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Facebook Takes on Google Reader: Who Said RSS is Dead?

By Tac Anderson ⋅ February 1, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment
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I’ve been playing around with Facebook. Both how to promote brands on Facebook as well as how users consume content within the walled garden (hint: there’s a direct correlation between the two).

As blogs and media networks extend their reach using Facebook Pages, I noticed something interesting:

Facebook can be used as an RSS reader.

Most people don’t use the groups feature enough but it’s just like using Twitter lists, except you can’t share them. I’ve set up one just for the blogs I follow on Facebook.

Facebook as RSS Reader

It’s like a more graphical version of Google Reader with the shared and comments view shown in the collapsed mode.From here users can like or comment on any post or click through to the expanded “notes” view.

Facebook is a growing source of news for most people. While the geeks among us may still prefer RSS or Twitter your average user will follow a fan page before they subscribe to an RSS feed.  I’ve written about a study showing that Facebook members use the social network as a growing source of tech news.

(BTW, feel free to join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page.)

Over on the Facebook blog, Malorie Lucich, has a post about how she’s seeing the rise of Facebook as a news source Creating Your Personalized News Channel.

When the earthquake hit Haiti, victims in the area, news affiliates and people around the world used Facebook to learn what was happening, connect with loved ones and quickly disseminate information. ABCNews.com and France 24 added Facebook live stream boxes to their sites to enable people to share their feelings on the disaster and relief efforts, and publish it back to their Facebook status. Meanwhile, The New York Times created a special Facebook Page dedicated to Haiti coverage, resources and updates from their reporters on the ground.

Malorie then recommends building a group of just the news sources you follow to clear the clutter. The next step in Facebook’s twitterfication will be to make these lists shareable. Facebook could also further this adoption by mimicking Twitter’s now dead, Suggested User List and have a recommended group that people could follow or even recommended groups by category. Companies would pay millions for that kind of reach.

As this kind of use on Facebook grows your Facebook fan numbers could easily eclipse your RSS subscriber numbers. This also poses an interesting challenge for publishers hiding their content behind pay wall or a unique partnership opportunity, depending on how they approach it.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick just posted a very similar post on ReadWriteWeb:

Facebook Could Become World’s Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.

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About Tac

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.

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  • http://twitter.com/voidfiles alex kessinger

    Yes, users may not get RSS, but a websites isn't forced to have a presence in google to br read on google reader

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com tacanderson

    True, but you do need a website. Technically you don't even need an RSS feed anymore. To have a Facebook page you don't actually need either. But if you do have an RSS feed there's no cost to having a Facebook page.

    You have to go where the readers are. 3 tears ago all the SEO experts were telling companies they needed a blog if they wanted to rank highly on Google. A website wasn't enough. This is the next extension of that argument, right or wrong.

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com tacanderson

    True, but you do need a website. Technically you don't even need an RSS feed anymore. To have a Facebook page you don't actually need either. But if you do have an RSS feed there's no cost to having a Facebook page.

    You have to go where the readers are. 3 tears ago all the SEO experts were telling companies they needed a blog if they wanted to rank highly on Google. A website wasn't enough. This is the next extension of that argument, right or wrong.

  • msj904rssreader

    Many are not using the tool all because they are not aware that you it is there. and even those that are aware do not know how to use the tool.

  • http://twitter.com/luckylou Luis Antezana (luckylou)

    It's worth pointing out that you're using the wrong terms in your article. You talk about using Facebook *groups* to serve a similar purpose to RSS, but you should be saying Facebook *lists*. Groups and lists have an entirely different functionality, of which I am sure you're aware, but it's probably worth editing your original text to make the correction since it would be very confusing for the less familiar to try to achieve this kind of filtering with groups.

    On my iPhone (I'm not sure which features are on other mobile devices), I find it quite handy that I am able access my lists to use as a filtering tool.

    Facebook lists work both ways, too: you can filter down to just the sources you want to read, and you can make a list to filter out the sources you don't want to read.

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com tacanderson

    That's a big problem with Facebook. Many of their user features are very hard to figure out. They could themselves and their readers a huge service by A) making their setting easier to find and use and B) educating their users on how to use existing functionality.

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com tacanderson

    Luis, you are absolutely right. I did mean Lists not groups.Thanks for pointing that out.

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