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From a NON-Tech Head: In Defense of RSS, Why Google is Wrong
- ggchappell 14y agoYou make some good points here, but I think you're arguing against a nonexistent position. Is anyone really saying that RSS is obsolete? Google certainly isn't. As for "If Google Reader isn’t being used, then why the outrage around the Internet?", well, a few people use it (as Google says, "... the product has a loyal following ....") and they are being loud about it. But the fact is that RSS is not that popular. Maybe it should be. It isn't. And outside of the ranks of the few that use it, that fact is rather obvious. For example, I'm a computer science professor. Not too long ago I set up an RSS feed for my class announcements. I asked in class once whether students were using the feed. And out of some 15 junior/senior computer-science majors, only one knew what RSS was. I think that's rather telling. So the solution to the problem is hardly to convince Google to keep Reader around. Rather, it is to make people aware of RSS, and implement new interfaces to it, that improve its usability.