

Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS - ssclafani
http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-both-quietly-kill.html?q=1

======
bradleyland
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.

~~~
ankrgyl
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).

~~~
turbodog
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?

~~~
Luyt
Yes, and they want you to install a special 'NYT app' for that, which will be
future: every company and news outlet will have its own app.

~~~
ChrisArchitect
haha, and they'll all be based on frontend UI accessing RSS.

~~~
Luyt
I was thinking more along the lines of 'accessing their own specific API
(maybe even a private, undisclosed API)'.

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pstack
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.

~~~
ankrgyl
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).

~~~
pstack
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.

~~~
ankrgyl
If you read about FriendFeed's Simple Update Protocol
([http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-
fe...](http://blog.friendfeed.com/2008/08/simple-update-protocol-fetch-
updates.html)), 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.

~~~
ppog
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.

~~~
ankrgyl
Good point. The reason I didn't bring that up is that the comments suggest
that if-modified-since isn't universally adopted by RSS publishers.

------
eli
_UPDATE: Dave Stevens shared a hack around this in the comments that you can
use with the Twitter API._

Using a well-documented feature of the API? That is not a hack.

~~~
nikcub
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.

~~~
thaumaturgy
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.

~~~
eli
But that's my point -- it's not a hack OR a kludge OR a workaround.

It is the straightforward and recommended way of doing something. Twitter
didn't kill RSS, they just stopped advertising it to end users.

------
ankrgyl
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?

------
kevinchen
99.99% of users will not notice or care.

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.

~~~
chc
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.

------
petervandijck
And thus become even more walled gardens (a proprietary API doesn't count as
"open").

The pendulum is still swinging towards "closed", but I sense it's about to
swing back.

~~~
follower
> but I sense it's about to swing back.

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.

~~~
petervandijck
Just the fact that we're so extremely closed now. It just _has_ to swing back
at some point.

------
hammock
Does anyone have an example of RSS being used/picked up by the mainstream
user?

~~~
idle_processor
Google Reader didn't die like Wave; that implies some level of success.

------
voidfiles
RSS is awesome, and standards help ease integration, but we need to stop
freaking out about RSS.

What we need to focus on is making sure companies endorse open data. Allowing
users to get data in, and out in a reasonable format.

------
elgenie
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...](https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=9445547199&format=rss20))
were unaffected.

/me added back the Page RSS feeds during a hackathon last year

------
imwilsonxu
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.

------
randomgeek
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...

------
pavel_lishin
> Unfortunately, it seems #2 was not accidental, as it was never fixed.

That does not necessarily follow.

------
hollerith
I notice that Google Reader still lets a person subscribe to someone's
Twitter.

------
smogzer
speaking of rss feeds, does anybody have a list of "social" or "information"
(weather like) sites with support for rss feeds ?

------
chopsueyar
"Embrace and extend."

Way to support open source, guys!

------
riams
I've fully abandoned Google Reader for Twitter.

------
dholowiski
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.

~~~
leon_
news in 140 chars ... reminds me of that movie where they water their plants
with soda.

~~~
eagleal
It's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy>

