at soda but a lot of it today is made with high fructose corn syrup. But “back in the day”, soda was made with real sugar. Not sure which is worse for you, they might be equally as bad for you. But after a sip of Dr. Pepper with *real sugar* I could feel a slight kick – my mouth tingled. It was like a blast from the past although I never experienced growing up on soda with real sugar. I thought this was neat that Pepsi and Dr. Pepper are doing this and I am a huge fan of their vintage designs they are using with this heritage “series” of soda.

By the – Dr. Pepper is celebrating 125 years of awesomeness. Note to Dr. Pepper – PLEASE make your downloadable wallpapers in much higher desktop resolutions. 1024×768 just doesn’t cut it anymore.

My dad is pissed – he’s a Coke fan and has been writing to Coke telling them to use real sugar (and glass bottles) officially in the U.S. (instead of relying on imports) and he even received a response to one of his emails that is along the lines of “thanks for your idea but we get too many ideas”. He emailed them back tonight asking why they let Pepsi beat them to doing something cool in the soda market.

I took the above shot of the Heritage Dr. Pepper 12-pack packaging with my HTC HD2 and uploaded it to Flickr. Having a 5 megapixel camera in a mobile phone is absolutely awesome!

Nothing against HTC’s hard work at providing a fantastic looking UI to run in Windows Mobile but I find that the Sense UI is overly complicated and too “busy” for me. I feel like its information overload. I would much rather have a much simpler UI. I hate to use this as an example but if you look at the hottest phone on the market today in the eyes of consumers – the iPhone – it’s UI is very simple and easy to use. I bet if you gave a consumer a phone running HTC Sense, they might find it complicated too. But again, I applaud the hard work HTC has done in this space and look forward to seeing where they take it. They have done a lot of great work here.

There is an interesting discussion taking place within the comments of my Flickr photo about running with HTC Sense on versus not.