
RSS will never die - andraz
http://www.zemanta.com/fruitblog/rss-will-never-die/
======
jsilence
One point I am missing on the whole "RSS is dead, long live Twitter" topic are
their differences on the technological and on the legal side.

RSS is an open protocol, free for everyone to implement either way, producing
or consuming, filtering or aggregating. Twitter and Facebook offer access to
their feeds via their API, which you can only use when you agree to their
terms of service. And they retain the right to change the API any time or to
restrict access at their own sole disgression.

RSS is free as in freedom, Twitter and Facebook are not. And that alone is a
good reason to keep RSS around.

~~~
voidfiles
Sure, but your missing the point. RSS is also an ecosystem. If there are no
producers, or readers, there are no consumers. If the ecosystem goes away
people won't use RSS anymore. Making it effectively dead.

~~~
mdaniel
No, I don't believe jsilence missed the point at all. In fact, that point is
the most important one: if all RSS feeds died tomorrow, I would still be able
to re-create them on my own machine by periodically polling every single
website that I care about.

Now if that sounds like a monster waste of bandwidth, it should: the
publishers get something from this deal, too. Plus they get readership,
because I use RSS to _remind_ me that there are articles on the web that I
want to read.

------
mwexler
When I want snippets, FB and Twitter are great. When I want to see what my
friends think are important, and use their filtering, the social nets are
great.

But when I want the firehose of a select group of sites organized around a
concept, and when I want to see EVERYTHING they have... there is no substitute
for a good RSS reader and an organized feed list. And since I found Feeddler
([http://www.chebinliu.com/projects/iphone/feeddler-rss-
reader...](http://www.chebinliu.com/projects/iphone/feeddler-rss-reader/)) for
my ipad/iphone and dumped the overhyped Reeder and "social magazine" formats
like Feedly, I find that I can catch all the things that my social network,
love them though I do, miss. And they miss a lot.

I still use reader.google, though I miss Bloglines, for my online reading.
That is an area ripe for improvement (aggregating duplicate posts, Techmeme-
like threading of topics across multiple blogs, per-feed filters to remove
posts that are not on topic without forcing you to drop the entire feed, etc.)
but I don't expect to see much coming. BTW, Google Reader has some great
keyboard commands if you haven't discovered them yet that make flying through
content much easier.

Am I an old fashioned stubborn old coot, hanging on to dead technology? Well
sure, just like those of us still using email and sms. Oh, didn't you hear?
Both of those were declared dead a few years ago as well. Come on, one and
all, join my club of "using uncool tech but still enjoying it".

~~~
unimpressive
>Come on, one and all, join my club of "using uncool tech but still enjoying
it".

How much for an annual membership?

Honestly, for a lot of these things, I think news of their death has been
greatly exaggerated. Though it would be nice to take this opportunity to _fix
some of the problems_ that pundits keep pointing to while shouting their
demise from the rooftops.

------
sgdesign
When I launched my first website about 15 years ago (a Fallout walkthrough
site, if you must know), I used to discover new referrals and links every time
I checked my analytics.

These days, even though my blog gets the same traffic in one day that my first
sites got in one year, my referral logs look strangely empty. All the traffic
comes from Twitter, Facebook, HN, and nobody manually links to anything from
their blog anymore.

I think this shows a partial transfer of content from blogs and sites to
social networks, and RSS has been hurt by this move.

Add to this the fact that the whole user experience about RSS has always been
mediocre at best, and outright bad nowadays. It takes me something like 5 or 6
clicks to add a RSS feed to Google Reader, and that's after installing a
Chrome extension.

So yeah, RSS will never die. But that's only because it's already a zombie.

~~~
Tomis02
For a good RSS user experience use Opera.

------
PaulHoule
Well, what I find depressing about RSS is that it's been around for 10+ years
and there's been no real innovation.

There are two user interfaces seen in RSS readers: (i) show headlines from
multiple blogs in their own little windows, (ii) show headlines from all blogs
in one big mess.

It's always seemed possible that you could have a better user interface, or
that machine learning could be used to pick out stuff you're actually
interested in -- but no, it's never happened. Every so often some organization
would come out with a new RSS reader and it was always the same boring stuff.

(In fact, Andraz and the guys at Zemanta have a lot of experience with content
analysis and they can't even find anything interesting to say about this
subject... That's the point, nobody's even trying to make a better RSS reader)

Now, to be fair, most of the alternatives aren't much better. Twitter makes no
attempt to be discriminative (and with the short stimulus, filtering Twitter
might be tough.) Facebook seems to have some sense of priority over what it
shows you, but it doesn't give you a lot of control.

What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people
are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay
for something that makes the web easier to follow?

~~~
masklinn
> What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people
> are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to
> pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?

There are already a number of these: different planet* aggregators for
technologies, longreads for "longer pieces", etc...

A single aggregator? The world does not need it, because it's absolutely
worthless and makes little to no sense. I probably don't want to read what you
want to, and neither does the next guy.

> If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription

There's a reason why newspaper are dying: by and large, people are not going
to pay for a newspaper subscription.

~~~
btrautsc
I definitely agree that personalization is the key - but on an individual
basis.

That is the focus of our company - and why we feel RSS won't die - but its
role will evolve as more info is consumed via Twitter/ etc/ etc - ignoring the
social signs(data) readers/ users provide doesn't make much sense.

But personalization should always be an option - because the firehose is still
very useful

------
tdr
I use RSS since 2005 and it's my primary learning source. Twitter is better
for seeing "trending topics" but doesn't replace RSS.

Problem: too much _good_ info to read(it's not the format but the tools for
consuming it).

Solution: built an automatic summarizer: <https://www.keenskim.com> (works for
webpages also). No more "read it later", but _right now_.

~~~
natep
Interesting concept. If you don't mind, some comments on your site/service:

1\. The slides on the main page aren't showing up for me in FF or Chrome.

2\. You're targeting avid readers, and are trying to save them time, but
you're pushing video how-to's? Text + screen shots, please! (Or maybe A/B
testing will prove me wrong)

3\. _Why_ are all the images of articles tilted and in such small font? I want
to see how well your service works for me, and what's better than reading an
article it's analyzed?

4\. Your how-to for RSS scares me a bit. It goes by so fast, and I have to
copy-paste URLs? I have to find RSS URLs that as this article mentions, are
getting increasingly hard to find? I'm already subscribed via Google Reader. I
could copy the URL from the 'Details and Statistics' of a feed, but why can't
you use their API to bulk import my feeds (competitors to Reader do this). I'm
not sure if you could automagically rewrite Reader subscription URLs once
scraped, but it seems like the easiest option to me (as long as you have an
intermediate page where I can exempt certain feeds.

5\. Is there any way I can see the results of your bookmarklet on a few actual
articles before signing up? Even if it's just a mirror of some popular
articles with the highlighting precomputed, as long as it's the whole article.
I feel like you have a lot of work to do to convince someone that they're not
going to miss some crucial bit of information by ignoring what you don't
highlight.

7\. Why do I need to remember another username? Is this a 'social' service?
You already have my email!

8\. It doesn't seem to work with Readability

9\. Why do you need to track me with cookies? You already have me running
javascript on every page I use the bookmarklet on...but I appreciate being
told about them

10\. How are you going to make money?

(just used the bookmarklet on this Wired article[1] currently on the front
page of HN. Very surreal. And I'm not sure if I got the main point of the
article or not...)

[1] [http://m.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-
write-...](http://m.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-
better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/all/1)

~~~
tdr
Wow! Great feedback! Thank you!

Now for the answers:

1\. my bad. I was doing some optimizations on the web server (via
<http://gtmetrix.com> ). Now it should work

2\. true! received same feedback yesterday. will change.

3\. just thought it would look better. but that doesn't mean better
experience. will change them (for bigger images just click them)

4\. originally KeenSkim was built for RSS feeds. After starting the alpha
testing we pivoted to the webpage bookmarklet. It works so well that we didn't
improve the RSS part. To be fixed in the next weeks (opml support)

5\. Not yet but great idea! we'll do that

7\. It's not social (not built with this intention in mind, but could be).
Social auth and simpler login are in the top 3 priorities after stabilizing
the summarization algorithm

8\. will look on that

9\. the cookies are for the site, not the bookmarklet (cross-domain calls).
It's mainly for login (standard Django). Does it bother you in any specific
way?

10\. mainly a freemium approach. the exact business model is not clear (we'll
test it after we get an idea about usage, costs, growth, ...). Do you have
anything in mind?

About the results: there are pages on which it work good, on some pages great
and on some really bad. The problem on this article is that it has several
story-lines and KeenSkim doesn't work well on that (interviews, lists,
tutorials won't be properly summarized)

EDIT: There is still space for improving the service. That's priority no. 1

Where there other news that you read?

Thanks again!

~~~
natep
I'm glad I can help.

3\. It might be good to keep the tilted pics in the slideshow, and straight
pictures (or actual text) elsewhere. Or maybe tilted everywhere! I can tell
you what bothers me, but what really matters is how many clickthroughs you
get, right?

7\. IMO, it shouldn't be social (how would it be?) so no usernames are
necessary, but I'm probably not your average user. Nor have I ever created an
online service/business, so keep that in mind when following my advice.

9\. I don't know about bothered, since I have cookies enabled for everything
else. It'd be less weird if you made it clear the cookie didn't track me
across other sites,

10\. No, just want to make sure you're thinking about it before possibly
getting attached to a service that might not survive (e.g. you get bought and
the buyer shuts it down). If I found the service useful (and especially if I
were a CEO/executive, I think), I would love to pay for it, either a 1-time
fee (like I did with Pinboard.in), or yearly subscription. Crazy idea: maybe
you could license the software to news sites so they can have built-in
highlighting with the click of a link (similar to 'print-friendly' links every
article has)

My RSS reader has few enough feeds that I've been able to read them all, but
I've been careful to only add feeds that I could keep up with (with keenskim,
that might change). Other than that, I stick to the top of HN.

------
neop
I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS. While I do agree it's too
complicated for the mainstream, for people who know what RSS is, I always
though that it was clearly better than Twitter/Facebook. You have a lot more
control with RSS feeds. I have over 100 feeds, there's some feeds where I
truly care about the content and will always what to know when there's new
content. There are other feeds where I might check them out in detail if I'm
bored, but most likely I'll just skim through them. With twitter this kind of
prioritization is simply not possible, there is only chronological order, and
it's very likely that I would miss some of the stuff I care about.

~~~
ge0rg
_I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS._

Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a
huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it
gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you
have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause
unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content.
With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request
all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as
well.

For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.

[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative.
Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]

~~~
Turing_Machine
_If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic._

Conditional GET has been in WordPress for about eight years, and is supported
by many of the other majors.

~~~
ge0rg
Ok, conditional GET mitigates the traffic problem, but the basic issue of
using polling for what should be a push service in the first place remains.

------
apl
Somewhat appropriate catchphrase from Martin's "Game of Thrones":

    
    
      > What is dead may never die.
    

RSS carries on, but so do mailing lists, newsgroups, bookmarks etc. People
claiming that Twitter will replace or has replaced RSS generally don't make
universal claims. Niche use remains; question is, where does the mainstream
flow.

~~~
jonny_eh
Was RSS ever mainstream?

~~~
brazzy
Was Usenet?

------
jcromartie
We're building a brand new HTML5-powered client-side mobile app, and it
depends on RSS. Because the RSS feeds are already there, and it makes a whole
lot of sense for our use case (displaying multiple streams of different types
of media). Twitter just wouldn't cut it.

------
spoiledtechie
How do you think podcasts get broadcasted? RSS baby.

I listen to podcasts all the time, and you sure can't find that type of
information on twitter or anywhere else.

As long as podcasts live on, so will RSS.

------
kijin
> _No pressure. It’s all going to be here tomorrow, a week from now ... even a
> month._

> _By the way, anything older than a week or two stops existing on Twitter._

Great point. One of the most annoying things about organizing articles based
on a single timeline like Twitter is that old stuff gets pushed into oblivion
too quickly. Most of these don't use pagination either, so I need to scroll
like crazy and wait for AJAX to catch up if I want to go back more than a few
days.

Sure, you could do search, but how do you search for something you don't even
know exists? Like a blog post that appeared two weeks ago while I wasn't
looking. With any half-decent RSS reader, each blog gets its own section, so
articles don't get lost in the noise even if Blog A only publishes once a
month and Blog B publishes twice a day. Even if Blog C only publishes once a
year, the little "(1)" next to its name will stay there even if I miss it by
several months.

Not all of us are always looking for the latest news from the last 30 minutes.
I routinely read articles from several years ago, sometimes even from the
previous millennium. Any method of finding and organizing articles that makes
it difficult for me to figure out what happened last year is not welcome in my
mind.

------
antninja
RSS will die if isolated blogs à la Wordpress die. RSS is a solution to the
problem of following those isolated blogs. Collective platforms like Tumblr or
Facebook solve this problem by featuring an integrated reader. There are other
solutions like using Twitter to notify the availability of new posts.

Solutions die if the problems die.

~~~
dasmoth
That's plausibly true, but I for one think it's a bit sad if isolated blogs
are seen as a problem rather than valuable decentralization.

------
voidfiles
Google Kils Google Reader

Is an interesting thought experiment. In one stroke Google could wipe out a
large tent pole for the RSS eco system. Wouldn't that effectively make RSS
dead?

Not only do people use Google Reader as means to read RSS, way to many RSS
Readers use Google Reader as the crawling infrastructure for there
app.(Newsblur being a notable exception). So killing google reader would pwn a
large number of apps.

After the main support is gone, why would you build RSS into your product at
all? Can RSS, that is propped up by one tenuous pole, last forever?

~~~
ge0rg
_Google Kils Google Reader_

Probably people who are using RSS will switch to some alternative
client/reader and learn an important lesson about relying on "free" services.

 _why would you build RSS into your product at all?_

The problem RSS is trying to solve, being informed about new articles (and
remembering which ones you've already read), still needs some alternative
solution. Neither twitter nor facebook are providing one.

I think as long as there is no superior way to keep up with different sources
of information, RSS will stay alive.

~~~
wslh
>> Probably people who are using RSS will switch to some alternative
client/reader and learn an important lesson about relying on "free" services.

It is more complicated than that. Google has a RSS history of blogs, this is
not easily reproducible.

------
Tooluka
Twitter was designed for a process of acquiring information, results (the
information itself) are irrelevant. RSS was designed for results, the process
of acquiring them is irrelevant. In other words - in Twitter what matters is
When and How, not What. In RSS it is the opposite - What matters, not When or
How. RSS will be just like now for years. Twitter will be indefinitely more
popular all that time until any moment in the future more trendy network will
emerge all every one will leave the ship in months. And probably no one will
compete with RSS. It is like a Unix tool - no point in touching it, if it
works.

------
kesun421
For those in this thread that are complaining about RSS UI and lack of better
way of consuming RSS content, we were trying to address some problems with
consuming information when oversubscribing to RSS feeds in Smart Reader.
Please check it out and provide any feedback :-)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895662>

------
Sivart13
So many of these posts are comparing Twitter to RSS. How the hell is Twitter
(a single provider streaming 140-character messages) anything like RSS (a way
to collect arbitrary data from many providers). Oranges are dead because
everyone uses Apples these days.

------
par
We just made a new RSS reader, please check it out and let us know what you
think! <http://readnewswire.com> (still very much WIP)

------
justncase80
RSS is how I read hacker news. RSS is excellent.

