The title is a bit of a double entendre. At first reading, I thought the claim was that (once again), Organization X had killed RSS (figuratively). As it turns out, Facebook and Twitter have, quite literally, killed RSS within the scope of their own systems by removing it from key locations.
In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you're only a part of the conversation while you're there.
In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don't want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I'm perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for "pushed" information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.
I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you can respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don't have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.
Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.
Based my usage patterns, I don't see this as "killing" RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I'm a dying breed though.
It's precisely because there's so much crud on Facebook that I consume it via an RSS feed rather than by visiting the site; that way, I can skim through a day's worth of friend updates in less than a minute. In any case, I have facebook.com ad-blocked in my primary browser, and use a secondary browser whenever I need to visit it. I don't visit Facebook much more often than once a week, and I only do if there's a particular update etc. worthy of attention.
Unfortunately, in the past week, Facebook's RSS feeds have been behaving very erratically. As seen in Google Reader, the update feeds show up as entirely refreshed - all new items - even though only a handful of items are actually new. The links on the RSS items have changed from the proper status update link to flat links to facebook.com. So rather than killing RSS, this move by Facebook is killing Facebook for me.
A common "general" application of RSS is news, but this will hopefully be slowly phased out as well. The New York Times offers an awesome API (http://developer.nytimes.com/) which gives you a much better view of their data than their RSS feeds (which they still provide).
So I'm supposed to use the NYT's custom API to get articles when RSS has, for years, provided a "general" method for me to do the same thing for not only the NYT but millions of other sources?
No, and that's why they still provide the RSS feed. My point is that in the immediate future, companies like FB, Twitter, and NY Times will experiment with APIs that provide richer functionality than RSS. Hopefully within a relatively short time frame, the APIs will start converging into a standardized, widely adopted replacement for RSS that builds on these ideas.
I have no interest in ever directly using Twitter and there's not enough content on there for me to bother with any workarounds. I currently use RSS for the one Twitter feed I bother to follow and if they ever really do get rid of RSS for their site, I'll just stop using even that. Not that much of a loss.
My habits are such that if you don't offer RSS feeds of information I want, I probably won't ever get your information or go to your site. You're not going to sucker me into "visiting regularly", just because you don't offer an RSS feed. I'll just move on and get what I want somewhere else.
I don't think getting you to visit their site is the point of the switch. Twitter and FB are in a position where they have enough addicted users that they can get away with messing with standards. RSS is outdated and slow, and FB and Twitter want people to use their data in a more sensible way, via their flexible APIs.
It's trivial to build an APP that generates an RSS stream for an arbitrary twitter account with their API, and I'm sure someone will soon. But the point is that they are setting a new standard for what can be done streams of structured data, and hopefully more sites will move away from RSS into cool APIs.
Of course, for now at least, there's no standard to this kind of API, but I think that people will eventually figure out what works and converge to it (as is the case with OAuth).
I hear people talk about how "RSS is so slow" all the time, but I still don't understand it. I see no failings or complaints about RSS. I get a headline and then I get an article. Are we talking speed between when content was generated and when it appears in an RSS feed? Honestly, I couldn't care less about that. I'll live if it takes fifteen minutes for an update to reach me. It's not like I'm getting a patient's live EKG readings via RSS.
As for yet another standardized API to replace it. As long as it provides the same functionality to all current services/devices that use RSS, that's fine with me. I would really prefer that it not be driven by Facebook and Twitter, however any more than I want Microsoft Office development teams driving the standardization of ODF.
If you read about FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol (http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fe...), you'll find some good arguments about why RSS slow. The crux of the problem is that to get any updates on a feed, you have to request and download the entire RSS feed (which is filled with summary text and is of nontrivial size).
Consider the case of a real-time news aggregator. A news source doesn't update very frequently (say once every 5 minutes), but you want to provide updates super fast (say within 30 seconds). That means on average you have to scrape the entire RSS feed 10 times for a single update. On the other hand, FB/Twitter APIs give you the flexibility to do things like "download items after this id," which hog much less bandwidth.
Looking at that article, the slowness doesn't come from having to download the entire RSS feed. As commenters there note, If-Modified-Since means you only need to download the feed when there are changes. So in your second paragraph, you have to ping the RSS feed 10 times, but you'd only need to download it once.
Rather, the slowness seems to come from the lack of an aggregation mechanism. If I want to follow 100 feeds (e.g. 100 Twitter users), I have to query each of those 100 feeds. Even though I can query them efficiently using If-Modified-Since, that's still slower than firing off one query to find out which of those 100 feeds have updates, and then querying only those which do.
> Of course, for now at least, there's no standard to this kind of API, but I think that people will eventually figure out what works and converge to it (as is the case with OAuth).
If I can't read it in Reeder I properly wont read it at all.
I don't know (or care) if it's a slow and outdated technology as it seems to work okay for me.
It doesn't benefit me at all if RSS disappears and is replaced with FB or Twitter. Sharing news? Sorry no, the signal to noise levels are already low and I don't need to pollute the internet any further (said the man who is writing a worthless post on HN :-)
But I guess it's not meant to benefit me anyway. So RSS will properly die and I'll silently adopt to whatever replaces it.
You must have missed the memo where now almost anything you do on a computer is hacking.
Got a form to submit in Django? I'm hacking. Got nodejs to run a sample app? I'm hacking. Integrate a shitty jQuery plugin? I'm hacking. RTFM - nope, hacking.
Ironically, you seem to have forgotten that "hack" is also a synonym for "kludge" -- long before programmers started referring to themselves as hackers as a term of pride and endearment, many writers were referred to as "hacks".
I don't see any problem with referring to using a documented workaround as a "hack" in that context.
just abuse the word. I hate that everything is "hacking" now - so I started overusing the word. whenever I'm doing something I am hacking. (Sometimes it's not limited to computer activities.)
I hope other people will will catch on and overuse the word to the point where it's not cool anymore and everything gets back to normal. (and hackernews can be renamed back to webmasternews)
This is super interesting. RSS has gotten really slow and bad, and a few years ago FriendFeed started to push for improvements with the Simple Update Protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Update_Protocol).
The world should move to a standardized JSON-based, OAuth compliant API, but unfortunately having two big, competing players like FB and Twitter means that things will probably partition into camps. It'll be interesting to see what happens when new websites start publishing content: will they define their own new standard or clone FB/Twitter?
I can see a use case where devs who don’t feel like building for Twitter’s API will want to use RSS to quickly get a user’s recent tweets. But I don’t think this will significantly impact anybody’s anything, and it feels like the author is exaggerating the consequences.
Most users of anything don't care about RSS. Most users also don't explicitly care about the API, either — those are both at a lower level than what users notice. That doesn't mean they're worthless.
I'm curious what you're seeing that gives you this sense? From where I'm sitting I see things swinging even further toward closed which is rather disheartening but I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.
At least from the FB standpoint, "kill RSS" is quite an exaggeration. The code correcting the oversight that removed the links for RSS feeds in latest redesign of Page profiles should be going out tomorrow (5/10/11). Note that the feeds themselves (e.g. https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=9445547199&fo...) were unaffected.
/me added back the Page RSS feeds during a hackathon last year
For me, reading rss is like reading newspapers or books: Better contents polished for readers, but less interactions(with authors or others readers).
On the other hand, reading facebook status or tweets is like listening or chatting with friends. Contents are impromptu and often out of context. However, it's much easier to interact.
140 char posts are not what one should should subscribe to via. a RSS reader.
Though I stand for open standards I don't really think that it is crucial that Twitter and Facebook supports RSS. Especially not Facebook - Twitter because it is more like the medias that I subscribe to; blogs, newssources and so on...
Rss was just a transitional technology. Twitter and Facebook have made it far easier for normal people to get news updates, and for developers there are API's. RSS will live on for podcast delivery (at least until apple dropsre-invents" podcasting) but other than that, let's just let RSS rest in peace.
Couldn't disagree more. Neither Twitter nor Facebook, and least of all every dinky little site offering a homebrewed API are an even remotely adequate replacement for RSS.
Twitter and Facebook have NOT made anything easier for normal people, they just managed to get the mindshare to force people to deal with their inadequacies, whereas a million different sites offering RSS feeds somehow never turned into something everyone and their dog "had to" use to be cool.
I use RSS daily as my main news source, check Facebook maybe every other day and never could figure out the point of Twitter.
In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you're only a part of the conversation while you're there.
In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don't want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I'm perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for "pushed" information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.
I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you can respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don't have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.
Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.
Based my usage patterns, I don't see this as "killing" RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I'm a dying breed though.