
The War On RSS  - mgunes
http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/1932
======
mechanical_fish
This post feels mistitled, but that itself is an interesting sign. If there is
a "war" on RSS (or, more precisely, on certain manifestations of RSS), where
is the army? Where is the manifesto? Who has pounded the table and declared
that RSS is our enemy and must die?

Has anyone?

My impression is that we have the _opposite_ of a "war" here. These RSS
features are dying of natural causes. Unless someone can point me to the
conference, blog post, or secret meeting where an evangelist convinced
Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Mozilla, et cetera to simultaneously kill this
feature in tandem, I'll continue to suspect that they're doing so because
they're all subject to the same market pressure: There's a lot of new,
popular, paying features that need building, from Twitter and Facebook
integration, to mobile apps, to mobile-friendly APIs, to responsive and touch-
friendly design, and as these things get added to the backlog other things get
pushed down. Code is expensive to maintain and if it doesn't carry its weight
it gets cut, even if it's vaguely likeable and nifty.

~~~
adambyrtek
You are treating the term "war" too literally. This is not about some secret
conspiracy, but the lack of incentives (or maybe even existence of
disincentives) to support open protocols in the era of walled gardens.

To refute your last point, the article explicitly mentions that that Twitter
has functional RSS support, which was deliberately removed from the user
interface and metadata, so it's not a matter of development or maintenance
cost.

~~~
scott_s
_War_ implies opposition. If there is no opposition, but rather "lack of
incentives," then I agree with mechanical_fish that _war_ is inappropriate.

~~~
why-el
Think of it as passive opposition, i.e. failure to do something about a cause.

~~~
mkr-hn
English is a big toolbox. We don't need to repurpose words for completely
different definitions. The suitably dramatic terms you're looking for are
demise and downfall.

"The demise of RSS"

"The downfall of RSS"

Or if you want to get superdramatic: "The silent acquiescence of RSS to an
untimely demise"

~~~
why-el
I actually agree thats dramatic, but its easy to see what they meant. And no,
not a downfall. A downfall does not convey the idea that measures were taken
by other parties to actually bring down the entity in question. A downfall can
be self-inflicted. So not war, but not downfall either. :)

~~~
true_religion
Just because one can puzzle out meaning doesn't mean that a piece is well
written. It only means the reader was sufficiently clever, or lucky enough to
stumble on the meaning.

------
conesus
I think the biggest problem with RSS is that you divorce the content from the
context. Both from the publisher's standpoint, when their ads aren't being
served or they decide to truncate their RSS feed so they can get ad revenue
back from click-through, and from the reader's standpoint, where a common
lamentation in moving to RSS is that you no longer get to read the original
site regularly.

I solved the "Original site" problem by building the original site into
NewsBlur -- <http://www.newsblur.com>.

The other big issue with RSS is that there are too many stories with a low
signal-to-noise ratio. I built in filtering and highlighting into NewsBlur to
address that concern. And it's a completely separate backend from Google
Reader.

And now the common refrain is that people use social channels
(Twitter/FB/Tumblr) to find links and news. So I just built that into NewsBlur
with shared stories. You can sign up to be a part of the private beta at
<http://dev.newsblur.com>. I'll send out invites to anybody who signs up.

Consuming the web through RSS can be problematic for both publishers and
readers. I'm addressing the big three issues - context, relevancy, and
surfacing - with a strong commitment to both readers and publishers. Let me
know what else you would expect to see in your ideal reading setup, and
chances are, RSS offers the foundation to build it.

~~~
mhd
"Context"? Don't you mean "design"? I regard the fact that I don't have to
view most blogs in their original look one of the best features of RSS, saves
me from activating Readability all the time.

~~~
conesus
There's a Feed view, which is what you're referring to, as well as an Original
view. There is also a Story view, which shows you the click-through of the
story, which is convenient for some feeds, like Hacker News.

The majority of sites that I personally subscribe to are individual writers. I
want to read their writing in the exact format that they intended it to be
read. Daring Fireball comes to mind.

~~~
mhd
I'm aware of the different NewsBlur features, I'm not saying that I don't like
the software (if only it didn't have such a huge stack needed to run it…). And
it's great that I can choose. I just wanted to state where I stand in the
content vs. presentation issue. Even most a-list bloggers often have pretty
unreadable, if pretty, layouts. I'd include DF there, by the way…

I'm also not quite sure about the ad argument, i.e that you're eliminating the
revenue of bloggers. The feeds themselves can contain ads, there's the
compromise of abstracted posts in feeds, and then there's the distinct
possibility that users who are proficient enough to use RSS also have
something like AdBlock installed. Personally, I see more ads in feeds than on
actual sites, due to dedicated feed readers not blocking ads, and the relative
low level of annoyance doesn't prompt me to use a filtering proxy for that -
never mind that I could on mobile devices…

------
icebraining
I think the demise of RSS represents a failure of its promoters. They painted
it as a service, when it should have been treated as a backend technology.

People want to know when certain websites they care about have new stuff. The
fact that RSS can be used to achieve that is, and should have been treated as,
_completely irrelevant_. Nobody except geeks like me care if they're
transmitted through RSS, PubSubBubHub or carrier pigeons.

Likewise, I don' think most people care that the website has a "feed" and they
need to get a "feeds reader" to be informed.

I think Firefox had the greatest opportunity to make it happen and they blew
it. RSS should have been integrated with the bookmarks system, and I don't
mean those awful "dynamic bookmarks" or whatever they were called.

When some page was bookmarked, the browser should save its RSS feed URL
alongside (hidden!) and use it to alert people to updates to their sites, and
provide an one-click way to open the new post(s) in a new tab (and an easy way
to disable notifications from that site, certainly).

This would've made RSS useful for much more people and provide a great
incentive for websites to provide good feeds. Unfortunately, it remained a
geek tool, and so it'll die as such.

~~~
dredmorbius
This is at least equally interesting and insightful as the original article if
not more so.

Steve Jobs would never have promoted RSS. He would, though, create user
experiences based on it. Which really jars my reality to even say it, but your
comments/observations and my own experiences (I use RSS exclusively on my
phone as an offline info gatherer mostly used when I'm on subways out of
Internet range) that 1) RSS is really cool and 2) there are no compelling end-
user RSS-based tools.

Thanks.

~~~
unimpressive
Well yeah. My ideal tech has all the implementation details hidden during use
and provides a nice little button to tell me how features are implemented if I
choose to know.

Hackers probably miss this because they feel the implementation details are _a
core part of the experience_. A system with no implementation details readily
available in some form will have a hard time gaining support from the type of
nerdy dudes who like to change the world from their garage without significant
secondary draws.

~~~
Gormo
I agree re the mindset of hackers: finding some neat new application and
knowing exactly what you want to do with it, only to have its mechanics and
implementation details utterly obfuscated so that you can only do what the
designers intended is an _incredibly frustrating experience_.

The current industry-wide focus on simplified UI and managed UX that has the
effect of constraining users into presumptive usage patterns is quite
obnoxious to hackers and power-users who want to be in control of their own
experience.

------
JunkDNA
I use RSS readers almost exclusively to consume content and would miss RSS if
nothing else replaced it. I'm an information junkie and RSS readers have made
it far easier for me to keep up with the torrent of information out there.
That said, I can't escape the feeling that the concept of websites having
feeds in a standard format is starting to wane. I also think google reader has
sucked a lot of oxygen out of the RSS space. Every mobile or desktop reader
pretty much _has_ to sync with google reader which influences their design
accordingly. While there are lots of attempts to make things look pretty,
there's not a whole lot of major innovation in the RSS reader space. That's
not to mention the fact that as far as I know, the reader API is unofficial so
it could go bye, bye any time.

All that being said, RSS alone is not exactly the pinnacle of information
delivery. What I really want is a better way to identify interesting and
informative information and filter out all the junk. This is a very, very hard
problem to solve in an automated way. Things like Flipboard are trying to
tackle this, but I haven't been able to embrace them. I also don't want to
rely on my social network, because I'm different from my network. I have my
own interests and priorities (that change over time).

What I want is a feed of information that is what google is to search. Google
nearly always shows me exactly what I'm looking for in the top hits. I want
something that gives me the most important, useful, and interesting
information in a prioritized list all the time. The only thing I've seen get
close to this is Fever (<http://feedafever.com/>). That's a good start, but
isn't quite there.

~~~
mikeklaas
Not to overly self-promote, but you might want to give us a try:
<http://zite.com> . I've personally spent years on the personalization
technology behind it, so I'd love to hear what you think.

~~~
gnosis
It's a real pity most (all?) services like this require the user to tell the
service what their interests are.

This kind of relationship, where the user trades information about him- or
herself for service is sadly all too common on today's internet, and amounts
to voluntary participation in a vast spyware network, where you are ever more
effectively watched and tracked no matter what you do.

Technologically, it should be quite feasible to do all the RSS feed gathering
and filtering for this sort of service on the client's machine, using software
installed locally on the user's machine rather than on the service's servers.

Another possibility is to do the processing on the service's servers, but to
try to build in some sort of privacy and anonymity guarantees in to the
service itself. This is inherently more problematic, since it would really
require some sort of verification of those guarantees by a neutral, trusted
third-party before it could be completely trusted. But it would still be a big
step forward over what we have now.

Good luck with your business, but I'm not going to use it until and unless I
can feel secure that I'm not giving you any information about myself, my
tastes or my preferences by using it.

------
rkudeshi
I think it's safe to say RSS cooked into browsers had its chance and was
thoroughly rejected. (And I say that as someone who loves RSS.)

What more could browser makers have done to encourage RSS? Technophiles love
it, but the mass market rejected it.

For all intents and purposes, Twitter is a simpler, more intuitive form of RSS
for the layperson.

As long as tools like Google Reader exist for those of us who do use RSS, I'm
not worried. And if Google kills Reader, it will probably usher in a new
renaissance of feed readers that are currently non-existent because of
Google's ads-funded largesse.

RSS is now too important to too many people to just die.

~~~
dwc
> What more could browser makers have done to encourage RSS? Technophiles love
> it, but the mass market rejected it.

I mostly agree, but...

Browsers prominently featured RSS for many years, and the world at large
ignored it. Heck, I'm one of those technophiles and _I_ ignored it in the
browser. Why? Because RSS should have been about convenience, but the browser
implementations did not seem intuitive, and more importantly did not make it
clear how it actually worked. All the techies I know who regularly consume
content through RSS use a separate reader, and I suggest that's because
browser RSS did not actually offer anything compelling (or even useful at
all). I could be totally wrong about how useful browser RSS was, but then the
problem is that even a moderately competent techie didn't see it and the buck
still stops at the browser.

~~~
gvb
Ditto for finding the browser implementations useless. I did use Thunderbird
for years, though.

The irony is that I'm now using GoogleReader _in a browser_ on my smartphone
(Android) to read RSS feeds. I still have some feeds into my Thunderbird
configuration, but mostly ignore them there.

I tried the Google RSS feed reader app (Android) and didn't like it. I have
not tried other RSS apps, the web-based GoogleReader meets my needs (I have a
personal policy to minimize the number of install apps).

------
skymt
Right now I have 234 feeds in my Google Reader. Many of them are updated
irregularly, often weeks or months apart. But when they do update, I don't
want to miss it.

If RSS is killed, what will replace it? Not for the case of Twitter or
TechCrunch, where there will always be new content when you visit and it
doesn't matter if you miss some, but for rare but important postings.

~~~
leephillips
Me, too. And, crucially, Google Reader supports pubsubhubbub, so you get near
realtime, pushed updates of arbitrary payloads. The only technology that
offers this in a practical form is rss/atom.

------
techtalsky
I feel like the problem with RSS was mainly a branding issue. First of all...
acronyms don't sell. No non-expert user is ever going to click an orange icon
with a wi-fi logo that says "RSS" or "XML". MAYBE they'd click a button that
says "Subscribe". Individual browsers and implementations tried to brand them
as "Live Bookmarks" or similar, but there wasn't much unity around it.

RSS is of course unbelievably useful, and people who understood that the
content of a site was being published side by side in a human readable but
totally nonstandard format (HTML) and a machine readable and much more
standard format (RSS,ATOM,etc.) instantly grabbed some kind of reader and
subscribed to anything they were interested in.

I tried to preach the gospel of feeds. I tried to get people to subscribe to
MY blogs. Even most of my medium-technical friends said, "Yeah, that whole
reader thing sounds cool, I've been meaning to set that up." Non-technical
people simply subscribed to things via email.

If somehow email could have organized itself more naturally into push (email)
and pull (feeds) buckets, then it could have perhaps happened naturally, but
confusing standards, implementations, and no real great way to explain the
benefits to new users is what killed RSS (and XML feeds in general)... there
was no war.

------
mmuro
I'm not sure if discoverability is as important as it used to be for RSS.
Nowadays you can simply input the URL of the site into your RSS reader and
it'll find the feed.

When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, my guess is that RSS doesn't accomplish
what those services are made for. As they have evolved, the reverse
chronological posting has become less important.

Plus, if you were Twitter, how would you want people to consume those tweets?
Would you rather get them immediately or several minutes later in a format
that has no context in the world of Twitter?

With that being said, I think RSS still plays a role in consolidating and
consuming news in a central location. But it should be up to the site
designers/developers to offer an easy way to "subscribe" to that site (via
email or RSS).

------
ambirex
In the case of Firefox, their user study indicated that very few people used
it (<https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/>)

~~~
trebor
I think it's easy to come to a false conclusion through studies like this.

Unlike BACK I click an RSS icon _once_ and subscribe in another
application—and only if I already like the site/news/feed. So for the users
like me that just click the button once and awhile to subscribe to a feed in
another piece of software, like Vienna or Mail, we appear as a false low.

I use Chrome, so that doesn't help Firefox in my case. But Chrome doesn't show
RSS links either. I wish they still offered the option.

~~~
dejv
There are official extension for Chrome to display this icon (see
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd)).

As long as there are extensions I am ok with removing this icon from browser
itself.

~~~
Gormo
The Chrome extension is sort of broken - if I click the address-bar RSS icon,
it opens the feed in a nice stylesheet, but _I can't see the URL_. This is a
problem for sites that put their feeds in meta tags, but don't have an RSS
link on their front page - I end up having to view source to copy out the RSS
link.

------
joshaidan
Is there an alternative technology that is replacing RSS?

Is there any evidence that blogs are dropping RSS? I think one of RSS's major
applications was for blogs to distribute their content. The examples given in
this article, such as Twitter and Facebook are both apps that also have APIs
available, so RSS in those cases are kind of redundant.

One could also make the argument that RSS is bad for the bottom line, as
selling advertising, and generating revenue off of it is far more difficult
than traditional websites.

The other big question is whether or not users are still using aggregators. If
aggregator use is down, then that could suggest the decline of RSS or RSS like
technology.

Finally, RSS probably still has a future in podcasting.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> Twitter and Facebook are both apps that also have APIs available

I can't just import their API into an RSS reader with a single click.

On the other hand: I probably could, if I spent a few days reading up the
documentation, writing up an app, testing it, and then deploying and hosting
it, resulting in an RSS feed that (e.g.) Google Reader could process.

My fiance? No way.

On the gripping hand, my fiance doesn't care about RSS and doesn't use it. I'd
argue that most twitter users probably don't, either. So there doesn't seem to
be much loss.

~~~
joshaidan
It may be difficult for you or others to create an RSS feed from an API, but a
service like Flipboard could do it. I think less technically inclined people
are more likely to use something like Flipboard over an RSS reader anyway,
it's less complicated.

And services like Flipboard benefit having access restricted to an API, as it
limits its availability, which helps them monetize off of it.

~~~
dcreemer
As I have come to reply on Flipboard more and more over the last 18+ months,
my Google Reader / RSS usage has dropped quite a bit. Flipboard is a great
Google Reader and general RSS client, but I find the Twitter streams to be
much more valuable.

For example, I follow the BikeEXIF blog (<http://www.bikeexif.com/>) via his
Twitter feed on Flipboard. This feed includes all of the blog posts, _plus_
links to other 3rd party content, commentary, and so on. This is much more
interesting than a pure RSS feed.

RSS may not be as useful to real humans, but I do think it's tremendously
important and very much alive as a service to service standard. I wrote the
RSS ingestion system for Flipboard. When reading the BikeEXIF blog on Fliboard
via the @bikeEXIF Twitter stream, the _content_ of each article is fetched
from the blog's RSS feed.

------
Swizec
What I don't understand is why anyone would expect to follow their friends via
RSS (twitter/facebook)? That stream is much _much_ too fast for what RSS is
meant to achieve ... semantically speaking.

I view RSS as a great way to follow important-ish things like people's
personal blogs and tech blogs and so on. Large pieces of content, everything
bigger than, say, 400 words should be in RSS.

Whereas twitter and facebook are for conversation. It's where people post
silly things that nobody _really_ cares about. Using those streams to get
actual news? Yeah, doesn't quite work ... following just 1031 people on
twitter means there are 5 new posts every time I refresh.

That is not an environment where I'd expect to discover big chunks of info.
And it's also not something I would _want_ mixed up with the slow moving big
content stuff.

------
toyg
If RSS didn't take off, it cannot be ascribed to malice from browser makers:
even Microsoft at one point backed it right into _Windows_ , they still
support it in IE9, there is a component everyone can access that will deal
with scheduled retrieval for you, so you could write an awesome windows-based
feedreader tomorrow. Mozilla gave it a chance, half-heartedly (their
implementation was terrible). Google didn't push it into Chrome, but they
built the de-facto "Definitive Feed Aggregator" and supported it widely. Even
standard-hating Apple built it into iTunes.

The truth is that RSS was a cool technology searching for a reason to exist.
It managed to find it on occasions (podcasting is still alive, twitter
basically used RSS as the "first draft" for their service, etc) but not in the
big way most geeks thought it would. Commercial and user interests did not
align with a vision of complete openness where standardized feeds get pushed
from machine to machine, moving free and public content everywhere. Also, most
services found the format to be a straight-jacket, and once you start adding
custom namespaces, you might as well just use your own format. It fit well
only for periodically-updated news/blog sites, which is what it was built for.
And its worst sin is that it's fundamentally a one-way technology, a
broadcasting tool, not a bi-directional tool. Social tools can be built on top
of it, but at that point it becomes just another messaging format, and not
particularly efficient either.

RSS will survive in some form (like RDF, remember that?) but will never gain
widespread popularity, unless it's somehow reinvented in a way that will align
with the interests of big commercial players and/or large number of users --
something we failed to do in the last 10+ years.

------
nikcub
I now subscribe to most blogs on Twitter, and RSS is still part of that, its
just that it is:

blogs -> rss -> rss2twitter gateway -> twitter -> me

So it _has_ become a backend technology, and RSS has been given a better
marketing term - 'following' (or 'subscribing'). It just isn't being directly
consumed by users any more, which is why you don't need it as an icon in apps,
but RSS is definitely still being consumed by other apps.

I found that the problem with most newsreaders wasn't the technology or
terminology, but that they presented news items in an email view - ie. every
item needs to be actioned, whereas the answer was a stream where you scan and
interesting items were actions. The other problem was discovery. Nobody really
worked out how to recommend other sources or feeds from within the reader
applications.

Twitter kinda accidentally nailed both of those issues.

~~~
saint-loup
I don't like following websites or institutions on Twitter. I use RSS/Atom for
(pull) news and Twitter for people.

------
epc
\- it solved a problem that 99.999% of the online public either doesn’t have,
doesn’t know they have, or doesn’t care that they have.

\- a lot of energy was poured into the absolutely stupid who gets credit for
what, who did what to whom, who linked what where, who’s the real napster wars
of 2002-2005.

\- RSS and Atom are frozen relics of the post web 1.0 pre web 2.0 era. Support
for anything other than html or text is a grab bag of works in this reader,
doesn't work in that reader, is silently and completely removed by this other
reader.

\- it's in no one's best interests (financially, spiritually, professionally)
for RSS to “succeed”. It had many fathers, all of whom moved on to other
things, even 410'ing their online selves.

\- it's difficult to monetize RSS. Ads may or may not work, you have to resort
to gimmicks and most savvy users (who are likely a majority of the people
reading your feed in the first place) are blocking ads, so there.

\- it's difficult to prove the value of RSS to the publisher: how many people
read this item? Dunno. You can't trust the number of unique user agents
pulling the feed, because more likely than not they're mostly spam bots
looking for content to republish. You _could_ choose to trust the feedburner
statistics, if you're using FB.

\- RSS feeds can't be styled in any useable, uniform way. To many people this
is a benefit of RSS, but it means that inline images that work great in the
original article end up out of context. Any attempt to use CSS styling to set
off differences in an article are mostly lost. There are some work arounds but
mostly manual hacks.

The public has moved on. It sucks. RSS feeds will continue to be available for
years, if not decades because they’re built into the publishing plumbing of
many systems. There were gopher servers running well into the late 1990s in
various places, much to the surprise at times of security administrators.

When faced with a public user base that goes to google.com and then types in
the web site they want in the search box, we responded with RSS/Atom. It _is_
a much better way of reviewing and consuming a lot of information, but the
user experience sucks, and it’s in no one’s interests to fix that.

Find a way to profit, stunningly, from RSS and it’ll take off again. Continue
to confine it to the techno–geek ghetto and that’s where it will remain.

[edit:formatting]

------
pmr_
Maybe I'm being naive here: Where is the alternative to RSS? I live in a small
happy world (I use feeds heavily with gwene.org and Emacs Gnus as my reader
and I like the experience). How am I (or anyone else) supposed to consume
content from blogs? I cannot a believe a technology would simply die without
there being something better. Am I living under a rock and just haven't seen
the RSS-killer?

------
ttunguz
Social protocols are replacing RSS. In my view, Twitter and Facebook are
better versions of RSS. First, they reach many more people. It’s easier to
“follow” something than to subscribe to an RSS feed (has a bit of a medical
ring to it, no?).

Second, these social streams provide an additional social filter to the news,
something that RSS news never did. These social filters also provide a layer
to comment, share and discuss, which is another feature altogether missing in
RSS.

Lastly, social streams avoid the challenge most RSS readers faced: the inbox
with 1000+ items to read and no way to sift through them. Social streams
create a time value decay function for this data. Facebook’s EdgeRank uses a
combination of different signals to ensure relevancy so when users login the
feed is only timely, relevant content, not an inbox of every status update and
share. Twitter uses time to reduce the number of items in the feed.

[http://tomasztunguz.com/2012/04/19/rss-is-dead-social-
stream...](http://tomasztunguz.com/2012/04/19/rss-is-dead-social-streams-have-
killed-it/)

~~~
Gormo
The social filters of sites like Twitter and Facebook are very deficient
compared to the social filters of genuinely social aggregators such as HN and
Reddit. The "genuinely social" bit there is indeed a dig against Twitter and
Facebook - Twitter, because it's terse and disorganized, and Facebook because
it's just a web-based interface to 'offline' social relationships rather than
a community in its own right.

And I follow HN via RSS.

------
jasonlotito
On the subject of Apple removing RSS from Mail, I don't see that as an issue
with RSS. Rather, it's removing from Mail something that shouldn't have been
there in the first place. I'm pretty much hooked on Reeder, with Google Reader
as the backend for most of it.

~~~
gurkendoktor
RSS and IMAP don't have much in common, but I think the applications overlap a
lot.

Many people subscribe to newsletters for exactly the same reason other people
use RSS.

I also did it the other way around, and I dearly miss it on 10.8: I subscribed
to RSS for stuff that other people use email notifications for. Mostly blog
post comments and AppWorld reviews, both of which are often support requests
in disguise. Adding the StackOverflow search query for a library I wrote was
also awesome. Extremely low traffic & always better to read within a day.

~~~
jasonlotito
> but I think the applications overlap a lot.

No doubt. But I feel that I'm in a different mindset when I'm looking to read
and looking to deal with email. It just reminds me of where iTunes has taken
us, from being a music player to become a media and DRM management system. I
was happy that didn't try and shove the Mac App Store in there as well.

------
zupreme
I believe that, based on my own non-scientific observation, most non-technical
people don't really know what RSS is or what it is used for.

I think that YACG, AutoBlogs, and so forth have also made website owners
question the value of publishing RSS feeds as well.

Personally though, as someone who has launched several niche blogs over the
years I find publishing an RSS feed to most of the big feed directories to be
the best way to get a ton of backlinks to a new sit in a very short amount of
time.

Of course large established sites have no need of this "benefit" so they
largely view RSS as brand-dilution factor, not a brand-promotion factor.

------
dhawalhs
Facebook still has RSS feeds for pages but looks like the link got hidden when
the pages got switched over to the new timeline layout. e.g.
[https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=305891199451158&#...</a>

------
netcan
Something has never been right about rss and I can't put my finger on exactly
what.

I always found the idea compelling. I've tried using readers. Taken time to
put in my feeds, but it never really became part of my routine. When I've been
away loggin in feels like a chore. Frequently updated feeds drowned out the
others. There hvae never been conventions that work around it either. What
happens when an entry is updated, for example. What happens when you click the
rss icon. etc etc.

I really wanted rss (and I still use it) but it was never right.

~~~
Andrew-Dufresne
>Frequently updated feeds drowned out the others.

You should give a try to <http://www.newsblur.com/> It comes with an
intelligence trainer that will present the new entries based on your ratings
of previous entries.

It also have very simple keyboard shortcuts to view the entry on the original
site without leaving the window at all.

------
lux
RSS also doesn't work very well in pure client-side development, whereas the
same data structure in JSON is easy in pretty much any context.

Say, for example, I want to show a list of items from a 3rd party in a sidebar
on my site. With a few lines of jQuery or other similar lib, I can do that no
problem.

Maybe RSS, just like XML-RPC which was still _much_ better than SOAP but has
fallen by the wayside in favour of REST + JSON, can be supplanted in the same
way.

------
jpalomaki
It's not in the interest of companies like Twitter to push out the information
in machine readable format without charging for it. Most of the business
models for these companies revolve around making money on the information they
have (or advertising).

For blogs that are seeking to make money out of advertising, it is difficult
to justify why they should send out the content out as RSS feed. If you send
full text, then user does not come to the site. If you send excerpts then
users are not happy.

One thing to try out could be push full fledged web pages inside the RSS
feeds. Instead of just getting the text, I would get images, layout and
advertisements as well (but of course still just the content, not the
"chrome"). Reading this kind of blog entry on my "RSS" reader would be more
like looking at the actual web site of the blog. Consuming large amounts of
web sites this way would be faster than visiting them one-by-one with the
browser. Publishers benefit could be that users would browse through more of
their content (on web I usually pick few articles to read, with this I would
probably cursory browse through most of content (and get exposure to the
related ads).

------
wxl
This "RSS is dead" stuff is really getting old. I think we can safely say RSS
is dead if Google ever decides to kill Google Reader.

~~~
mike-cardwell
My tech blog at <https://grepular.com/blog/> has about 1100 feed subscribers.
About 1000 of them are Google Reader users. I'd be really interested to see
what would happen if Google dropped the Reader service. I wonder how many of
those people would resubscribe from elsewhere.

~~~
Tooluka
Nice feature of GReader is that it uses browser native engine with all user
mods - adblock, flashblock, greasemonkey, stylish etc. Stand-alones that I've
used are mostly Trident (IE engine) so despite their great features they are
also annoying.

So for your question - it will take lots of effort to relocate RSS reader and
large portion of user base will be lost in transition.

------
par
Funny, we just started working on a better RSS reader:
<http://readnewswire.com/>

~~~
nollidge
Just signed up, but I probably won't use it until I can import my feeds from
my current reader (NetVibes). There's around 100 of them, there's no way I'm
doing that manually.

Also needs grouping. Again, there's a hundred of them, I need hierarchy.

~~~
par
Thanks for signing up. You are correct about importing and grouping. Both
things that we aim to take care of soon.

~~~
mdaniel
I'm going to assume you know about <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML>

------
cpeterso
Relevant to my interests, "Hacker News Overload" publishes RSS feeds of HN
articles at various score thresholds (20, 50, 100, 150):

[http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-
overlo...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload)

------
navs
So if folks aren't using RSS anymore, what are they using? Surely, they aren't
manually browsing websites. I typically follow twitter feeds for updates but
what's the standard RSS replacement for the average user?

------
ddw
RSS is alive and well in iTunes podcasts. It's just that people don't know or
care that their podcast feeds get updated by way of RSS.

RSS will live on if content creators continue to provide it. I think the issue
is that no one except tech people really care, so at least the tech blogs (and
Hacker News) will continue to support it.

Getting content via social networks seems like a step backwards, but it seems
like it's what most folks are fine with.

------
jfb
Apple's RSS support was _utter pants_. I use RSS all the time, on Apple
platforms exclusively, and I'm overjoyed to see it gone from Safari and Mail.

------
uiri
I use <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-icon/> in order to
bring back the RSS icon in Firefox.

------
rodolphoarruda
Interesting. If RSS' days are numbered, what sort of technological change can
we expect from popular news aggregation sites like popurls.com?

------
wildster
I don't bother with a blog aggregator much anymore but I don't see itunes ever
replacing rss/atom for podcast feeds.

------
jgamman
seriously - it's a 'subscribe' function. i don't give a fig if it lands in my
inbox or a reader or my email's RSS inbox. so long as the function continues
(and email is a fine proxy) I'm fine with it.

------
Jebus
I use a few RSS in my iGoogle (mostly global news, just in case the world is
ending or something which I would like to know instantly), and LOTS in my
Thunderbird. How else would I be notified when this or that blogger, who
writes one amazing article once or twice a year does so?

Don't kill RSS, write a nice guide on how to use it for non-techies and make
it viral.

------
huoju
The "follow" killed RSS. To use RSS, user must known many background
knowledge, it's too complexly. "Follow" is a simply way to keep trace the
information which you interested.

------
rsanchez1
It's always social media vs RSS. I mainly see this storyline pushed by tech
blogs. They use social media, all their tech blog peers use social media, they
see that most of their users use social media. Tech bloggers then start to
feel that no one must use RSS anymore since everyone is on Twitter or
Facebook, when in reality it is just their circle that has abandoned RSS.
Unfortunately, since most people form their opinions of technology from the
people who have been loud enough to form a reading audience, more people also
start to believe that RSS is being phased out.

The only "war" against RSS is in the mind of tech bloggers.

------
guccimane
I don't find it to be good for much besides keeping track of podcasts. I never
saw the appeal of "syndicated content" (blech), I'd rather read websites. Very
few people use it when rolled into the browser, it's better off implemented in
extensions and standalone apps.

