They’re like Marmite – you either love them or hate them. Well, I definitely hate full RSS feeds as for me they defeat the whole point of RSS. I use a RSS reader primarily to help me track the large number of websites that I follow quickly. But the other reason I use RSS is because it allows me to read only the articles that I find interesting and to quickly skip over the others. However, for sites that publish full feeds this is made more difficult, particularly for long articles.
Now I know that respected bloggers like Scoble, The Blog Herald, Engadget (particularly annoying as posts tend to have big images), Kotaku and Download squad have firmly come down on the side of full feeds, and I bet many bloggers have followed suit as a result, but then you have great sites like Ars Technica and Onlineblog that publish summary feeds.
So, I guess the only solution is for feed readers to allow users create their own excerpts. Google Reader tries to do this with the ‘List View’ but they’ve gone too far the other way for my tastes as the summary view doesn’t show enough info and then I’m still subjected to the full feed when I expand an item.
I love all the sites in my newsreader, but I’m going to have to prune some more sites (already down from 98 to 71) unless something changes soon.
