
Why I will always love RSS - Nemmie
http://www.jefclaes.be/2012/05/why-i-will-always-love-rss.html
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stroboskop
Compared to RSS, centralized information distribution is not better but more
profitable. That's the main reason why so many people and corporations have a
pronounced interest in the demise of RSS.

But _RSS will not die_ : It's a great standard for decentralized information
distribution and a lot of people will keep using it.

I agree that most RSS clients are bad though. So those who are really
concerned with the future of RSS should work on better clients and
applications.

~~~
andrethegiant
A great client is Shaun Inman's Fever[1]. It scales really well; the more
feeds you add to it, the more tailored it becomes to your interests. It's not
free but it's easily the best aggregator I've seen.

[1] <http://feedafever.com/>

~~~
gnufs
As for a hosted FOSS web reader, I can recommend Newsblur:
<http://www.newsblur.com>

~~~
diminish
Nice to hear, I am not the only one who uses RSS for extremely intense reading
of all web sites and blogs I admire. Average users are heading more like to a
TV-like reading mode; which is close to "passive". But It is nice to see there
are a lot of hackers who want to "actively" select what they want to read.

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pwpwp
There should be a simple rule: if your site/app presents _any_ data
chronologically, there has to be an RSS/Atom feed for it.

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lince
Am I the only one loving Atom?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29#Atom_compa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29#Atom_compared_to_RSS_2.0)

~~~
Wilya
Frankly, except for the people developing the readers, the RSS/Atom
distinction is completely irrelevant. RSS is used as a simplification for
RSS/Atom.

I am actually developing a reader, so I know the differences. They're mostly
minor, and I have to support both formats anyway, so I abstract most of them
away.

~~~
pnelson
Most are minor but Atom feeds explicitly state content type. This could be a
security issue with RSS since there is no reliable way to guess between plain
text or escaped HTML.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)#Content_model>

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tbatterii
The reason given for why rss is dying (i get all my content from the people I
follow on twitter ie: I follow certain taste makers) doesn't consider how a
person who you follow gets content that you want to read.

I'm willing to bet that somewhere along the line a person being followed is
using rss to some extent. But not exclusively.

rss makes it potentially easier for the "taste makers" to fulfill their role
in curating content.

rss's supposed replacement would lead to the internet being even more of an
echo chamber than it already is.

Also, how does one persons blog post asserting that "rss is dying" constitute
"a bunch of noise in the tech community" worthy of attention?

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webwanderings
I think the reason RSS didn't pickup among the average crowed is because of
Google Reader and browser's native RSS handling.

If only the website owners had implemented easy and known feature for users to
"receive" the content, i.e, get RSS via email, get it via SMS, chat, etc,
etc....all instead of getting it in your browser or in Google Reader or in
some other geeky program....than RSS as a push technology, might have seen a
better perspective.

Although there were services available which would translate the RSS for
average users, but they weren't close to the original website.

~~~
eternauta3k
What's wrong with google reader? It works fine for me.

~~~
webwanderings
There's nothing wrong with Google Reader, just as there's nothing wrong with
Google Plus. It is just so that Google Reader has not seen a mass adoption
beyond the niche tech crowd, so it couldn't lift the RSS upwards.

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sj4nz
I can remember the time I used bloglines and had over 1000+ feeds. It got to
be a chore—at the time I believed that I needed to read everything and set
myself up for failure. Now I treat them as periodic inspiration and brain-
fodder on-demand for whatever the hive-mind of the Internet has top-of-mind
that day. With feeds roughly classified, I'm using Feedly as my "newspaper" of
interesting things.

RSS may die, but the idea of a machine-readable subscription and notification
system never will.

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zdw
Also of note, why don't financial institutions offer read only RSS feeds of
transactions? Logging into their site manually with a browser is a PITA, and
their data is only in formats that suck and need to be converted from.

I'd love to be able to script up a really RSS grabber that dumps directly to
disk and other scripts that do all this automatically.

~~~
Domenic_S
Erm, because you still need to log in to validate that you're authorized to
read the feed.

Many financial institutions make available transaction logs in CSV and other
machine-readable formats, usually labeled "Export to QuickBooks" or something
similar.

~~~
zdw
Plenty of other ways to do auth out there. Heck, if they just emailed me data
that would be an improvement.

The problem with CSV, QFX, and similar is that it generally doesn't contain
all of the data available from the website, like check images, statements,
etc.

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ddw
If there's a new field that I want to learn about, I usually find the best
blog that I can for it and subscribe to the RSS feed. Instant immersion.

How can Twitter/Facebook/whatever beat this where I have to comb through a
bunch of noise to the get to the same content?

It's a bummer that we seem to be going backwards sometimes.

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rradu
> _I strongly believe the contemporary fetish of liking and sharing cheapens
> the way we consume our information._

It's not necessary to like, retweet, etc in order to consume the content. If
all you want is to click on a link and get to an article, then that's all you
have to do.

> _Don't get me wrong, I do see value in community driven content, but there's
> also a lot of dirt and sensationalism._

Then curate the people you follow / subscribe to on your social networks. You
have full control over the posts you see on Twitter, for example, especially
if you create lists to only include accounts that tweet out new articles for a
given blog or newspaper. Works just like an RSS feed, but it's integrated in
the social product you use anyway (speaking from my perspective, at least).

> _This forces me to absorb it all, even though most of their content doesn't
> go viral. This liberates me from feeling the urge to be connected all the
> friggin' time, plus more importantly, there is a gold mine of wisdom to be
> found in the non-controversial content out there._

Being forced to absorb it all and not miss a post is liberating? I often feel
the opposite--that I need to disconnect and just accept I can't read
everything on the Internet.

