Being compared to TiVo is just about the best praise you can ask for in the technology space right now. While I don’t think TiVo the company will thrive in the long-term, they’ve elevated the expectations of consumers everywhere, and not just within TV. Whether they succeed commercially or not, they’ve changed the world. That’s not too shabby.
Via the Scripting News RSS feed just now, I saw this Feedster analogy:
Think of RSS as “Tivo for the Web”.
As someone who flipped through both NFL playoff games today via TiVo, in about one-third the time, and someone who was pre-ordered a product (RadioShark, from Griffin Technology… end of February, according to those manning Macworld booth) which promises to deliver a TiVo-like experience for radio, I’m a sucker for this analogy. But it doesn’t hold water. The difference with RSS is delivery, as that Feedster page makes clear if you read more than the quote. TiVo is not about delivery. It’s about taking control of time, taking it back from the content producers. The web has never forced you to adapt to the content producers’ time constraints. Both technically and otherwise, the web is stateless in most of its applications — you choose when to interact, even if that interaction is passive reading. So, the analogy misses, but it sounds cool all the same, and I’ll bet it gets picked up far and wide, even though it’s wrong… which is not necessarily a bad thing for RSS, which needs something to bring it out of the early adopter technologist world and into more general use/understanding.