8 ms·

RSS: What Not Dying Looks Like

328 points by srikar 12y ago

stephen_mcd 12y ago
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.
- dovel 12y ago
  How are you organising these feeds? Just interested because that is always my downfall. End up subscribing to loads of stuff and eventually stop reading
  - stephen_mcd 12y ago
    Well that list above are all things I kinda class as "personal notifications", so I put all those into a folder - in kouio you can view a single folder at a time, or expand it and see the unread counts against each feed (pretty sure Google's worked that way too). Then everything else goes into various folders, with a couple top-level main feeds that I don't put into a folder at all, here's a screenshot: http://cl.ly/VNOJ http://cl.ly/VNOJ
    - dovel 12y ago
      Cheers bud! Think i'll do some RSS organisation later. I like the idea of subbing to stack overflow tags - hadnt heard of that.
      - stephen_mcd 12y ago
        Yeah I only found those recently and it kinda blew my mind - great way to keep an eye on the kinds of blockers people have with a particular technology.
- mattoc 12y ago
  Kouio was exactly what I was looking for after Google Reader shut down. It kept enough of my favourite features such as j/k vi-style movements, starring and organisation whilst adding its own. I've not run in to any hiccups, despite the beta label. Thanks for the list of uses I hadn't considered -- I tend to lose track of mailing lists.
- donniezazen 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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/pathogendavids_guide_to_rss_and_reddit/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathoge...
      - donniezazen 12y ago
- andyl 12y ago
  Thanks for the reference to Kouio - I just switched to it. So far, the UI looks even better than Google Reader. Especially on Mobile.
- joombaga 12y ago
  Does it do podcasts?
jamesbritt 12y ago
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.
camillomiller 12y ago
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.
- moggie 12y ago
  What's to stop—not slow down, but stop some one or ones from, so to speak, turning the tide with regard to RSS's adoption by the tech-indifferent? What mindset was there to begin with prior to the shift to Twitter, et.al? Also, please, will you elaborate on the shift?
  - pjc50 12y ago
    RSS won't be adopted by the tech-indifferent because it's a technology. It's not a service or a company and therefore doesn't have anyone with a vested financial interest pushing it as a platform. Also, it doesn't fit into the advertising-funded clickbaity world. It's therefore only adopted by people who think about what they are doing and what they want out of their internet, rather than people following the shiny path of least resistance and most popularity.
    - moggie 12y ago
Yhippa 12y ago
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.
cygnus 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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
- chrismorgan 12y ago
  Firefox has a Subscribe button which you can use, though it is not there by default (to get it, open the customiser, at the bottom of the menu, and you can then drag that Subscribe button into the menu.)
- alxndr 12y ago
  View source and search for "feed" or "rss" or "atom" or even "xml".
leeoniya 12y ago
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.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  I think that would have been ideal, but I get the feeling that the response _still_ would have been: "Google killed Reader by charging, no one will use it now! How dare they charge for taking advantage of an open format! What happened to 'don't be evil?!?!?' "
- bencollier49 12y ago
  Perhaps they perceived it as competition to Google Plus.
  - bowmessage 12y ago
    I'm almost sure it was this, or Google Now's news alerts. They don't want people to choose when to read their news. They want the news to choose how many people read their articles. Advertising is the name of their game.
- patio11 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
wutbrodo 12y ago
> 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.
- jfoster 12y ago
  If that were the reason for shutting down Reader, they probably would have done better by merging it into Google+.
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    Exactly. I understand the tendency for people to assume malice in every action taken by a company they don't like, but it still blows my mind when people can't realize how insane they sound while desperately searching for threads of conspiracy to tie into some evil master plan.
- schrijver 12y ago
  The more straightforward explanation, is that it would drive people to use Google Search, which RSS effectively bypasses.
  - wutbrodo 12y ago
    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.
pjmlp 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Maybe, but not having to synchronize your feeds between different devices and platforms is a good incentive to give up that control.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    You can use a self-hosted web reader, like Tiny Tiny RSS. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.
    - toyg 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        Sure, but I've never met a non-geek who used RSS anyway.
- donniezazen 12y ago
  What's your client?
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Mostly the browser integrated RSS readers, I just follow a restricted set of sites.
- lurkinggrue 12y ago
  You can say the same thing about software. I used to use the built in reader to Opera but all that was dropped recently when Opera dropped their codebase and turned into Chrome.
hackuser 12y ago
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
- benrapscallion 12y ago
  and if doesn't have a feed: page2rss.com can create one to monitor for changes.
- ajanuary 12y ago
  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.
001sky 12y ago
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 ?
codelust 12y ago
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.
neals 12y ago
I actually use Digg (http://digg.com/reader http://digg.com/reader) for my RSS needs. (Remember Digg?, right?)
- patrickdavey 12y ago
  Me too. And I find myself reading their top stories links too.. Decent Android app (free) also.
- glitchdout 12y ago
  Me too. Loving it so far. A bit too white, maybe. I just wish they fixed a bug where pressing "j" does not mark as read the first post. Kind of annoying. I have to press "k" first, then "j".
kmfrk 12y ago
I also imagine something like IFTTT has made RSS more relevant than it's been in a long time.
- chenster 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    I'm working on something like this. Would you be willing to chat about it?
ciderpunx 12y ago
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.
- fredsted 12y ago
  Note "feeds" is plural. There's no way for a server admin to get a list of other sites you subscribe to, unlike a centralized app like Google Reader.
  - ciderpunx 12y ago
    Yep, that's a fair point.
- onli 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    I think he means the server hosting the RSS feed and not the server hosting your RSS tool (like the late Google Reader).
    - onli 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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
lyndonh 12y ago
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.
- rkwz 12y ago
  > Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ? This. It's akin to joining a gym - 'hey, this blog is good. I should read this regularly to make myself better' and we subscribe to the feed. But life happens and we start ignoring the new posts. It builds up and everytime we open the feed reader we see thousands of posts unread. This makes us feel guilty.
  - lurkinggrue 12y ago
    Or you are somebody like me that has about 60 feeds in his news reader and looks at it every day. Oddly enough I've been using the old reader: https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
- VLM 12y ago
  "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.
ahoge 12y ago
Nah, it's not dying or anything. It just isn't very popular. It never has been. Reader was a niche product.
doczoidberg 12y ago
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.
blueskin_ 12y ago
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).
edanm 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 :)
adventured 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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_Governors_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P._v._Board_of_Gove...
dredmorbius 12y ago
Among the other parts of the Web which, ironically, don't have any RSS feeds: Google Plus. But it's dead anyway.
lampe3 12y ago
I still use RSS feeds on a daily base... just because google wants to push G+ rss is not dead...
Systemic33 12y ago
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.
camus2 12y ago
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
jpb0104 12y ago
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.
jsherer 12y ago
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.
mtourne 12y ago
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.
bradleysmith 12y ago
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.
KaiserPro 12y ago
without numbers this is conjecture surely?
edavis 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Another take on that theme: Pulp for Mac. http://www.acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/ http://www.acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/
gmisra 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
pauselaugh 12y ago
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.
rgomez 12y ago
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.
ssivark 12y ago
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-google-reader-implies-for-the-future-of-rss/ http://dickfeynman.github.io/blog/writings/what-the-fate-of-...

328 points by srikar 12y ago

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.

dovel 12y ago
How are you organising these feeds? Just interested because that is always my downfall. End up subscribing to loads of stuff and eventually stop reading
- stephen_mcd 12y ago
  Well that list above are all things I kinda class as "personal notifications", so I put all those into a folder - in kouio you can view a single folder at a time, or expand it and see the unread counts against each feed (pretty sure Google's worked that way too). Then everything else goes into various folders, with a couple top-level main feeds that I don't put into a folder at all, here's a screenshot: http://cl.ly/VNOJ http://cl.ly/VNOJ
  - dovel 12y ago
    Cheers bud! Think i'll do some RSS organisation later. I like the idea of subbing to stack overflow tags - hadnt heard of that.
    - stephen_mcd 12y ago
      Yeah I only found those recently and it kinda blew my mind - great way to keep an eye on the kinds of blockers people have with a particular technology.
mattoc 12y ago
Kouio was exactly what I was looking for after Google Reader shut down. It kept enough of my favourite features such as j/k vi-style movements, starring and organisation whilst adding its own. I've not run in to any hiccups, despite the beta label. Thanks for the list of uses I hadn't considered -- I tend to lose track of mailing lists.
donniezazen 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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/pathogendavids_guide_to_rss_and_reddit/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pathogendavid/comments/tv8m9/pathoge...
    - donniezazen 12y ago
andyl 12y ago
Thanks for the reference to Kouio - I just switched to it. So far, the UI looks even better than Google Reader. Especially on Mobile.
joombaga 12y ago
Does it do podcasts?

jamesbritt 12y ago

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.

camillomiller 12y ago

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.

moggie 12y ago
What's to stop—not slow down, but stop some one or ones from, so to speak, turning the tide with regard to RSS's adoption by the tech-indifferent? What mindset was there to begin with prior to the shift to Twitter, et.al? Also, please, will you elaborate on the shift?
- pjc50 12y ago
  RSS won't be adopted by the tech-indifferent because it's a technology. It's not a service or a company and therefore doesn't have anyone with a vested financial interest pushing it as a platform. Also, it doesn't fit into the advertising-funded clickbaity world. It's therefore only adopted by people who think about what they are doing and what they want out of their internet, rather than people following the shiny path of least resistance and most popularity.
  - moggie 12y ago

Yhippa 12y ago

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.

cygnus 12y ago

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 12y ago
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
chrismorgan 12y ago
Firefox has a Subscribe button which you can use, though it is not there by default (to get it, open the customiser, at the bottom of the menu, and you can then drag that Subscribe button into the menu.)
alxndr 12y ago
View source and search for "feed" or "rss" or "atom" or even "xml".

leeoniya 12y ago

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.

wutbrodo 12y ago
I think that would have been ideal, but I get the feeling that the response _still_ would have been: "Google killed Reader by charging, no one will use it now! How dare they charge for taking advantage of an open format! What happened to 'don't be evil?!?!?' "
bencollier49 12y ago
Perhaps they perceived it as competition to Google Plus.
- bowmessage 12y ago
  I'm almost sure it was this, or Google Now's news alerts. They don't want people to choose when to read their news. They want the news to choose how many people read their articles. Advertising is the name of their game.
patio11 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

wutbrodo 12y ago

> 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.

jfoster 12y ago
If that were the reason for shutting down Reader, they probably would have done better by merging it into Google+.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  Exactly. I understand the tendency for people to assume malice in every action taken by a company they don't like, but it still blows my mind when people can't realize how insane they sound while desperately searching for threads of conspiracy to tie into some evil master plan.
schrijver 12y ago
The more straightforward explanation, is that it would drive people to use Google Search, which RSS effectively bypasses.
- wutbrodo 12y ago
  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.

pjmlp 12y ago

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 12y ago
Maybe, but not having to synchronize your feeds between different devices and platforms is a good incentive to give up that control.
- icebraining 12y ago
  You can use a self-hosted web reader, like Tiny Tiny RSS. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.
  - toyg 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      Sure, but I've never met a non-geek who used RSS anyway.
donniezazen 12y ago
What's your client?
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Mostly the browser integrated RSS readers, I just follow a restricted set of sites.
lurkinggrue 12y ago
You can say the same thing about software. I used to use the built in reader to Opera but all that was dropped recently when Opera dropped their codebase and turned into Chrome.

hackuser 12y ago

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

benrapscallion 12y ago
and if doesn't have a feed: page2rss.com can create one to monitor for changes.
ajanuary 12y ago
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.

001sky 12y ago

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 ?

codelust 12y ago

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.

neals 12y ago

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

patrickdavey 12y ago
Me too. And I find myself reading their top stories links too.. Decent Android app (free) also.
glitchdout 12y ago
Me too. Loving it so far. A bit too white, maybe. I just wish they fixed a bug where pressing "j" does not mark as read the first post. Kind of annoying. I have to press "k" first, then "j".

kmfrk 12y ago

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

chenster 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I'm working on something like this. Would you be willing to chat about it?

ciderpunx 12y ago

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.

fredsted 12y ago
Note "feeds" is plural. There's no way for a server admin to get a list of other sites you subscribe to, unlike a centralized app like Google Reader.
- ciderpunx 12y ago
  Yep, that's a fair point.
onli 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I think he means the server hosting the RSS feed and not the server hosting your RSS tool (like the late Google Reader).
  - onli 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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

lyndonh 12y ago

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.

rkwz 12y ago
> Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ? This. It's akin to joining a gym - 'hey, this blog is good. I should read this regularly to make myself better' and we subscribe to the feed. But life happens and we start ignoring the new posts. It builds up and everytime we open the feed reader we see thousands of posts unread. This makes us feel guilty.
- lurkinggrue 12y ago
  Or you are somebody like me that has about 60 feeds in his news reader and looks at it every day. Oddly enough I've been using the old reader: https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
VLM 12y ago
"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.

ahoge 12y ago

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

doczoidberg 12y ago

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.

blueskin_ 12y ago

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).

edanm 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 :)

adventured 12y ago

"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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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_Governors_of_the_Federal_Reserve_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P._v._Board_of_Gove...

dredmorbius 12y ago

Among the other parts of the Web which, ironically, don't have any RSS feeds: Google Plus. But it's dead anyway.

lampe3 12y ago

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

Systemic33 12y ago

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.

camus2 12y ago

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

jpb0104 12y ago

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.

jsherer 12y ago

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.

mtourne 12y ago

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.

bradleysmith 12y ago

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.

KaiserPro 12y ago

without numbers this is conjecture surely?

edavis 12y ago

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 12y ago
Another take on that theme: Pulp for Mac. http://www.acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/ http://www.acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/

gmisra 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

pauselaugh 12y ago

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.

rgomez 12y ago

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.

ssivark 12y ago

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-google-reader-implies-for-the-future-of-rss/ http://dickfeynman.github.io/blog/writings/what-the-fate-of-...