4 ms·
The title is a bit of a double entendre. At first reading, I thought the claim was that (once again), Organization X had killed RSS (figuratively). As it turns
by bradleyland 16y ago
The title is a bit of a double entendre. At first reading, I thought the claim was that (once again), Organization X had killed RSS (figuratively). As it turns out, Facebook and Twitter have, quite literally, killed RSS within the scope of their own systems by removing it from key locations.
In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you're only a part of the conversation while you're there.
In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don't want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I'm perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for "pushed" information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.
I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you can respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don't have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.
Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.
Based my usage patterns, I don't see this as "killing" RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I'm a dying breed though.
- nhangen 16y agoThis is true. The feeds still work, they just hid them from plain sight.
- ankrgyl 16y agoA common "general" application of RSS is news, but this will hopefully be slowly phased out as well. The New York Times offers an awesome API (http://developer.nytimes.com/ http://developer.nytimes.com/) which gives you a much better view of their data than their RSS feeds (which they still provide).
- turbodog 16y agoSo I'm supposed to use the NYT's custom API to get articles when RSS has, for years, provided a "general" method for me to do the same thing for not only the NYT but millions of other sources?
- Luyt 16y agoYes, and they want you to install a special 'NYT app' for that, which will be future: every company and news outlet will have its own app.
- ChrisArchitect 16y agohaha, and they'll all be based on frontend UI accessing RSS.
- Luyt 16y agoI was thinking more along the lines of 'accessing their own specific API (maybe even a private, undisclosed API)'.
- ankrgyl 16y agoNo, and that's why they still provide the RSS feed. My point is that in the immediate future, companies like FB, Twitter, and NY Times will experiment with APIs that provide richer functionality than RSS. Hopefully within a relatively short time frame, the APIs will start converging into a standardized, widely adopted replacement for RSS that builds on these ideas.
- barrkel 16y agoIt's precisely because there's so much crud on Facebook that I consume it via an RSS feed rather than by visiting the site; that way, I can skim through a day's worth of friend updates in less than a minute. In any case, I have facebook.com ad-blocked in my primary browser, and use a secondary browser whenever I need to visit it. I don't visit Facebook much more often than once a week, and I only do if there's a particular update etc. worthy of attention. I use jwz's RSS workarounds for my Facebook feeds: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/12/how-to-use-facebook-with-a-feed-reader/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/12/how-to-use-facebook-with-a-f... Unfortunately, in the past week, Facebook's RSS feeds have been behaving very erratically. As seen in Google Reader, the update feeds show up as entirely refreshed - all new items - even though only a handful of items are actually new. The links on the RSS items have changed from the proper status update link to flat links to facebook.com. So rather than killing RSS, this move by Facebook is killing Facebook for me.