After 10 days of collecting votes, we have some results in our
Dec. 5 poll that asked you what RSS readers you use.
Bloglines was the winner, with 187 votes, followed by NetNewsWire with 163 votes. It's interesting to see the number of
readers who are Mac users. FeedDemon, considered tne best RSS readers for Windows by some, only received 34 votes.
Readers could vote for multiple selections.
Yahoo received 89 votes, followed by Google's 51 votes. "Other software reader" garnered 94 votes, with 41 votes going
to "other online reader." Seven voters said they don't read RSS feeds. Combining Bloglines, Newsgator, Yahoo, Google
and "other online reader" indicates that a large chunk of our readership get their RSS-feed information online rather
than from software applications.
It suggests to me that they are getting their news, but perhaps are missing some of the extra features found in
software apps. But this could be good news for the new Web 2.0 online readers slowly surfacing. They may be able to
attract more people than the desktop software developers can, shaking up this growing niche of the software
industry.
1. Thanks for publishing these poll numbers, Todd. I've been looking forward to seeing how folks in the industry here respond. (As a NetNewsWire user myself, I'm not surprised to see it rank so high.) :)
We recently published some research that we (Yahoo!) did with the folks at Ipsos Insight to gauge the mainstream public's use of RSS.
- "http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf"
Our findings in terms of favored feedreading environments differed from this poll, although again the audience we were targeting was significantly different. The most surprising finding was really how much of the 'net public is using RSS but isn't aware of this fact. (In other words, they use and add content to a portal/aggregator experience like My Yahoo!, My MSN, etc., but have no idea of what the underlying technology is.)
Anyway, just wanted to share this set of data with your audience here, too. Thanks again for sharing these results!
Posted at 4:47AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Micah Laaker