
RSS Rant - hollerith
http://feliciaday.com/blog/rss-rant
======
asolove
Sadly, RSS is like many other platforms without a default client. Well-
engineered, extremely useful, but impossible to explain to non-technical
people. Before you can use RSS, you have to know what it is, look for it on a
website, and have a client downloaded or an account on a web service. For this
to make sense you need a mental model of a server with information, a client
requesting it, and a technical specification that teaches them to talk to each
other.

Compare with Facebook or Twitter, where you click a link to the default client
and can start using it right away.

Ultimately, you can google "Twitter" or "Facebook" and start using the
platform right away. Google "RSS" and you get technical explanations, a
Wikipedia page, and competing choices for feed readers.

~~~
mapgrep
The web has no default client.

Email has no default client.

TV has no default client.

The telephone network, after a lengthy battle involving AT&T, has no default
client.

SMS has no default client.

Somehow, people find a way to use these things. It took many years from when
the first web browser was written in 1990 to get to ubiquity. We got RSS in
1999 and it is in widespread use among web publishers; I can't think of a
major news site that does not use it. Where we are lacking is in user uptake.
Give it time. Open standards always take longer, but one will eventually get
us there.

~~~
lukifer
The default client for email and web is the one that comes with your computer.
The default client for SMS is your phone. The default client for TV is to turn
it on and flip through channels.

The point of the OP was not about having a single standardized client, but
rather having the functionality baked into product(s) without the user having
to seek it out on their own, or even learn what "RSS" means. The feeble
attempts from Safari and Firefox are the closest we've come, but ideally this
was a push that should have happened at the OS level, both on desktop and
mobile.

~~~
ClintonWu
This is one of the things we're working on at Start.Me (<http://thestart.me>)
. We're trying to speed up your online browsing routine and figure out how to
add both RSS and non-RSS sites to feeds without users necessarily having to
know what RSS means; just what sites they want to keep up with. Would love
anyone's feedback after we release something next week.

~~~
stdbrouw
Not to be a debbie downer, but you can enter any website in Google Reader and
get a feed subscription back too, without having to know what RSS means. (It
doesn't, strictly speaking, work on non-RSS sites, true, but despite the
recent trend we're talking about here, most sites still have 'em if you look
hard enough.)

That said, it's a marketing thing. If you can make things click for the
everyday joe, all the more power to you!

~~~
JeffJenkins
I had a site I used that feature for, but google took it away like a year ago

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gchucky
Not to be pedantic, but there are some of us who don't use Twitter but still
want to follow tweets (e.g. in Google Reader). It's possible to get an RSS
feed of tweets through the Twitter API:
[http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_n...](http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=$USERNAME)

That's not really a solution, however. Kind of a drag that Twitter pulled RSS
links down off of user pages..

~~~
gaffe
Fun fact: Google Reader will understand <http://twitter.com/username> as an
RSS feed. The trick is to remove the hashbang that Twitter automatically adds
to the URL (i.e. <http://twitter.com/#!/username>) before attempting to add it
as a feed.

~~~
jfb
This is awesome. Thanks!

------
runevault
This reminds me of the stupidity of Spotify going to Facebook only. Don't lock
yourself into ONLY using someone else's platform that only they control for
authentication (facebook/twitter/etc). At least have an option for something
like OAuth where you can host your own as well and no one group holds control.

I wonder when people will realize handing over the keys this way is a terrible
idea. Support those platforms if you want, certainly. But don't make them the
only way to interact with you.

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snorkel
I happen to have worked on a SaaS offering entirely focused on aggregating and
consolidating RSS feeds, and I can truly say that only a tiny minority of
technically inclined people ever gave a shit about RSS feeds, or even
understood what it meant. The fact of the matter is that most people have no
urge to fuss with news aggregating tools.

RSS was also useful for streaming playlists and status items to thin clients,
but they too are increasingly supporting full-on web browsers instead.

~~~
rcfox
> I can truly say that only a tiny minority of technically inclined people
> ever gave a shit about RSS feeds

So what? It's in your best interest to keep the nerds happy because they are
the ones doing the actual work to push technology forward.

~~~
snorkel
It goes back to the old 80/20 principle, and most content publishers are
realizing what I learned: spending resources to keep a small minority of nerds
happy doesn't put food on the table.

------
Legion
I expect this link is getting attention solely because it was written by
Felicia Day, but I too have a list of a number of sites that I don't read as I
wish I could because of their lack of RSS.

And taking it a step further, RSS without full-text is little better than no
RSS.

~~~
Periodic
There have been a few sites I have found interesting and wanted to follow, but
ultimately don't because they don't have an RSS feed. I don't have the time,
energy, or organization to go to the site every few days and check for
updates. There are plenty of other things that I can read in my RSS
aggregator.

------
mechanical_fish
I look at this and say to myself "Felicia is using the wrong Twitter client.
She should switch to the one that she actually wants. The only difficulty is
that it might not exist yet."

Does it exist? What I think we might be looking for is a Twitter client that
displays the usual timeline, but also can act like an RSS reader: For a subset
of your followers, you can display a list of all their Tweets over the last 7
days that included a link, along with a preview of the content at that link.
Surf down that display and mark a Tweet "read" and it disappears from that
display (though it remains in the usual timeline).

Actually this might scream "Instapaper addon". I'd love to be able to select a
subset of my Twitter followers and have their Tweeted URLs beamed directly
into Instapaper to be read at my leisure. Come to think of it, I wonder if I
could hack that up myself.

~~~
rcfox
I look at this and say to myself, "This dude's missing the point."

Twitter is not a superset of RSS. It does a small part of what I do with RSS,
but not all of it, and not in as nice of a way.

The Twitter-Instapaper thing is a good idea, but it's just not the same as
RSS.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Alas, it doesn't matter how well RSS works for its current users. What matters
is how well it works for publishers.

It's not merely that Twitter is easier to subscribe to, that the feeds are
easier to set up and serve (there's almost nothing to do; Twitter's engineers
do all the work), that the Twitter link-sharing protocol is intuitively
obvious, that Twitter has a legendary brand while nobody knows what RSS is,
that Twitter clients show the actual rendered HTML of the linked page
(complete with those ads) rather than an often-incomplete text teaser or a
bunch of broken formatting.

No, the killer feature of Twitter is the viral loop. Any individual tweet can
be trivially forwarded, or trivially broadcast to an entire hashtag. And every
tweet or retweet is also a self-contained advertisement for its author and a
call to action: It takes only one click to bring up the entire history of its
author's Twitter stream, and only one click to subscribe to that author's
future Tweets.

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sports_guy
Outside of those of us that love Google Reader, I have to imagine that Search
Engines and numerous content aggregators are ingesting RSS feeds. Removing
them is going to degrade your distribution immensely and likely affect your
SEO.

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mike-cardwell
I prefer RSS/Atom as it is a "distributed" way of handling feeds, rather than
relying on a single centralised service.

This is why my website will always have an RSS feed. I also have a Twitter
feed for people who want it, but I'd prefer people to use RSS.

My tech blog seems to have about an equal number of RSS followers and Twitter
followers. I'm not sure how much overlap there is.

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mmackh
RSS is the most useful thing ever; if you hide it behind the a lovely
interface and make the user forget about it. It's pretty hard to understate
the efficiency that developers would lose out on, if RSS were to go. That
said, I am mostly using Twitter to catch up with he latest news - it's so darn
efficient

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webmonkeyuk
"Basically I’ve noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS
to Twitter and FB, but REMOVING IT COMPLETELY!"

So why not subscribe to the Twitter or FB RSS feed of their content. Or am I
missing something.

~~~
peterbraden
facebook doesn't offer rss

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kin
There's a reason I use FB and Twitter vs. RSS feeds. Because its so damn
dominant, a lot of sources post to Twitter and FB exclusively. Furthermore, if
there's anything particularly popular/huge/breaking, FB's algorithm populates
the top of my feed with it. RSS feeds don't do that. Different clients'
"magic" function doesn't work properly. RSS has become spam to me. For
exclusive news, I thus rely on social clients.

For major news sources like Gawker, IGN, CNN, what have you, RSS is still
there and probably won't be going away.

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afhof
If a website is good enough, its not hard to just make a screen scaper and
turn it into an RSS feed.

This scrapes the HN front page every hour and is a lot easier to check:

<http://hn.af.rkive.org/feed.php?id=4>

~~~
nir
Why, you could even have the screen scraper export to RSS!

~~~
soult
Why, you could just use <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss> !

~~~
nir
You realize I was joking...

------
ChrisArchitect
RSS - the internet's great underrated 'killer app'

~~~
pferde
s/internet/web/

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shareme
unfortunately author is wrong G+ did not remove feeds..

If you look at your G+ profile page in view source in any browser you will see
a Buzz activity atom feed for it..

