Chelsea finished a disappointing sixth in the league table of football websites published by comScore: Man Utd are top, Liverpool second, Arsenal third, then Real Madrid and Barcelona completing the top five. So Roman’s Empire will be hoping for a traffic boost with the launch (effectively) of its own RSS reader, based on UK firm Zebtab‘s platform.
Zebtab bills itself as ‘the ultimate widget (offering) ‘snackable’ rich content and entertainment including audio, video and pictures direct to desktops’. It’s basically your classic ‘desktop alert’ tool, with the benefit of having multiple content sources in the one application. Their promotional material doesn’t mention RSS, but today’s Guardian piece on the product says it’s ‘based on a form of RSS content feeds, but avoids technical jargon… Though widely used by bloggers and technology sites to syndicate and monitor new content, the acronym has deterred more mainstream adoption of RSS. Zebtab aims to make the technology invisible.’
We’ve seen others try to simplify RSS by launching branded applications, not least the Guardian incidentally… and fail to make much impact. I thought IE7 would have done more to drive it home, but I think they missed the opportunity. Vista’s sidebar could yet be RSS’s salvation… and whilst Zebtab’s aim is laudable, I don’t fancy their chances.
Responses
I’m a huge Barcelona fan and I want to see their website embrace the user-generated content revolution. After all, Barcelona is a club truly for the people, owned by its members (“socios”). The website should echo this.
It’s interesting to watch the desktop marketplace come alive. Manchester United have launched with Screenza, which focusses less on text alerts and more on fan immersion with wallpapers, screensaver and a calendar. Everton too have picked up the Screenza option. I tend to agree that once people learn about tabbed browsing in IE and Firefox and the Vista Widgets emerge, mee-too RSS clients may well become redundant.