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RSS format sucks because XML sucks. I agree that it would be awesome if it was opensource so you could mitigate any risks by having it run on your own hardware

RSS format sucks because XML sucks. I agree that it would be awesome if it was opensource so you could mitigate any risks by having it run on your own hardware, but really it's a valuable service and they deserve to make some money, which will play into keeping the service alive.

ZaneClaes 14y ago
Thanks! The stack which is required for the Streamified API is really quite large, too. Between node, mongo, elasticsearch, and a few other pieces of software... plus a few dozen node modules and even some custom linux configuration, it's really not feasible to expect devs to install it on their own machines ;)
- graue 14y ago
  You could open source it anyway, though, or parts of it. NewsBlur does this: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur One could run their own NewsBlur, but Samuel has stated it requires a lot of resources to pull RSS feeds, and so in practice it's much easier to pay them $2/month. (This may not apply if you plan on having business customers who are paying orders of magnitude more than that.) But it alleviates any fear that the service users depend on may disappear; in the worst case, run it yourself.
  - ZaneClaes 14y ago
    Fair points, thanks. I'd have to discuss with the team if this is an option, ultimately. I can promise that if we ever did go away, I would certainly aim to opensource it (why not?) But as a company w/ investors, it's not a decision I can make myself right now ;)
- anonfunction 14y ago
  Your welcome! I get that the service your providing is more than the sum of its code. Someone is doing the website, marketing, documentation, fixing bugs, keeping up with changes etc... not to mention paying the bills to reliably run the servers. If you want my opinion, I would recommend finding a small area of your tech stack that you wish was better and starting an opensource project to solve that specific problem. No one expects twitter to give away their source code for their core product, but they do appreciate bootstrap and bower.js a whole lot.
  - ZaneClaes 14y ago
    That's a really good point -- I'm going to look for a way to do that.
logn 14y ago
I would agree if we were talking about a SOAP protocol that could be restful or something. But RSS doesn't bother me at all. You can just pass it through a converter to suit your fancy, and the bloat for an average use case of 10 results can't be that much. It's a minor miracle anybody decided to publish their sites through RSS so I'm happy they used the format that was hot at the time and got adoption.
- anonfunction 14y ago
  I love RSS, I couldn't have built a ton of cool stuff over the years without it. For example I built @twuoted using twitter's search feed 4 years ago with Sweetcron, but that has long since been replaced by twitters API. I don't hate on RSS, I think it was a wonderful invention for it's time and was great for showing how standards can work. But I still want it to die and JSON to become the new king in data transfer. That could be due to my work being in the web development arena and using node.js, but I honestly think it's just a better solution.

ZaneClaes 14y ago

Thanks! The stack which is required for the Streamified API is really quite large, too. Between node, mongo, elasticsearch, and a few other pieces of software... plus a few dozen node modules and even some custom linux configuration, it's really not feasible to expect devs to install it on their own machines ;)

graue 14y ago
You could open source it anyway, though, or parts of it. NewsBlur does this: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur One could run their own NewsBlur, but Samuel has stated it requires a lot of resources to pull RSS feeds, and so in practice it's much easier to pay them $2/month. (This may not apply if you plan on having business customers who are paying orders of magnitude more than that.) But it alleviates any fear that the service users depend on may disappear; in the worst case, run it yourself.
- ZaneClaes 14y ago
  Fair points, thanks. I'd have to discuss with the team if this is an option, ultimately. I can promise that if we ever did go away, I would certainly aim to opensource it (why not?) But as a company w/ investors, it's not a decision I can make myself right now ;)
anonfunction 14y ago
Your welcome! I get that the service your providing is more than the sum of its code. Someone is doing the website, marketing, documentation, fixing bugs, keeping up with changes etc... not to mention paying the bills to reliably run the servers. If you want my opinion, I would recommend finding a small area of your tech stack that you wish was better and starting an opensource project to solve that specific problem. No one expects twitter to give away their source code for their core product, but they do appreciate bootstrap and bower.js a whole lot.
- ZaneClaes 14y ago
  That's a really good point -- I'm going to look for a way to do that.

logn 14y ago

I would agree if we were talking about a SOAP protocol that could be restful or something. But RSS doesn't bother me at all. You can just pass it through a converter to suit your fancy, and the bloat for an average use case of 10 results can't be that much. It's a minor miracle anybody decided to publish their sites through RSS so I'm happy they used the format that was hot at the time and got adoption.

anonfunction 14y ago
I love RSS, I couldn't have built a ton of cool stuff over the years without it. For example I built @twuoted using twitter's search feed 4 years ago with Sweetcron, but that has long since been replaced by twitters API. I don't hate on RSS, I think it was a wonderful invention for it's time and was great for showing how standards can work. But I still want it to die and JSON to become the new king in data transfer. That could be due to my work being in the web development arena and using node.js, but I honestly think it's just a better solution.