

Do people still use RSS? - tosbourn
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/q/23237/1240

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jinushaun
I use it everyday. In fact, that's how I saw this HN post.

IMO, when it comes to RSS, people are always asking the wrong question. RSS is
a technology, not a product. It makes as much sense as asking whether someone
is using GSM or TCP. I think a large part of that problem is that the
technology appeared before a user-friendly way to consume it. Imagine email
addresses being introduced before email clients existed. To most people,
clicking on an RSS button displays garbage to the screen. They don't know what
to do with it. Even after browsers started displaying RSS feeds in a pretty
format, users still didn't know what to do with it. Should they bookmark this
link? Why would they consume the barebones RSS feed in their browser instead
of the rich and graphical website? RSS enables one to subscribe to a website,
it's not the ends but the means. These questions still remain unanswered which
is why some people like Gruber and TechCrunch like to claim that Twitter
killed RSS, although I think they're completely different things.

~~~
justncase80
word.

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mikedougherty
I wouldn't have ever seen this submission if it weren't for RSS. Along with
almost everything else I'm going to read online today.

~~~
mcclanahoochie
I heard this post via FeedSpeak - <http://feedspeak.tk>

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kmfrk
I think my best way of answering the question is that because some magazine
authors don't have per-contributor RSS, I don't follow them and forget them.

Twitter is a very interesting development, but the only site whose RSS it's
replaced is Daring Fireball.

However, finding a good RSS client is the biggest pain in the ass, and I don't
know what I would have done, if I didn't discover Fever, when Bloglines died
and took all my data and saved updates with it.

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WalterSear
What's wrong with google reader?

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kmfrk
My main gripe was that it prunes updates over a certain age (one month?)
without telling me, and it pissed me off to no end to find out the way I did.

Fever still prunes updates, albeit with an explicit and definable value. It
allows up to eight weeks, which is usually enough for me to catch the
important updates and makes sense from a personal server perspective, seeing
that I don't have an infinite amount of storage available for the burgeoning
database of feed updates.

After Bloglines died, the concept of cloud-based RSS readers made even less
sense to me, seeing that it took all my saved updates with it. I feel the same
way about e-mail, but I don't really see a dead-easy alternative available at
the moment, especially with Gmail's two-factor authentication.

Google Reader also used to, basically, not work at all on Opera, which is
normal for any Google service, so it never really grew on me. Its design
annoys me to no end as well.

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xer0
With _very_ few exceptions, if you don't have a feed you don't survive past my
first visit. I visit HN manually every day, and stackoverflow and my bank
manually when I need to, and documentation sites. That's it. The web is much
too large to visit sites manually, and every site is less than a drop in the
bucket.

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MrEnigma
Yes, it's the best way to keep up to date on things that are not updated very
often. I probably have 400-500 feeds subscribed to in google reader, but never
use google reader directly.

On Mac: Reeder On iPad: Reeder On iPhone: NetNewsWire (until Reeder comes to
iPhone??)

Twitter has replaced some of that news gathering, but a lot of times if I'm
away for a week, I'm not going to go through thousands of tweets to see what I
missed, but it's pretty easy on the lower volume feeds. I don't necessarily
read everything, but at least the headlines give me an idea of what's going
on.

I don't know what I'd do without them.

~~~
Ravenlock
...Reeder is on iPhone. And it's brilliant. Go get it.

~~~
MrEnigma
How did I miss that. Thanks!

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tosbourn
I didn't post up my answer on the site because someone else had already
covered it. In short, yes people still use them and given how easy they are to
implement I see no reason not to put them onto your site.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Absolutely, especially if your readers are tech-savvy. Personally, having a
feed drastically lowers the "compellingness barrier" a site must exceed to
gain my sustained attention. There are very few sites that are interesting
enough to make me visit them manually every day, but lots of sites interesting
enough that I'll add them to my feed reader.

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Lagged2Death
Is there any public data about how many people use Google Reader, Bloglines
Reader, Netvibes, iGoogle, My Yahoo! and so forth, all of which are RSS-based?

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tristan_louis
Not only do I use it (that's how I saw this story) but also advocate it to
people who like to consume news. When you think about it, RSS in a news reader
is a much more efficient information consumption than visiting sites.

Twitter and other social feeds are interesting but the amount of noise to
signal seems to be much lower than what you can get on RSS, even on some of
the better sources.

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richardg
Yes, I believe people still do. RSS is about content and providing
information. Everybody needs information, everybody needs something new - so
it is here to stay.. I'm assuming by RSS you mean the content, not the
technology. In fact, got a site that uses youtube RSS feeds to show videos and
create playlists.

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webwanderings
I've been using RSS for long and I don't see not using it in any near future.
I use a combination of Brief (<http://brief.mozdev.org/>) and Google Reader.

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justncase80
Yes. That's how I look at HN. RSS is the bomb.

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Ravenlock
I certainly do. Aside from Twitter it's the only content consumption method I
use every single day.

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sbmassey
What are the alternatives to RSS? Do people really use Twitter instead? What
else is there?

~~~
presty
Actually, for websites managed by non-tech people, I see a big shift towards
Facebook Pages (and Twitter).

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kenok
YES.

