
RSS: What Not Dying Looks Like - srikar
http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/84826194914/what-not-dying-looks-like
======
camillomiller
I agree, but with a caveat. Google closing reader wasn't RSS' tombstone, for
sure. Rss is stronger than ever and, as pointed out in the article, it's still
widely used by small and big players on the Web. Unfortunately Google Reader
was the gateway into the RSS realm for those folks who just wanted a quick way
to keep track of their news. For those folks, who aren't certainly programmer
nor can appreciate the subtleties of RSS' survival, RSS is definitively dead.
Those folks are the vast majority of Web users. I think we may say that the
most popular front-end usage of RSS has died when Google closed reader.

I don't agree with the void-to-be-filled theory, because that void has been
quickly filled already by Twitter, Facebook and other self-sufficing, closed
and mind numbing services that have nothing to do with the fluid open nature
of RSS. Many many users have quickly shifted to that mindset and they won't be
back. Do you think those millions of BuzzFeed reader can give a crap about
RSS?

So yeah, you can archive google reader closing shop in the "google's
unforgivable mistake" directory.

Source: I'm a web editor (not for English speaking websites as you may have
understood) since 2006. I've seen the shift all happen under my eyes. It's
sort of disgusting.

~~~
weland
> Unfortunately Google Reader was the gateway into the RSS realm for those
> folks who just wanted a quick way to keep track of their news

I confess: I literally cannot understand this. There must be a thousand RSS
readers, many of them allowing at least _some_ privacy, some of them by e.g.
not running on a remote server, which also means their existence and
usefulness does not depend on someone always being kind enough not to pull the
plug. What the bloody hell was so special about Google Reader?

~~~
nanofortnight
Ease of use.

Not everybody wants to setup an RSS reader (or knows what one is).

~~~
weland
But setting up an RSS reader is no different from installing any application.
For crying out loud, that means going to an app store for much of the RSS-
reading Internet or clicking next, next and finish for the rest of it.

I know I sound like an elitist schmuck when I say it, but I'm increasingly
starting to think all this ease-of-use thing is getting a bit out of hand. If
there are people are willing to sacrifice performance (Google Reader's UI was
slower than Liferea's first versions, and that's something!), privacy and
reliability (an installed RSS reader does always work, as opposed to a public,
remote service, ran by an advertising company) just because clicking "Install"
is hard for them, I honestly wish all these bad, evil companies they're
outraged about mine the shit out of them, from their eye color to the size of
their underwear. I get legitimate cases (e.g. you're behind company firewall
and you're on your work computer so you can't install anything), but
_installing_ a program really shouldn't be a difficult task otherwise.

~~~
acheron
I don't want to use a standalone RSS reader any more than a standalone email
client. There's a reason everybody [1] switched to webmail.

In any case, a web RSS reader that I run myself (tt-rss or similar) is a
pretty good compromise.

[1] Yes, person who is about to reply, I know you personally didn't.

~~~
loup-vaillant
E-mail clients are a terrible example. While relatively easy to install, they
give you very little control, and no additional privacy.

To get all that, you need your own server. Ideally a home server, but many ISP
forbid you to send e-mail at all (they close port 25). The next best thing is
a remote virtual machine with root access. Either way, good luck installing
Postfix and Dovecot. I have, and there's no way the "average user" could do
the same.

So, of course you don't use an e-mail client.

~~~
hollerith
>many ISP forbid you to send e-mail at all (they close port 25).

Can anyone name an ISP that forbids their customers from using SMTP to send
mail?

My guess is that the person I'm quoting is confused by the longstanding spam-
control measure in which the ISP requires the outgoing mail to go through a
mail server designated by (and usually run by) the ISP rather than going
directly to the recipient's mail server.

But if I'm wrong about that, I want to know!

~~~
loup-vaillant
I'm not confused, and know exactly what you are talking about.

Call it pedantic, but yes, they do forbid you to send e-mails. Instead, they
force you to ask _them_ to send e-mail for you (that's how SMTP relays work).
They're not _completely_ forbidding you to use SMTP, but they do require that
you go through their servers. That's quite the restricted SMTP usage.

The snail mail equivalent would be to forbid you to ship your mail yourself.
Instead you have to give it to the official postal services so _they_ can ship
the mail.

Why would they do that? I see only one reason: they want to control your mail.
They look at the destination, and maybe decide they won't ship the mail after
all. They look at how much mail you send out, and maybe they won't send more
than a dozen per day. They may _open_ the mail (or otherwise X-ray it), and
take "appropriate" action depending on the content, including not shipping it,
building a customer profile of you and your recipients, writing your name on
some black list, or archive the mail, just in case.

Spam mitigation? That's just a pretext they use to snoop over your private
communications. (Or, more accurately, control their network. They will always
push for more corporate control, that's what corporations do.)

Of course, you can bypass the limitation by using HTTP to ask _another_ big
corporation to send your mail. And receive and store your mail too. And deeply
analyse it so they can show you customized banners. And give it to the
authorities whenever they ask for it…

Such an Orwellian nightmare would never fly in the physical world. In the
digital one however, they can capitalize on people's ignorance.

------
lyndonh
If RSS "died" (and I don't think it did), then it was when the main browsers
stopped showing the RSS icon next to the URL and started hiding RSS feeds and
links.

From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients were
designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as
read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check
every day ?

From a site perspective, most sites were stuffing the whole web page in each
RSS article such that RSS was not a summary. Then they realised that people
reading RSS weren't reading ads so they either killed RSS or made each article
one line.

From a programmer perspective, writing an RSS client became a hello world of
applications programming such that there were millions of very bad clients.

RSS is very much alive and very useful; but maybe RSS as we used to think of
it is dead. It's a background thing that browsers and applications should make
use of

I think the big challenge for RSS and the web in general is link rot.

~~~
VLM
"From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients
were designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as
read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check
every day ?"

Me? And its more like dozens BTW not thousands?

There's a fundamental perception issue best described by analogy.

In many living rooms is a box that displays video. Some people insist that all
humans only want to view streamed live content that someone else controls.
Some people insist that all humans only want to view the output of a perfect
DVR. Both extremist positions are of course wrong.

I have 104 relatively low traffic, yet VERY important to me, feeds in my
newsblur rss reader. I'd be hyper pissed off almost beyond words if newsblur
decided to only display the 10 most recent posts. I'd have to dump them and
their attractive mobile client app and go back to self hosting a feedonfeeds
installation, which doesn't really work on mobile, but at least it would
display all the new news to me rather than a subset.

Most sites that screw up RSS don't have real content anyway. Just linkbait
surrounded by ads. Not much of a loss.

~~~
alxndr
> "Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day?"

My response to that is: Who wants thousands of Facebook Twitter Instagram
Pinwhatevertube sites to check every day? Just have them all sent to one
place, and check that.

I only want one inbox, total, ever, to check. All of my email, plus Twitter,
Instabook, Whatevergram, plus all posts from any blog that I really want to
follow, plus any Google Alerts of any topics that I follow — all of that, in
one place. An RSS reader and some jumping through hoops lets me achieve two
inboxes total, my email plus "everything else", and that's good enough for me
at the moment.

------
gmisra
I don't think very many people thought RSS "died", rather the _opportunity_
for RSS to become the dominant, cross-source publishing standard has died.

There used to be a world where all things on Twitter and Facebook were
published to RSS feeds, drastically lowering the barriers to entry for
experimenting with content consumption ideas, or cross-content aggregation, or
personalization, etc.

There used to be a world where big, public technology players like Google and
Firefox were helping on-board new users, and appeared to be making a long-term
commitment to the technology. When Google Reader was a thing, the rate at
which non-technical users in my personal network were starting to talk about
RSS was astounding. And _everybody_ was thinking about whether or not RSS was
a natural fit for their product/idea/platform/drone/toaster.

There was a moment in history where RSS was poised to become as ubiquitous as
e-mail. But that opportunity was taken away, because the big tech companies
either couldn't or wouldn't innovate on their business models, instead they're
focused on the near-zero-sum game of user acquisition and retention.

A similar thing happened in the late 1990s with the major ISPs -
AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy/etc actively encouraged you to only communicate in-
network, e.g. how their chat clients initially worked. Unfortunately for them
(but fortunately for us), their core identity system was based on the already
standardized technology of e-mail. And eventually the ability of others to
provide better/different experiences via e-mail (Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, etc)
changed how people viewed those networks.

This time around, the big tech companies are much more self-conscious
regarding user base degradation, and the risks of having their core user
experience compromised by out-of-network innovation. Consumers always lose
this game.

~~~
mountaineer
This is my feeling as well. RSS is alive and kicking as a technology, I still
use it as a core technology for a product I'm building. But, consuming raw
feeds in a reader is what's dead or at least endangered. That experience has
now moved to Twitter and Facebook where we rely on our influencers to feed the
news consumption and which has been cut off from outside development
opportunities.

~~~
sentenza
What bugs many of us feed reader users, though, is that Twitter and Facebook
(as well as most other wall or stream based content aggregations) are very bad
at information management.

One thing is the singal-to-noise ratio, but another is the issue of
infrequently updated content. Anybody that posts only once a month will get
buried on any normal Twitter or Facebook feed. With RSS you can easily keep
track of infrequent posters even if you have high-volume feeds in your reader.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Facebook had an optional "power user"
mode where you get a view that is not unlike a file browser, allowing you to
conditionally hide/remove/manage parts of the information flow. Maybe I could
be tempted by that.

But then again, I'm no usability expert. Maybe I'm just using reality wrong.

~~~
watmough
I think reality means that the Facebook business is based on stuffing as much
near-relevant garbage at you as possible, which is much harder over RSS.

------
stephen_mcd
Very well put!

My RSS reader ([http://kouio.com](http://kouio.com) after Google's shut down)
has always been my complete command centre:

\- Google Alerts

\- LinkedIn updates

\- Every issue/comment/star on my Github projects

\- The exact ages of my children every day (via
[http://howoldismykid.com](http://howoldismykid.com))

\- New questions per tag on stack overflow.

\- New messages for individual Google Groups.

and so much more.

I was just lost when Google Reader shut down thinking I'd lose all that, RSS
really is the universal API of web data.

~~~
donniezazen
That's a slick RSS reader. I have previously used The Old Reader for its
simplicity. I am currently using Feedly as it has good Android support and are
doing good job with Evernote integration. Thanks for suggesting the RSS reader
and the age RSS app.

RSS is a very good nice technology from users point of view. One place to get
all your news but it's a shame that companies like want to move away from open
protocols like RSS and XMPP.

I have so far not been able to solve the problem of reading Hacker's News and
Reddit. The easiest way to read these news aggregation sites have been to
visit their front page. I couldn't find anything that would send posts that
come on the front page of HN and Reddit in my RSS inbox.

~~~
stephen_mcd
I use the web version of kouio on android every day, it's tailored directly to
mobile devices:

[https://kouio.com/blog/kouio-your-mobile-rss-
reader](https://kouio.com/blog/kouio-your-mobile-rss-reader)

You can also push articles out to a whole ton of services at once, including
Evernote:

[https://kouio.com/blog/sharing-is-caring](https://kouio.com/blog/sharing-is-
caring)

As for HN and Reddit, RSS is perfect for these - HN has its own RSS feed
dedicated to front-page items:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)

It gets even better with Reddit, each individual subreddit has its own RSS
feed, eg:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/systems/.rss](http://www.reddit.com/r/systems/.rss)

With kouio I group together all the interesting subreddit feeds under a folder
called Reddit - then I can view them individually or all together at once.

~~~
dredmorbius
reddit's RSS features are even better than that. You can feed off users,
searches, multireddits, comments on a specific post, submission from a domain,
and probably more.

[http://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss](http://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathoge...](http://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathogendavids_guide_to_rss_and_reddit/)

~~~
donniezazen
Thanks for the info.

------
edanm
I'm starting to that RSS isn't dead - it was just never alive in the sense
that most people who say "RSS is dead" mean.

The majority of the population _does not_ use RSS, _does not realize RSS
exists_ , and _does not care about RSS_. That's a fact, and has always been
true and will likely remain true in the future.

When people say "RSS is dead", that's what they mean - it's a technology that
never got a share of average users actually using it. So saying that RSS dies
is ridiculous - by that definition, it was never alive.

~~~
oddevan
I agree with the clarification that "it's a technology that never got a share
of average users _aware that they were_ actually using it." Plenty of people
subscribe to news feeds in Twitter; what do you think the backend technology
is supplying them? Podcasts have also been mentioned.

People don't use RSS the same way that people don't use JSON: they don't know
or care about it, but it's a key component of many of the services they use
every day.

~~~
edanm
Good clarification. The only thing I'd add is that the many people banging the
"RSS is not dead" bandwagon tend to be talking about RSS as a consumer
technology, in my opinion. A lot less people are talking about "XML is dead",
for example. Even software devs don't care so much about technology :)

------
jamesbritt
I can't think of a better way for me to quickly browse hundreds of Web sources
than RSS. Speed is key, and the option to save things of interest for deeper
review later.

One of the things that made it hard to find a replacement for me for Reader
was that so many new rss readers do too much while not offering a simple,
compact list view.

As it happens I decided to go with The Old Reader despite some speed issues.

------
Yhippa
I have a side project that aggregates news for a sports team I follow. Over
time I've been collecting RSS feeds from different sources on the internet
related to this team.

I went back and validated whether the feeds were alive or not and about half
of them are now defunct. The sites that removed them seem to have moved on to
the main social networks as seen in the various chicklets in the page that
accompany the articles.

I wonder if they no longer value RSS or if its getting killed in site
redesigns? My suspicion is that not enough people use RSS to warrant providing
that functionality. There seem to be too many steps for users to use RSS while
it is easier to get that content by using something more "standard" like
Facebook or Twitter.

------
codelust
RSS was never meant to be a product. It is a format and a spec. Products are
built around the spec: apps that push it, clients that pull it. It has
incredible value where machines speak to each other. Much of the 'dying' was
fed by the deluge of RSS-as-product based companies that thrived at that time.
Those companies and products probably are dead, but RSS is not. And that is
not surprising; not at least for me.

------
adventured
"every major news site is broadcasting via RSS"

This is an exaggeration.

One of the biggest news sites in the world, bloomberg.com, serves up no RSS
feeds.

Forbes.com doesn't have RSS anywhere on their home page, and has dropped it
from, as far as I can tell, every single story page. They only have this page
left: [http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.html](http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.html)
which is a dying collection of years old RSS links (on a page with an ancient
template design).

I deal with RSS feeds a lot in my business, and many of the top sites are a
mess when it comes to keeping their feeds properly linked to their site
structures as they update.

~~~
VLM
He's talking about actual news sources, not syndicators who resell news to
optimistically obtain ad impressions.

Here's a typical actual source of news:

[http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss](http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss)

My local dead tree newspaper takes those reuters stories, wraps them in some
style, some local color, some lasagna recipes, and tries to resell the reuters
stories for the ad impressions. Its a dying industry because I can just
subscribe to a reuters feed... Of course a feed like

[http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews](http://feeds.reuters.com/Reuters/worldNews)

Must be 1000 news stories per day, at least some days. MostRead is somewhat
saner, maybe a post every two hours or so (depends on the day).

I would pay for a reuters feed. Maybe not much, but I'd pay something, maybe
between $12/yr and $52/yr. I wouldn't pay a penny to a small time syndicator
who merely adds lasagna recipes and local high school sports team stories.

One problem with a site like bloomberg is you've got something a cross between
machine generated infotainment and a feed of news releases better obtained
from the sources anyway. I'm not sure "journalism" counts as "news" anymore,
if it ever did.

~~~
kahirsch
Bloomberg has a staff of more than 2,400 journalists and editors.[1]

This is the same Bloomberg that sued the Federal Reserve to make them release
the names of the recipients of the Fed's emergency loans.[2]

[1][http://jobs.bloomberg.com/go/News-
Jobs/356821/](http://jobs.bloomberg.com/go/News-Jobs/356821/)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P._v._Board_of_Gove...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P._v._Board_of_Governors_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System)

------
neals
I actually use Digg ([http://digg.com/reader](http://digg.com/reader)) for my
RSS needs. (Remember Digg?, right?)

~~~
patrickdavey
Me too. And I find myself reading their top stories links too.. Decent Android
app (free) also.

------
hackuser
I rarely find a site I want to subscribe to that lacks a feed.

An easy way to find RSS feeds in Firefox (this still works in FF 24 ESR, at
least):

1) Click View > Toolbars > Customize

2) Find the RSS icon; drag it to someplace convenient on one of your toolbars

3) When you find a page/site to which you want to subscription but don't see a
feed button, check Firefox' RSS icon. If it's activated (i.e., not greyed
out), click it and subscribe.

Another solution that maybe is too obvious to mention: Search for (adjusting
for your favorite search engine's syntax): rss|feed site:domainname.com

~~~
ajanuary
Most readers I've come across will let you paste in a url and it will try and
discover the feed for you, which beats having to search for it. Obviously
having the icon in FF helps you know if one is available.

------
cygnus
My very first thought whenever I want to read more about a website/blog,
subscribe to the RSS.

I see less and less the RSS button though, so I have to play with the URL
/feed or /rss to get the feed. Too bad.

~~~
icebraining
Have you tried just putting the main website URL into your reader? Many
support autodiscovery[1], as long as the site has the proper HTML tags set up.

[1] [http://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery](http://www.rssboard.org/rss-
autodiscovery)

------
wutbrodo
> Then Google thought they could abandon the technology and assumed everyone
> would gravitate to their social networks instead.

This is probably the most baffling of all the pathetic attempts I've seen to
shoehorn a nefarious motive into the closing of Reader. If the contention is
that shutting down Reader would force people to social networks, WHY would
Google expect people to go to Google+ instead of the social network with
multiple times the usage (Facebook)? I've never seen a piece of data that
indicated that Google+ was doing any better than a distant second to Facebook
(depending on how you count YouTube), and it does even worse on referral
traffic (which is more relevant when you're talking about a replacement for
Reader). This is probably the funniest tinfoil hat I've ever seen; Google shut
down Reader so that people would be forced to use Facebook more.

~~~
schrijver
The more straightforward explanation, is that it would drive people to use
Google Search, which RSS effectively bypasses.

~~~
wutbrodo
I think some pretty impressive mental gymnastics are required to see web
search replacing even a tiny portion of the functionality of RSS, particularly
when compared to other "feeds" like FB, G+, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

~~~
verbin217
Well that's certainly true but it doesn't contradict his point. A free RSS
tool prevents a lot of otherwise would-be searches. Especially since Google
Search basically replaced URL input.

~~~
icebraining
Does it really? I can't imagine anyone tech savvy enough to use an RSS reader,
just switching to manually searching for each site. It's not like free RSS
readers stopped existing with the death of GReader, and there's Twitter and
even just bookmarks.

------
ahoge
Nah, it's not dying or anything. It just isn't very popular. It never has
been. Reader was a niche product.

------
Systemic33
RSS as a consumer facing tech was never really alive. The way it lives today
is as an medium of transportation. Its the equivalent of a news page in JSON
format. But unlike JSON, it is purposebuilt for article delivery, instead of
being simply data delivery.

------
pjmlp
I never understood the issue with Google Reader, as I always used native
clients to receive RSS updates.

Every time one uses a "web app" is giving control over to third parties.

~~~
nikbackm
Maybe, but not having to synchronize your feeds between different devices and
platforms is a good incentive to give up that control.

~~~
icebraining
You can use a self-hosted web reader, like Tiny Tiny RSS. Best of both worlds,
in my opinion.

~~~
toyg
Then you need to pay for hosting, or do some geek-gymnastics with Dropbox or
similar (and at that point, your data is again on somebody else's server)... A
lot of bother for non-geeks.

~~~
icebraining
Sure, but I've never met a non-geek who used RSS anyway.

------
ciderpunx
From the article

    
    
      > no one ever has to know what feeds you subscribe to.
    

Whoever runs the server knows you're reading that feed from their server logs.

~~~
onli
True, but it is quite possible that is you yourself.

If you selfhost your reader, you control the logs. If you use a reader, the
server admin might now what feeds you have. But the server who hosts the feed
(the blog) has no idea, tracking doesn't work easily - that is still an
improvement.

~~~
verbin217
I think he means the server hosting the RSS feed and not the server hosting
your RSS tool (like the late Google Reader).

~~~
onli
In that case, the server hosting the feed does now nothing about you as soon
as you are not the sole user on a server hosting a feed (I sure wasn't sure
how to interpret that, so I tried to cover both cases)

~~~
ciderpunx
The server would know your IP address, and most likely your user agent and
referrer by looking at their weberver log though, right?

cf. eg. :
[https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes](https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes)

~~~
onli
Which server exactly? If you use a feedreader, it is not you or your browser
that fetches the page, it is the feedreader itself. So a site only knows that
their feed was fetched once from a feedreader, not who or how manye people
read that feed.

------
ssivark
Imho, The biggest threat to the public use of RSS is not the shutting down of
aggregators, but the dire situation of Feedburner. Since RSS is no longer part
of Google's business strategy, it might not be long before Feedburner is
sacrificed as part of their annual culling. It's easy to import an OPML file
into your new aggregator -- but due to the decouple nature of publishing and
subscribing using RSS, if/when Feedburner goes off, millions of content
pubilshers will be left in the dark with no way to connect with their
subscribers. That's truly worrisome.

I'd elaborated on this in a blog post I wrote a while ago (When Google Reader
shut down) -- [http://dickfeynman.github.io/blog/writings/what-the-fate-
of-...](http://dickfeynman.github.io/blog/writings/what-the-fate-of-google-
reader-implies-for-the-future-of-rss/)

------
kmfrk
I also imagine something like IFTTT has made RSS more relevant than it's been
in a long time.

~~~
chenster
I love RSS, my deal aggregator site [http://dealbert.net](http://dealbert.net)
is completely based on RSS feeds. The problem that I have is too many RSS
feeds could simply overwhelm subscribers who would have to weed through the
content to find information that interest to them. It would be golden if IFTTT
could also has a channel that does content recommendation based on feeds.

~~~
jsherer
I'm working on something like this. Would you be willing to chat about it?

------
edavis
I hope it isn't uncouth to mention my RSS reader here:
[https://github.com/edavis/riverpy](https://github.com/edavis/riverpy)

It treats RSS like a newspaper instead of email. Here's a demo:
[http://riverpy-demo.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html](http://riverpy-
demo.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

I'm biased, of course, but I think it's a pretty interesting take on what an
RSS reader can be.

RSS is more active now than I ever remember it being when Google Reader was
around. Really interested to see what the next few years bring.

~~~
mratzloff
Another take on that theme: Pulp for Mac.

[http://www.acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/](http://www.acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/)

------
jsherer
I love hearing about this. I've been growing my reader Minimal Reader
[https://minimalreader.com/](https://minimalreader.com/) for the past year and
can say that thousands of paying customers helps reassure that there's still a
market for RSS.

RSS is here to stay as long as people using RSS continue to support it by
building atop the infrastructure, funding innovative products, or even just
requesting a feed from their favorite publishers if they don't have one.

------
leeoniya
i still dont understand why they killed Reader. all they had to do was say,
"hey guys, would you pay $3-$5/month to keep it". people would have thrown
money at them.

~~~
patio11
As I said at the time on Twitter, that turns Reader into an excellent $X
million a year business. Google does not "do" $X million dollar businesses.

~~~
chippy
This is true - it happened at the time of them announcing fees for Google
Maps. There was some management decision to go for things that directly made
money at that time, and drop those things that were not growing.

------
001sky
_Netscape invented the underlying code in the late 90’s, and then took away
all documentation and support in 2001 after AOL bought them out._

So, what happened ?

------
mtourne
If I remember correctly, I moved to using theoldreader after Google Reader
went dark, then you were down for 3 days, then you kicked all the Reader's
switchers out (like me) to keep a more a manageable operation. For a little
while it's not RSS that seemed dead, but online RSS readers were definitely a
rare breed. Happy to see that you've changed your mind about limiting access.

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doczoidberg
I hope RSS will never die. I used iGoogle for years. It was the best way to
have a nice overview of all sites I would have visited each instead. Twitter
for me is no surrogate so that I coded a simple clone:
[http://www.fyrup.com](http://www.fyrup.com) Feel free to use it.

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blueskin_
I have a whole folder full of RSS feeds. It's an easy way to keep up with
blogs, webcomics, and news, all without wrecking my privacy by giving away my
reading habits to a third party (formerly google, now whoever everything-as-a-
website fans like instead).

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camus2
Google still has a js rss api, in fact i'm using it with my pure client-side
rss reader (backed by dropbox api) which is still in early stages ;)

[https://mparaiso.github.io/flowreader](https://mparaiso.github.io/flowreader)

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jpb0104
Very happy with my post-Google Reader RSS reader:
[https://mnmlrdr.com/](https://mnmlrdr.com/).

These guys really care about the user experience. The mobile interface is
spot-on.

I do not think RSS is going anywhere.

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bradleysmith
rss is also a wonderful way to route data around the web, and lets a non-geek
get into programmatic-like consumption of news with only a limited
understanding of web technology.

its also fairly effective at storing and working with geodata. I really like
the Geonames rss to georss geocoding API.

shameless plug for attention on a for-fun doo-dad I built: intelmap.com uses
an RSS feed generated by a hackernews clone at news.intelmap.com and drops it
on an openlayers map. a better example of geoRSS is syria.intelmap.com, that
is a collection of more lively feeds.

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rgomez
Yesterday discovered Inoreader, already tired by Feedly's lack of Android's
notifications, ATM seems to me the best platform to substitute/improve Google
Reader.

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lampe3
I still use RSS feeds on a daily base... just because google wants to push G+
rss is not dead...

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pauselaugh
What a non-article.

RSS can never die, obviously, it is a technology.

What dies is it as a/the standard.

It simply isn't anymore, there are other ways to do what RSS does, similar to
RSS except, whoops, it isn't RSS.

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KaiserPro
without numbers this is conjecture surely?

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dredmorbius
Among the other parts of the Web which, ironically, don't have any RSS feeds:
Google Plus.

But it's dead anyway.

