RSS Rant

[asolove]

Sadly, RSS is like many other platforms without a default client. Well-engineered, extremely useful, but impossible to explain to non-technical people. Before you can use RSS, you have to know what it is, look for it on a website, and have a client downloaded or an account on a web service. For this to make sense you need a mental model of a server with information, a client requesting it, and a technical specification that teaches them to talk to each other.

Compare with Facebook or Twitter, where you click a link to the default client and can start using it right away.

Ultimately, you can google "Twitter" or "Facebook" and start using the platform right away. Google "RSS" and you get technical explanations, a Wikipedia page, and competing choices for feed readers.

[mapgrep]

The web has no default client.

Email has no default client.

TV has no default client.

The telephone network, after a lengthy battle involving AT&T, has no default client.

SMS has no default client.

Somehow, people find a way to use these things. It took many years from when the first web browser was written in 1990 to get to ubiquity. We got RSS in 1999 and it is in widespread use among web publishers; I can't think of a major news site that does not use it. Where we are lacking is in user uptake. Give it time. Open standards always take longer, but one will eventually get us there.

[mikepk]

As someone who started an RSS-based company (that's now defunct) I think the issue isn't just a lack of a default client, it's a lack of a tangible conceptual model for people. I spent years explaining the RSS concept, testing lots of different metaphors, and almost always got the "blank stare" or "nodding along so you think I understand".

I think the deeper problem is that it takes a kind of abstract thinking, that content and presentation are different things and that the content of a website or blog can be a resource as much as a particular presentation of it, that's just not normal for non-technical people. I think most people still think of websites as "places" you "go" to, and the idea of the content/data packaged in a format for easy syndication is a mental leap regardless of the metaphor you use.

[ImprovedSilence]

I started using google reader when I came from a completely non-tech understanding of the web. Heck, I still just paste in the website of a blog I want to follow into google reader, and it pulls up the RSS, should it have one. One huge plus of RSS is that I follow lots of artsy things, so I get the actual pictures, not unlike tumblr (which also is, IMO, a far better mechanism than twitter or FB for following blogs/sites).

[brlewis]

Posting to Twitter and Facebook does not preclude providing RSS.

[anamax]

> Sadly, RSS is like many other platforms without a default client.

While that may be true, I'll bet that almost everyone has a decent client.

For example, IE7-9 all have RSS readers. Yes, they manage and create subscriptions. The RSS icon turns orange and becomes active when there's a feed available on the current page.

I'll bet that the other major browsers do as well or better.

[fistofjohnwayne]

I think you bring up a few of the reasons why I'm finding RSS feeds more difficult to locate on sites. Several times recently I've only been able to find them by knowing where WordPress automatically publishes the feed or by viewing the source of the page.

[hollerith]

No one publishes only on RSS, so the non-techie's can go to a web page to see what's new on the Foo blog. I think a bigger problem is that Foo blog's web site is different in hundreds of small details from Bar blog's web site. In other words, one reason non-techies are more likely to follow someone on FB is that they are already familiar with FB's user interface.

The bigger problem though comes when the non-techie has written something online that I want to read...

[baby]

Well, beta users really don't need to use RSS. It's like IRC. You have to dig into it if you want to use it, and you would so because you have to.

Actually I stopped using RSS years ago. It's a time consumer, you lose the charisma of every different websites and their way of browsing (I don't see myself using reddit or HN's RSS), a lot of website just truncate their articles in their RSS feed...

[voidfiles]

What does it matter that most people can't use RSS. Even if 1% of the internet population uses RSS it's still a useful technology. People can learn how to use these things over time, maybe a long time. The knowledge can be transmitted.

[bryanlarsen]

Firefox made an attempt at this problem with an RSS icon, but failed.

[gchucky]

Not to be pedantic, but there are some of us who don't use Twitter but still want to follow tweets (e.g. in Google Reader). It's possible to get an RSS feed of tweets through the Twitter API: http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_n...

That's not really a solution, however. Kind of a drag that Twitter pulled RSS links down off of user pages..

[gaffe]

Fun fact: Google Reader will understand http://twitter.com/username as an RSS feed. The trick is to remove the hashbang that Twitter automatically adds to the URL (i.e. http://twitter.com/#!/username) before attempting to add it as a feed.

[baby]

and it's a good move of twitter who force you to use their website if you want to follow tweets.

[runevault]

This reminds me of the stupidity of Spotify going to Facebook only. Don't lock yourself into ONLY using someone else's platform that only they control for authentication (facebook/twitter/etc). At least have an option for something like OAuth where you can host your own as well and no one group holds control.

I wonder when people will realize handing over the keys this way is a terrible idea. Support those platforms if you want, certainly. But don't make them the only way to interact with you.

[snorkel]

I happen to have worked on a SaaS offering entirely focused on aggregating and consolidating RSS feeds, and I can truly say that only a tiny minority of technically inclined people ever gave a shit about RSS feeds, or even understood what it meant. The fact of the matter is that most people have no urge to fuss with news aggregating tools.

RSS was also useful for streaming playlists and status items to thin clients, but they too are increasingly supporting full-on web browsers instead.

[rcfox]

> I can truly say that only a tiny minority of technically inclined people ever gave a shit about RSS feeds

So what? It's in your best interest to keep the nerds happy because they are the ones doing the actual work to push technology forward.

[Legion]

I expect this link is getting attention solely because it was written by Felicia Day, but I too have a list of a number of sites that I don't read as I wish I could because of their lack of RSS.

And taking it a step further, RSS without full-text is little better than no RSS.

[Periodic]

There have been a few sites I have found interesting and wanted to follow, but ultimately don't because they don't have an RSS feed. I don't have the time, energy, or organization to go to the site every few days and check for updates. There are plenty of other things that I can read in my RSS aggregator.

[chrishenn]

"RSS without full-text is little better than no RSS."

I totally agree. I use Reeder on both my phone and computer, because it's able to take those annoying excerpts, and use readability to turn it into the full text right in the feed reader.

[nreece]

* shameless plug * You can use Feedity - http://feedity.com to instantly create RSS feeds for any public webpage.

[jay_kyburz]

Hell yes, please just just include a full posting in rss, When I'm on my phone I'm not going to click over to your website.

[icebraining]

I too have a list of a number of site that I don't read as I wish I could because of their lack of RSS.

Yahoo! Pipes has helped me with that (it can fetch pages and turn them into RSS feeds), although it requires some knowledge of HTML and possibly regexes.

[mechanical_fish]

I look at this and say to myself "Felicia is using the wrong Twitter client. She should switch to the one that she actually wants. The only difficulty is that it might not exist yet."

Does it exist? What I think we might be looking for is a Twitter client that displays the usual timeline, but also can act like an RSS reader: For a subset of your followers, you can display a list of all their Tweets over the last 7 days that included a link, along with a preview of the content at that link. Surf down that display and mark a Tweet "read" and it disappears from that display (though it remains in the usual timeline).

Actually this might scream "Instapaper addon". I'd love to be able to select a subset of my Twitter followers and have their Tweeted URLs beamed directly into Instapaper to be read at my leisure. Come to think of it, I wonder if I could hack that up myself.

[rcfox]

I look at this and say to myself, "This dude's missing the point."

Twitter is not a superset of RSS. It does a small part of what I do with RSS, but not all of it, and not in as nice of a way.

The Twitter-Instapaper thing is a good idea, but it's just not the same as RSS.

[jarek]

It is an almost trivial observation to say that those who don't understand RSS are condemned to reinvent it, poorly - but if you are going to reinvent it, why make it extra-difficult and do it using a proprietary platform and an as-of-yet non-existent client for that platform?

[ugh]

I found no combination of people with quite my taste on Twitter. There are always bits and pieces that get left out. My RSS reader gives me a more comprehensive overview and allows me to be more effective.

A better Twitter client won’t help with that: It can’t display information that’s not there.

[protomyth]

I've been looking, and to a point, coding what I actually want from twitter along these lines, but I really don't think that type of client will ever exist for general consumption. Heck, finding a twitter client that actually goes back a day and grabs all the tweets since your last look is pretty hard (even some that claim they will don't. Twitter's crackdown on clients pretty much ended a good chunk of the innovation.

[MatthewPhillips]

Flipboard, Paper.li, Editions, News.me, Zite, right? Or are you talking about something else?

[nc]

We're actually working on this, really early stage but you can register your interest @ http://getchirp.com

[sports_guy]

Outside of those of us that love Google Reader, I have to imagine that Search Engines and numerous content aggregators are ingesting RSS feeds. Removing them is going to degrade your distribution immensely and likely affect your SEO.

[mike-cardwell]

I prefer RSS/Atom as it is a "distributed" way of handling feeds, rather than relying on a single centralised service.

This is why my website will always have an RSS feed. I also have a Twitter feed for people who want it, but I'd prefer people to use RSS.

My tech blog seems to have about an equal number of RSS followers and Twitter followers. I'm not sure how much overlap there is.

[mmackh]

RSS is the most useful thing ever; if you hide it behind the a lovely interface and make the user forget about it. It's pretty hard to understate the efficiency that developers would lose out on, if RSS were to go. That said, I am mostly using Twitter to catch up with he latest news - it's so darn efficient

[webmonkeyuk]

"Basically I’ve noticed a huge trend not only in websites moving away from RSS to Twitter and FB, but REMOVING IT COMPLETELY!"

So why not subscribe to the Twitter or FB RSS feed of their content. Or am I missing something.

[peterbraden]

facebook doesn't offer rss

[kin]

There's a reason I use FB and Twitter vs. RSS feeds. Because its so damn dominant, a lot of sources post to Twitter and FB exclusively. Furthermore, if there's anything particularly popular/huge/breaking, FB's algorithm populates the top of my feed with it. RSS feeds don't do that. Different clients' "magic" function doesn't work properly. RSS has become spam to me. For exclusive news, I thus rely on social clients.

For major news sources like Gawker, IGN, CNN, what have you, RSS is still there and probably won't be going away.

[afhof]

If a website is good enough, its not hard to just make a screen scaper and turn it into an RSS feed.

This scrapes the HN front page every hour and is a lot easier to check:

http://hn.af.rkive.org/feed.php?id=4

[nir]

Why, you could even have the screen scraper export to RSS!

[ChrisArchitect]

RSS - the internet's great underrated 'killer app'

[pferde]

s/internet/web/

[shareme]

unfortunately author is wrong G+ did not remove feeds..

If you look at your G+ profile page in view source in any browser you will see a Buzz activity atom feed for it..