I used to think Jakob Neilsen was really on to something. And don’t misunderstand, I still feel that his robot-like usability/simplicity mantra has some merit, but I think he’s getting to the point where he’s no longer really understanding technology and is instead stuck on a 1994 version of the usability meme and stubbornly refusing to budge.

Witness the latest interview on the Wall Street Journal where he discusses RSS. He says that email newsletters are better than RSS feeds because people look forward to them and they can be targetted at specific time periods. He also says that we shouldn’t use the ‘RSS’ moniker because people don’t know what it means and we should say “news feeds” instead.

First of all, go ask Richard Stallman about retroactively re-naming technology. GNU/Linux anyone? Anyone? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Perhaps ‘news feeds’ is a better term. In fact, I’d submit that he’s absolutely right since RSS is only one type of feed and it’s like saying “Kleenex” when you mean “facial tissue.” Still, RSS is easy to type and there are a lot of people who are already really used to calling it RSS. Chances are, the term won’t go away and it almost sounds like Neilsen is rejecting the technology because he doesn’t like the name.

What’s even more insane is that he goes on to trumpet the heavens about the benefits of email newsletters instead. Check it:

With the best ones, it’s like a service you are waiting for and expecting. The email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That’s the great strength.

Okay, let’s compare and contrast. I have about 35 news feeds on my Netvibes page. I also subscribe to about six or seven email newsletters including the iTunes weekly, TiVo’s newsletter, Ticketmaster’s events calendar and GameSpot’s “targeted” weekly. Of the newsletters I probably only ever really find anything of value in Ticketmaster’s and even then it’s probably on the level of one out of every three contains a listing for a show I’m interested in seeing and wouldn’t have otherwise known existed. My least favorite is GameSpot’s because no matter how much they try to cater to my preferences, it’s still fluffy, week-old cruft that I either don’t care about or already knew.

Of my 35 feeds, however, I probably read about 25% of the articles that come through. That’s a lot more value to me not because I get that much content from them but because I skip the other 75% not based on time-wasting skim-throughs to get to the good stuff but based on clear information gathered from the linked text and blurbs or fed articles that I can examine one at a time. Take for example my feed from RPGNet: There are probably ten to twelve articles that come through per day and many of them don’t interest me in the least. Yesterday a column came through with the headline and preview text: “Behind the Counter: A Busy Season. Origins, Sales Analysis, Online Sales, and GAMA.” No click. I don’t care about the details of distribution methods for gaming shops. It might have been an interesting article, but I didn’t feel like spending the time finding out, it didn’t sound interesting and I didn’t have to read more than 13 words to determine that. On the other hand the article whose feed read “Keeping Kosher: Balancing Characters and Stories. Character-focused and story-focused players in RPGs.” got a click. I didn’t have to run my eyeballs past the four screens worth of text on the distribution article to get to the character/story article like I would have in a newsletter. That’s great strength, and Neilsen is missing the point.