RSS Readers: Affordances and Constraints

I think that the advantages of RSS heavily outweighs the constraints. It really depends on how the user chooses to utilize RSS.

First off, RSS can provide you with all the new info posted on the sites you often frequent. That saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of sites that you browse on a daily basis. Instead of going to each site separately, you can read the latest updates all in one place. Secondly, if you are subscribing to a certain topic for research purposes, RSS does the searching for you. You do not have to google it and click through each site only to find a majority of them is irrelevant to the topic you are interested in. If some of the RSS feeds are, in fact, irrelevant, you would be able to skim through all of them quicker than clicking them one by one on any search engines such as google or yahoo. Instead of permanently storing them in your bookmarks or favorites, you can put a little star by it so you don't have a bunch of bookmarks in your favorites list.

A disadvantage of RSS may be that some sites do not have the latest updates right away. So there might be a glitch in the system right now, but I have confidence that this problem would soon be solved. This may cause some problems if students were depending on the RSS feed to tell them the latest assignments and announcements from their class, school, or teacher. Another disadvantage is that RSS may be a little more time consuming when it comes to organizing, but I think once you get the hang of it, it'll become a lot easier and maybe even hard to live without!