
Rest in Peace, RSS - vaksel
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/
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_pius
I found this really ironic because I actually came across this article in my
RSS reader. I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

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noodle
i like how RSS is dead because this one guy doesn't open up google reader
anymore.

in other news: i've never visited austrailia, so i posit it no longer exists.

~~~
whatusername
When Chairman Rudd implements the great firewall of Australia - then perhaps
we shall truly disappear (from online communities at least).

RSS, Email, Phone calls and blogs all aren't going away any time soon.
Hopefully in another 5 years or so the stake will be buried completely in the
heart of the fax machine - but just because one guys has been distracted by
the "oooohh.. shiny" of Twitter - does not the death of RSS make.

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elbenshira
What's the point of this article? It's as if the author wrote it just because
he had to write something, much like how the talkative guy talks about the
most useless things just for the sake of talking.

~~~
paulgb
Is it just me, or do most TechCrunch (+ family) feel like that lately?

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sachinag
You know how fortune cookie fortunes are better if you add "in bed" to the end
of them? New rule: add "for me" to every blog post title.

~~~
jokermatt999
If you're feeling snarkier, I'd also suggest "in my useless opinion" for the
particularly outrageous claims.

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tlrobinson
Following up on that...

I'd like an intelligent RSS reader that aggregated information from various
social sites to tell me which posts are worth reading, preferably normalized
based on the number of readers, so I don't get a zillion Engadget posts and
zero niche blogs.

The data could come from links from my friends on Twitter, Facebook,
FriendFeed, Delicious, etc (after following shortened URL redirects, of
course. _sigh_ ), top posts on social news sites I read (namely Hacker News
and the various sub-Reddits I'm subscribed to), etc.

It would cross-reference all that data with the RSS feeds I'm actually
subscribed to, and present me with ranked list of unread articles, so I can
read through the best articles first, and ignore the rest if I don't have
time.

Separately it could suggest a few other articles on sites I'm not subscribed
to, but might be interested in, also based on all of the above data.

Ideally it would be be "passive", not requiring manual interaction to "train"
it, other than looking at my subscribed feeds. If there were some more
advanced "learning" aspect to it, it could heavily weight my own actions on
social sites, i.e. voting up articles on social news sites, linking to
articles, etc.

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barrkel
This is what happens when people who used to report on the news, think they
are creating the news. Gillmor has an acute version of this disease, as is
highly evident from his Gillmor Gang podcast.

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nimbix
What we have here is a wonderful example of filter failure.

See this link: <http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/>

It's a video of Clay Shirky's web2expo keynote titled "It's Not Information
Overload. It's Filter Failure."

Here's what's happening: For every wonderful blog post there are several
mediocre ones. And when you oversubscribe to RSS feeds, which many of us do,
you start drowning in a flood of posts you don't feel like reading.

Links you get on Twitter, on the other hand, are already pre-filtered.
Somebody must have already read the article and decided it's worth sharing.
You also know from previous experience who is sharing good links and who is
sharing crap, so you know whose links are worth clicking.

But this can only work as long as some people keep on reading lots of articles
and only share the good ones. You're not gonna get any new links once everyone
decides to abandon RSS and only read articles shared by people they follow on
Twitter.

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tlrobinson
Some people may like the "firehose" method of getting their news through
Twitter, but I still prefer the asynchrony of RSS readers for everything
except perhaps breaking news.

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jdrock
It seems like the author is being satirical, but there are people that really
do think this way.

~~~
barrkel
He is 100% in earnest. He's been raving on about this for months on his
podcast.

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bslatkin
Definitely some fluff in the article, but I think his point is simply: "RSS is
too slow".

I think this is solvable. One option:

<http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com>

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shib71
This stream-of-consciousness style of writing is a sure sign of a fluff piece.

Narrative is not a convincing argument, and two pages filled with "this is so"
statements do not interest me.

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ojbyrne
Let's see how twitter manages through the valley of the shadow of spam. Hello,
/Dani|Erica|Loni|Heather[A-Z][1-9]{4}/! Thanks for following me. Uh, not.

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jgilliam
Any blogger who doesn't use RSS isn't worth reading, much less putting at the
top of Hacker News.

~~~
icefox
How about the fact that Hacker News doesn't have rss?

~~~
shib71
I have been using this feed for as long as I've known about HN. I can count
the number of times I've been to the HN front page on one hand.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>

~~~
maarek
I use this feed: <http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi> which gets me full
text of the article with links to the HN comments. Of course, I found it
originally in the standard HN RSS feed.

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sho
This article is annoying, but I agree with the title - RSS never really lived
up to its potential. Actually, scratch that - RSS was never the right tool
anyway. Neither is twitter, for that matter. And Atom is cool but it's a
solution looking for a problem.

What we need is real pub/sub for the internet. XMPP is a kind-of OK first stab
but old, ugly and overly complex, AMQP is lovely locally but not really suited
for consumers. I get the feeling we haven't cracked this particular nut yet.

And as for Twitter being a replacement for RSS - are you kidding? Is this guy
really suggesting that every single RSS source in the world publish their
entire feed to Twitter? That would actually be kind of funny, come to think of
it. Hardly a solution, though.

