Why Don’t Social Networks Provide RSS Feeds?

The total lack of RSS feeds on many of the most popular social networks seems shocking. More and more, across the net, RSS feeds have become the standard way to make important oft-updated information universally and easily accessible. In addition to increasing user convenience, feeds allow sites to participate in a whole galaxy of mash-ups, pipes, and remixes. Meanwhile, social networks are like black holes: they suck in your data and attention while emitting nothing in return. Facebook‘s failure to offer one for your “News Feed” (it’s most prominent UI feature) glares especially darkly in this regard since they explicitly describe this information as a feed without offering it to you as one.

I can think of three reasons why social networks might not offer feeds, none of them especially flattering:

• Lack of Demand, Part 1. It’s possible that the average Facebook user is so technically unsophisticated that the company’s UI designers made a conscious, informed choice, based on real research, and decided that explaining and implementing the feature to their high standard of clarity and usability was just too challenging a prospect. Possible, but unlikely. No less populist a site than Blogger managed to explain not only the process RSS subscription to their audience, but also a whole series of RSS publishing options — a much more complicated topic.
• Lack of Demand, Part 2. It’s also possible that, when it comes down to it, people don’t actually have an urgent need to know what’s going on in their social networks; the updates to their News Feed — the fact that “Cameron Hill added the Vampires application” or that “Marcus Estes removed ‘hidden telecommunications'” from his interests” or that “Jamie Freedman added the Optical Illusions Challenge application” — may just not be all that vital. Oh, how I wish I believed this was true. In reality, though, the number of hours clocked on the site itself by each of Facebook’s 50 million users seems to debunk it pretty thoroughly. I mean, the mere existence of the word Facecrack on its own seems to end the “Lack of Demand” conversation pretty conclusively, doesn’t it?
• Greed. With Lack of Demand shot down, we’re pretty much left looking greed unavoidably in the eye. As Cory Doctorow recently righteously griped — and as the growing Facebook Beacon scandal confirms — nearly every technical decision Facebook makes is designed with a sole mission in mind: generating more ad impressions. Why don’t Facebook notification emails contain the message’s actual content? So you’ll click through to the site and view more ads, of course! Not that you can’t put ads in feed items (or even emails), but I’m sure the average trip to Facebook generates more than a single page view, which amplifies impressions, and removes a modal change, which improves click-throughs and conversions.

There are, of course, exceptions to this logic. Digg, Twitter, and a few other sites, mostly with more technically savvy audiences, generate feeds galore (and, in the case of Twitter, actually push their content out to a variety of messaging platforms most of which present major obstacles to advertising), but the general story remains: Facebook and MySpace, the mainstream social networks, don’t generate feeds.

And I think this is an opportunity for someone.

What would you do with an RSS feed from your social network of choice? What could you mash it up or remix it with? Would having access to a feed change how you operate your account? How would a highly feed-oriented social network that emanated data and activity in all directions be different from today’s black holes? Would it be better?

Tagged: social network, feed, rss, greedfacebook