This post feels mistitled, but that itself is an interesting sign. If there is a "war" on RSS (or, more precisely, on certain manifestations of RSS), where is the army? Where is the manifesto? Who has pounded the table and declared that RSS is our enemy and must die?
Has anyone?
My impression is that we have the opposite of a "war" here. These RSS features are dying of natural causes. Unless someone can point me to the conference, blog post, or secret meeting where an evangelist convinced Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Mozilla, et cetera to simultaneously kill this feature in tandem, I'll continue to suspect that they're doing so because they're all subject to the same market pressure: There's a lot of new, popular, paying features that need building, from Twitter and Facebook integration, to mobile apps, to mobile-friendly APIs, to responsive and touch-friendly design, and as these things get added to the backlog other things get pushed down. Code is expensive to maintain and if it doesn't carry its weight it gets cut, even if it's vaguely likeable and nifty.
You are treating the term "war" too literally. This is not about some secret conspiracy, but the lack of incentives (or maybe even existence of disincentives) to support open protocols in the era of walled gardens.
To refute your last point, the article explicitly mentions that that Twitter has functional RSS support, which was deliberately removed from the user interface and metadata, so it's not a matter of development or maintenance cost.
Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google are not conspiring to kill RSS, but each company wants to lock users into their walled garden. RSS lets users "eat the cheese" without getting caught in a proprietary mousetrap.
It's clearly no conspiracy theory 'war' so to speak, I think that term was used simply to convey that RSS is dying.
On an individual level, Google Reader used to be like crack for me, I couldn't get away from it. Used it every day. Followed hundereds of websites. Then the tore the social out of it and clunklily put it into G+, which blows (no reader user liked this). Now I almost never use google reader. It's almost like they were trying to push people away from it. But that's just my two cents.
I think the biggest problem with RSS is that you divorce the content from the context. Both from the publisher's standpoint, when their ads aren't being served or they decide to truncate their RSS feed so they can get ad revenue back from click-through, and from the reader's standpoint, where a common lamentation in moving to RSS is that you no longer get to read the original site regularly.
I solved the "Original site" problem by building the original site into NewsBlur -- http://www.newsblur.com.
The other big issue with RSS is that there are too many stories with a low signal-to-noise ratio. I built in filtering and highlighting into NewsBlur to address that concern. And it's a completely separate backend from Google Reader.
And now the common refrain is that people use social channels (Twitter/FB/Tumblr) to find links and news. So I just built that into NewsBlur with shared stories. You can sign up to be a part of the private beta at http://dev.newsblur.com. I'll send out invites to anybody who signs up.
Consuming the web through RSS can be problematic for both publishers and readers. I'm addressing the big three issues - context, relevancy, and surfacing - with a strong commitment to both readers and publishers. Let me know what else you would expect to see in your ideal reading setup, and chances are, RSS offers the foundation to build it.
I switched over to NewsBlur from Google Reader in December (after there was a post about it on HN) and haven't looked back. I even emailed the creator once with an issue I was having and received a prompt and helpful response. Try that with Google Reader!
Whoaaaaa, this is some hot hot hot JS. Thanks for open-sourcing this. I do a similar thing with http://somaseek.com/ (same basic concept only it's only reading XML from SomaFM ), and reddit is also open-source with a live "reference" implementation :)
I hope Google picks something like this up (or hey, just /hires you/ if you're into that) and re-does Reader for 2012 :)
"Context"? Don't you mean "design"? I regard the fact that I don't have to view most blogs in their original look one of the best features of RSS, saves me from activating Readability all the time.
This is the first I'm hearing of Newsblur. I've contemplated building something similar to try and tackle some of the issues I raised in my comment in this thread. Looks like you're well on your way. I hope you stick with it! I'd really like to more out of RSS.
Interesting. These are the exact issues that I had. So I eagerly clicked over to your site. I clicked on a few things, and after 2 minutes I left. For good. Why?
No taste. Very little to no taste.
While you do exactly what I need, these are incredibly complicated times. And I want to be sure that you will solve my issues without introducing complicated buttons and concepts I have to learn first. Plus Icons that hurt my eyes. But that's exactly what you provided.
Would be great if you looked into this matter. Cause as of right now, 3 minutes after my visit, I'm still looking for a solution.
Your "About NewsBlur" page has nice Who/How/Why sections, but I’m still not sure What NewsBlur is. I guess it is a feed reader and it looks nice, but what makes it different from the one I already have?
This is the first I'm hearing of Newsblur. I've contemplated building something similar to try and tackle some of the issues I raised in my comment in this thread. Looks like you're well on your way.
I think the demise of RSS represents a failure of its promoters. They painted it as a service, when it should have been treated as a backend technology.
People want to know when certain websites they care about have new stuff. The fact that RSS can be used to achieve that is, and should have been treated as, completely irrelevant. Nobody except geeks like me care if they're transmitted through RSS, PubSubBubHub or carrier pigeons.
Likewise, I don' think most people care that the website has a "feed" and they need to get a "feeds reader" to be informed.
I think Firefox had the greatest opportunity to make it happen and they blew it. RSS should have been integrated with the bookmarks system, and I don't mean those awful "dynamic bookmarks" or whatever they were called.
When some page was bookmarked, the browser should save its RSS feed URL alongside (hidden!) and use it to alert people to updates to their sites, and provide an one-click way to open the new post(s) in a new tab (and an easy way to disable notifications from that site, certainly).
This would've made RSS useful for much more people and provide a great incentive for websites to provide good feeds. Unfortunately, it remained a geek tool, and so it'll die as such.
This is at least equally interesting and insightful as the original article if not more so.
Steve Jobs would never have promoted RSS. He would, though, create user experiences based on it. Which really jars my reality to even say it, but your comments/observations and my own experiences (I use RSS exclusively on my phone as an offline info gatherer mostly used when I'm on subways out of Internet range) that 1) RSS is really cool and 2) there are no compelling end-user RSS-based tools.
I use RSS readers almost exclusively to consume content and would miss RSS if nothing else replaced it. I'm an information junkie and RSS readers have made it far easier for me to keep up with the torrent of information out there. That said, I can't escape the feeling that the concept of websites having feeds in a standard format is starting to wane. I also think google reader has sucked a lot of oxygen out of the RSS space. Every mobile or desktop reader pretty much has to sync with google reader which influences their design accordingly. While there are lots of attempts to make things look pretty, there's not a whole lot of major innovation in the RSS reader space. That's not to mention the fact that as far as I know, the reader API is unofficial so it could go bye, bye any time.
All that being said, RSS alone is not exactly the pinnacle of information delivery. What I really want is a better way to identify interesting and informative information and filter out all the junk. This is a very, very hard problem to solve in an automated way. Things like Flipboard are trying to tackle this, but I haven't been able to embrace them. I also don't want to rely on my social network, because I'm different from my network. I have my own interests and priorities (that change over time).
What I want is a feed of information that is what google is to search. Google nearly always shows me exactly what I'm looking for in the top hits. I want something that gives me the most important, useful, and interesting information in a prioritized list all the time. The only thing I've seen get close to this is Fever (http://feedafever.com/). That's a good start, but isn't quite there.
I think it's safe to say RSS cooked into browsers had its chance and was thoroughly rejected. (And I say that as someone who loves RSS.)
What more could browser makers have done to encourage RSS? Technophiles love it, but the mass market rejected it.
For all intents and purposes, Twitter is a simpler, more intuitive form of RSS for the layperson.
As long as tools like Google Reader exist for those of us who do use RSS, I'm not worried. And if Google kills Reader, it will probably usher in a new renaissance of feed readers that are currently non-existent because of Google's ads-funded largesse.
RSS is now too important to too many people to just die.
> What more could browser makers have done to encourage RSS? Technophiles love it, but the mass market rejected it.
I mostly agree, but...
Browsers prominently featured RSS for many years, and the world at large ignored it. Heck, I'm one of those technophiles and I ignored it in the browser. Why? Because RSS should have been about convenience, but the browser implementations did not seem intuitive, and more importantly did not make it clear how it actually worked. All the techies I know who regularly consume content through RSS use a separate reader, and I suggest that's because browser RSS did not actually offer anything compelling (or even useful at all). I could be totally wrong about how useful browser RSS was, but then the problem is that even a moderately competent techie didn't see it and the buck still stops at the browser.
My personal opinion as somebody who uses RSS quite a lot is that it's never been that useful in the browser - or at least as I saw it implemented. Because I still have to actively "go" somewhere to see the feeds, which is not quite the point for me.
I will be really bummed, though, to see it removed from Mail.app. The Mail client has been the perfect place for me personally because I use RSS as a way to receive notifications. I use it for everything from following twitter search feeds, to monitoring eBay auctions to our own internal error-logging system.
I think RSS suffers from lack of awareness to the average person. I've showed it to a number of people and many of them have gone on to become power RSS users. My wife uses it to monitor knitting sites and to watch for search terms to bring up results on craigslist. It's really fantastic when you know how to use it. But they had no idea what it was or how to use it before I mentioned it.
The article specifically mentions services dropping support for the RSS format in favor of proprietary apis. This is bad. RSS/Atom might be falling out of favor due to XML's own decline of popularity but it needs to be replaced by something else, not per-service programming.
Right now I have 234 feeds in my Google Reader. Many of them are updated irregularly, often weeks or months apart. But when they do update, I don't want to miss it.
If RSS is killed, what will replace it? Not for the case of Twitter or TechCrunch, where there will always be new content when you visit and it doesn't matter if you miss some, but for rare but important postings.
I feel like the problem with RSS was mainly a branding issue. First of all... acronyms don't sell. No non-expert user is ever going to click an orange icon with a wi-fi logo that says "RSS" or "XML". MAYBE they'd click a button that says "Subscribe". Individual browsers and implementations tried to brand them as "Live Bookmarks" or similar, but there wasn't much unity around it.
RSS is of course unbelievably useful, and people who understood that the content of a site was being published side by side in a human readable but totally nonstandard format (HTML) and a machine readable and much more standard format (RSS,ATOM,etc.) instantly grabbed some kind of reader and subscribed to anything they were interested in.
I tried to preach the gospel of feeds. I tried to get people to subscribe to MY blogs. Even most of my medium-technical friends said, "Yeah, that whole reader thing sounds cool, I've been meaning to set that up." Non-technical people simply subscribed to things via email.
If somehow email could have organized itself more naturally into push (email) and pull (feeds) buckets, then it could have perhaps happened naturally, but confusing standards, implementations, and no real great way to explain the benefits to new users is what killed RSS (and XML feeds in general)... there was no war.
I'm not sure if discoverability is as important as it used to be for RSS. Nowadays you can simply input the URL of the site into your RSS reader and it'll find the feed.
When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, my guess is that RSS doesn't accomplish what those services are made for. As they have evolved, the reverse chronological posting has become less important.
Plus, if you were Twitter, how would you want people to consume those tweets? Would you rather get them immediately or several minutes later in a format that has no context in the world of Twitter?
With that being said, I think RSS still plays a role in consolidating and consuming news in a central location. But it should be up to the site designers/developers to offer an easy way to "subscribe" to that site (via email or RSS).
I think it's easy to come to a false conclusion through studies like this.
Unlike BACK I click an RSS icon once and subscribe in another application—and only if I already like the site/news/feed. So for the users like me that just click the button once and awhile to subscribe to a feed in another piece of software, like Vienna or Mail, we appear as a false low.
I use Chrome, so that doesn't help Firefox in my case. But Chrome doesn't show RSS links either. I wish they still offered the option.
I'm your average HN reader and so, I think, somewhat above average in technical matters and the few times I tried using RSS in Firefox it felt awkward and I wasn't quite sure whether I was doing something wrong.
The last couple of years I mostly read RSS on my iPad / iPhone or using Google Reader (which is okay'ish).
I read blogs and aggregators only through RSS, and I've never once used the built-in RSS featurs of Firefox. Firefox's implementation is awful - I use Thunderbird and read feeds via the same interface as my email.
Is there an alternative technology that is replacing RSS?
Is there any evidence that blogs are dropping RSS? I think one of RSS's major applications was for blogs to distribute their content. The examples given in this article, such as Twitter and Facebook are both apps that also have APIs available, so RSS in those cases are kind of redundant.
One could also make the argument that RSS is bad for the bottom line, as selling advertising, and generating revenue off of it is far more difficult than traditional websites.
The other big question is whether or not users are still using aggregators. If aggregator use is down, then that could suggest the decline of RSS or RSS like technology.
Finally, RSS probably still has a future in podcasting.
> Twitter and Facebook are both apps that also have APIs available
I can't just import their API into an RSS reader with a single click.
On the other hand: I probably could, if I spent a few days reading up the documentation, writing up an app, testing it, and then deploying and hosting it, resulting in an RSS feed that (e.g.) Google Reader could process.
My fiance? No way.
On the gripping hand, my fiance doesn't care about RSS and doesn't use it. I'd argue that most twitter users probably don't, either. So there doesn't seem to be much loss.
What I don't understand is why anyone would expect to follow their friends via RSS (twitter/facebook)? That stream is much much too fast for what RSS is meant to achieve ... semantically speaking.
I view RSS as a great way to follow important-ish things like people's personal blogs and tech blogs and so on. Large pieces of content, everything bigger than, say, 400 words should be in RSS.
Whereas twitter and facebook are for conversation. It's where people post silly things that nobody really cares about. Using those streams to get actual news? Yeah, doesn't quite work ... following just 1031 people on twitter means there are 5 new posts every time I refresh.
That is not an environment where I'd expect to discover big chunks of info. And it's also not something I would want mixed up with the slow moving big content stuff.
If RSS didn't take off, it cannot be ascribed to malice from browser makers: even Microsoft at one point backed it right into Windows, they still support it in IE9, there is a component everyone can access that will deal with scheduled retrieval for you, so you could write an awesome windows-based feedreader tomorrow. Mozilla gave it a chance, half-heartedly (their implementation was terrible). Google didn't push it into Chrome, but they built the de-facto "Definitive Feed Aggregator" and supported it widely. Even standard-hating Apple built it into iTunes.
The truth is that RSS was a cool technology searching for a reason to exist. It managed to find it on occasions (podcasting is still alive, twitter basically used RSS as the "first draft" for their service, etc) but not in the big way most geeks thought it would. Commercial and user interests did not align with a vision of complete openness where standardized feeds get pushed from machine to machine, moving free and public content everywhere. Also, most services found the format to be a straight-jacket, and once you start adding custom namespaces, you might as well just use your own format. It fit well only for periodically-updated news/blog sites, which is what it was built for. And its worst sin is that it's fundamentally a one-way technology, a broadcasting tool, not a bi-directional tool. Social tools can be built on top of it, but at that point it becomes just another messaging format, and not particularly efficient either.
RSS will survive in some form (like RDF, remember that?) but will never gain widespread popularity, unless it's somehow reinvented in a way that will align with the interests of big commercial players and/or large number of users -- something we failed to do in the last 10+ years.
I now subscribe to most blogs on Twitter, and RSS is still part of that, its just that it is:
blogs -> rss -> rss2twitter gateway -> twitter -> me
So it has become a backend technology, and RSS has been given a better marketing term - 'following' (or 'subscribing'). It just isn't being directly consumed by users any more, which is why you don't need it as an icon in apps, but RSS is definitely still being consumed by other apps.
I found that the problem with most newsreaders wasn't the technology or terminology, but that they presented news items in an email view - ie. every item needs to be actioned, whereas the answer was a stream where you scan and interesting items were actions. The other problem was discovery. Nobody really worked out how to recommend other sources or feeds from within the reader applications.
Twitter kinda accidentally nailed both of those issues.
- it solved a problem that 99.999% of the online public either doesn’t have, doesn’t know they have, or doesn’t care that they have.
- a lot of energy was poured into the absolutely stupid who gets credit for what, who did what to whom, who linked what where, who’s the real napster wars of 2002-2005.
- RSS and Atom are frozen relics of the post web 1.0 pre web 2.0 era. Support for anything other than html or text is a grab bag of works in this reader, doesn't work in that reader, is silently and completely removed by this other reader.
- it's in no one's best interests (financially, spiritually, professionally) for RSS to “succeed”. It had many fathers, all of whom moved on to other things, even 410'ing their online selves.
- it's difficult to monetize RSS. Ads may or may not work, you have to resort to gimmicks and most savvy users (who are likely a majority of the people reading your feed in the first place) are blocking ads, so there.
- it's difficult to prove the value of RSS to the publisher: how many people read this item? Dunno. You can't trust the number of unique user agents pulling the feed, because more likely than not they're mostly spam bots looking for content to republish. You could choose to trust the feedburner statistics, if you're using FB.
- RSS feeds can't be styled in any useable, uniform way. To many people this is a benefit of RSS, but it means that inline images that work great in the original article end up out of context. Any attempt to use CSS styling to set off differences in an article are mostly lost. There are some work arounds but mostly manual hacks.
The public has moved on. It sucks. RSS feeds will continue to be available for years, if not decades because they’re built into the publishing plumbing of many systems. There were gopher servers running well into the late 1990s in various places, much to the surprise at times of security administrators.
When faced with a public user base that goes to google.com and then types in the web site they want in the search box, we responded with RSS/Atom. It is a much better way of reviewing and consuming a lot of information, but the user experience sucks, and it’s in no one’s interests to fix that.
Find a way to profit, stunningly, from RSS and it’ll take off again. Continue to confine it to the techno–geek ghetto and that’s where it will remain.
Maybe I'm being naive here: Where is the alternative to RSS? I live in
a small happy world (I use feeds heavily with gwene.org and Emacs Gnus
as my reader and I like the experience). How am I (or anyone else)
supposed to consume content from blogs? I cannot a believe a
technology would simply die without there being something better. Am I
living under a rock and just haven't seen the RSS-killer?
Social protocols are replacing RSS. In my view, Twitter and Facebook are better versions of RSS. First, they reach many more people. It’s easier to “follow” something than to subscribe to an RSS feed (has a bit of a medical ring to it, no?).
Second, these social streams provide an additional social filter to the news, something that RSS news never did. These social filters also provide a layer to comment, share and discuss, which is another feature altogether missing in RSS.
Lastly, social streams avoid the challenge most RSS readers faced: the inbox with 1000+ items to read and no way to sift through them. Social streams create a time value decay function for this data. Facebook’s EdgeRank uses a combination of different signals to ensure relevancy so when users login the feed is only timely, relevant content, not an inbox of every status update and share. Twitter uses time to reduce the number of items in the feed.
The social filters of sites like Twitter and Facebook are very deficient compared to the social filters of genuinely social aggregators such as HN and Reddit. The "genuinely social" bit there is indeed a dig against Twitter and Facebook - Twitter, because it's terse and disorganized, and Facebook because it's just a web-based interface to 'offline' social relationships rather than a community in its own right.
I don't know about any other rss users, but the content I post in my social circles originates from google reader by way of some rss feed about 95% of the time.
On the subject of Apple removing RSS from Mail, I don't see that as an issue with RSS. Rather, it's removing from Mail something that shouldn't have been there in the first place. I'm pretty much hooked on Reeder, with Google Reader as the backend for most of it.
I believe that, based on my own non-scientific observation, most non-technical people don't really know what RSS is or what it is used for.
I think that YACG, AutoBlogs, and so forth have also made website owners question the value of publishing RSS feeds as well.
Personally though, as someone who has launched several niche blogs over the years I find publishing an RSS feed to most of the big feed directories to be the best way to get a ton of backlinks to a new sit in a very short amount of time.
Of course large established sites have no need of this "benefit" so they largely view RSS as brand-dilution factor, not a brand-promotion factor.
Something has never been right about rss and I can't put my finger on exactly what.
I always found the idea compelling. I've tried using readers. Taken time to put in my feeds, but it never really became part of my routine. When I've been away loggin in feels like a chore. Frequently updated feeds drowned out the others. There hvae never been conventions that work around it either. What happens when an entry is updated, for example. What happens when you click the rss icon. etc etc.
I really wanted rss (and I still use it) but it was never right.
You should give a try to http://www.newsblur.com/
It comes with an intelligence trainer that will present the new entries based on your ratings of previous entries.
It also have very simple keyboard shortcuts to view the entry on the original site without leaving the window at all.
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|14 years ago|reply
Has anyone?
My impression is that we have the opposite of a "war" here. These RSS features are dying of natural causes. Unless someone can point me to the conference, blog post, or secret meeting where an evangelist convinced Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Mozilla, et cetera to simultaneously kill this feature in tandem, I'll continue to suspect that they're doing so because they're all subject to the same market pressure: There's a lot of new, popular, paying features that need building, from Twitter and Facebook integration, to mobile apps, to mobile-friendly APIs, to responsive and touch-friendly design, and as these things get added to the backlog other things get pushed down. Code is expensive to maintain and if it doesn't carry its weight it gets cut, even if it's vaguely likeable and nifty.
[+] [-] adambyrtek|14 years ago|reply
To refute your last point, the article explicitly mentions that that Twitter has functional RSS support, which was deliberately removed from the user interface and metadata, so it's not a matter of development or maintenance cost.
[+] [-] cpeterso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|14 years ago|reply
On an individual level, Google Reader used to be like crack for me, I couldn't get away from it. Used it every day. Followed hundereds of websites. Then the tore the social out of it and clunklily put it into G+, which blows (no reader user liked this). Now I almost never use google reader. It's almost like they were trying to push people away from it. But that's just my two cents.
[+] [-] smacktoward|14 years ago|reply
Here: http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/
[+] [-] xaa|14 years ago|reply
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/mon-april-16-2012-...
around 7:00.
[+] [-] sutro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conesus|14 years ago|reply
I solved the "Original site" problem by building the original site into NewsBlur -- http://www.newsblur.com.
The other big issue with RSS is that there are too many stories with a low signal-to-noise ratio. I built in filtering and highlighting into NewsBlur to address that concern. And it's a completely separate backend from Google Reader.
And now the common refrain is that people use social channels (Twitter/FB/Tumblr) to find links and news. So I just built that into NewsBlur with shared stories. You can sign up to be a part of the private beta at http://dev.newsblur.com. I'll send out invites to anybody who signs up.
Consuming the web through RSS can be problematic for both publishers and readers. I'm addressing the big three issues - context, relevancy, and surfacing - with a strong commitment to both readers and publishers. Let me know what else you would expect to see in your ideal reading setup, and chances are, RSS offers the foundation to build it.
[+] [-] guga31bb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanp2k2|14 years ago|reply
I hope Google picks something like this up (or hey, just /hires you/ if you're into that) and re-does Reader for 2012 :)
[+] [-] mhd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JunkDNA|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gring|14 years ago|reply
No taste. Very little to no taste.
While you do exactly what I need, these are incredibly complicated times. And I want to be sure that you will solve my issues without introducing complicated buttons and concepts I have to learn first. Plus Icons that hurt my eyes. But that's exactly what you provided.
Would be great if you looked into this matter. Cause as of right now, 3 minutes after my visit, I'm still looking for a solution.
[+] [-] SimonSapin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdaniel|14 years ago|reply
That does not make me happy.
[+] [-] JunkDNA|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
People want to know when certain websites they care about have new stuff. The fact that RSS can be used to achieve that is, and should have been treated as, completely irrelevant. Nobody except geeks like me care if they're transmitted through RSS, PubSubBubHub or carrier pigeons.
Likewise, I don' think most people care that the website has a "feed" and they need to get a "feeds reader" to be informed.
I think Firefox had the greatest opportunity to make it happen and they blew it. RSS should have been integrated with the bookmarks system, and I don't mean those awful "dynamic bookmarks" or whatever they were called.
When some page was bookmarked, the browser should save its RSS feed URL alongside (hidden!) and use it to alert people to updates to their sites, and provide an one-click way to open the new post(s) in a new tab (and an easy way to disable notifications from that site, certainly).
This would've made RSS useful for much more people and provide a great incentive for websites to provide good feeds. Unfortunately, it remained a geek tool, and so it'll die as such.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|14 years ago|reply
Steve Jobs would never have promoted RSS. He would, though, create user experiences based on it. Which really jars my reality to even say it, but your comments/observations and my own experiences (I use RSS exclusively on my phone as an offline info gatherer mostly used when I'm on subways out of Internet range) that 1) RSS is really cool and 2) there are no compelling end-user RSS-based tools.
Thanks.
[+] [-] JunkDNA|14 years ago|reply
All that being said, RSS alone is not exactly the pinnacle of information delivery. What I really want is a better way to identify interesting and informative information and filter out all the junk. This is a very, very hard problem to solve in an automated way. Things like Flipboard are trying to tackle this, but I haven't been able to embrace them. I also don't want to rely on my social network, because I'm different from my network. I have my own interests and priorities (that change over time).
What I want is a feed of information that is what google is to search. Google nearly always shows me exactly what I'm looking for in the top hits. I want something that gives me the most important, useful, and interesting information in a prioritized list all the time. The only thing I've seen get close to this is Fever (http://feedafever.com/). That's a good start, but isn't quite there.
[+] [-] rkudeshi|14 years ago|reply
What more could browser makers have done to encourage RSS? Technophiles love it, but the mass market rejected it.
For all intents and purposes, Twitter is a simpler, more intuitive form of RSS for the layperson.
As long as tools like Google Reader exist for those of us who do use RSS, I'm not worried. And if Google kills Reader, it will probably usher in a new renaissance of feed readers that are currently non-existent because of Google's ads-funded largesse.
RSS is now too important to too many people to just die.
[+] [-] dwc|14 years ago|reply
I mostly agree, but...
Browsers prominently featured RSS for many years, and the world at large ignored it. Heck, I'm one of those technophiles and I ignored it in the browser. Why? Because RSS should have been about convenience, but the browser implementations did not seem intuitive, and more importantly did not make it clear how it actually worked. All the techies I know who regularly consume content through RSS use a separate reader, and I suggest that's because browser RSS did not actually offer anything compelling (or even useful at all). I could be totally wrong about how useful browser RSS was, but then the problem is that even a moderately competent techie didn't see it and the buck still stops at the browser.
[+] [-] jakejake|14 years ago|reply
I will be really bummed, though, to see it removed from Mail.app. The Mail client has been the perfect place for me personally because I use RSS as a way to receive notifications. I use it for everything from following twitter search feeds, to monitoring eBay auctions to our own internal error-logging system.
I think RSS suffers from lack of awareness to the average person. I've showed it to a number of people and many of them have gone on to become power RSS users. My wife uses it to monitor knitting sites and to watch for search terms to bring up results on craigslist. It's really fantastic when you know how to use it. But they had no idea what it was or how to use it before I mentioned it.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bleys|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skymt|14 years ago|reply
If RSS is killed, what will replace it? Not for the case of Twitter or TechCrunch, where there will always be new content when you visit and it doesn't matter if you miss some, but for rare but important postings.
[+] [-] techtalsky|14 years ago|reply
RSS is of course unbelievably useful, and people who understood that the content of a site was being published side by side in a human readable but totally nonstandard format (HTML) and a machine readable and much more standard format (RSS,ATOM,etc.) instantly grabbed some kind of reader and subscribed to anything they were interested in.
I tried to preach the gospel of feeds. I tried to get people to subscribe to MY blogs. Even most of my medium-technical friends said, "Yeah, that whole reader thing sounds cool, I've been meaning to set that up." Non-technical people simply subscribed to things via email.
If somehow email could have organized itself more naturally into push (email) and pull (feeds) buckets, then it could have perhaps happened naturally, but confusing standards, implementations, and no real great way to explain the benefits to new users is what killed RSS (and XML feeds in general)... there was no war.
[+] [-] mmuro|14 years ago|reply
When it comes to Facebook and Twitter, my guess is that RSS doesn't accomplish what those services are made for. As they have evolved, the reverse chronological posting has become less important.
Plus, if you were Twitter, how would you want people to consume those tweets? Would you rather get them immediately or several minutes later in a format that has no context in the world of Twitter?
With that being said, I think RSS still plays a role in consolidating and consuming news in a central location. But it should be up to the site designers/developers to offer an easy way to "subscribe" to that site (via email or RSS).
[+] [-] ambirex|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trebor|14 years ago|reply
Unlike BACK I click an RSS icon once and subscribe in another application—and only if I already like the site/news/feed. So for the users like me that just click the button once and awhile to subscribe to a feed in another piece of software, like Vienna or Mail, we appear as a false low.
I use Chrome, so that doesn't help Firefox in my case. But Chrome doesn't show RSS links either. I wish they still offered the option.
[+] [-] aerique|14 years ago|reply
The last couple of years I mostly read RSS on my iPad / iPhone or using Google Reader (which is okay'ish).
[+] [-] Gormo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshaidan|14 years ago|reply
Is there any evidence that blogs are dropping RSS? I think one of RSS's major applications was for blogs to distribute their content. The examples given in this article, such as Twitter and Facebook are both apps that also have APIs available, so RSS in those cases are kind of redundant.
One could also make the argument that RSS is bad for the bottom line, as selling advertising, and generating revenue off of it is far more difficult than traditional websites.
The other big question is whether or not users are still using aggregators. If aggregator use is down, then that could suggest the decline of RSS or RSS like technology.
Finally, RSS probably still has a future in podcasting.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
I can't just import their API into an RSS reader with a single click.
On the other hand: I probably could, if I spent a few days reading up the documentation, writing up an app, testing it, and then deploying and hosting it, resulting in an RSS feed that (e.g.) Google Reader could process.
My fiance? No way.
On the gripping hand, my fiance doesn't care about RSS and doesn't use it. I'd argue that most twitter users probably don't, either. So there doesn't seem to be much loss.
[+] [-] Swizec|14 years ago|reply
I view RSS as a great way to follow important-ish things like people's personal blogs and tech blogs and so on. Large pieces of content, everything bigger than, say, 400 words should be in RSS.
Whereas twitter and facebook are for conversation. It's where people post silly things that nobody really cares about. Using those streams to get actual news? Yeah, doesn't quite work ... following just 1031 people on twitter means there are 5 new posts every time I refresh.
That is not an environment where I'd expect to discover big chunks of info. And it's also not something I would want mixed up with the slow moving big content stuff.
[+] [-] toyg|14 years ago|reply
The truth is that RSS was a cool technology searching for a reason to exist. It managed to find it on occasions (podcasting is still alive, twitter basically used RSS as the "first draft" for their service, etc) but not in the big way most geeks thought it would. Commercial and user interests did not align with a vision of complete openness where standardized feeds get pushed from machine to machine, moving free and public content everywhere. Also, most services found the format to be a straight-jacket, and once you start adding custom namespaces, you might as well just use your own format. It fit well only for periodically-updated news/blog sites, which is what it was built for. And its worst sin is that it's fundamentally a one-way technology, a broadcasting tool, not a bi-directional tool. Social tools can be built on top of it, but at that point it becomes just another messaging format, and not particularly efficient either.
RSS will survive in some form (like RDF, remember that?) but will never gain widespread popularity, unless it's somehow reinvented in a way that will align with the interests of big commercial players and/or large number of users -- something we failed to do in the last 10+ years.
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
blogs -> rss -> rss2twitter gateway -> twitter -> me
So it has become a backend technology, and RSS has been given a better marketing term - 'following' (or 'subscribing'). It just isn't being directly consumed by users any more, which is why you don't need it as an icon in apps, but RSS is definitely still being consumed by other apps.
I found that the problem with most newsreaders wasn't the technology or terminology, but that they presented news items in an email view - ie. every item needs to be actioned, whereas the answer was a stream where you scan and interesting items were actions. The other problem was discovery. Nobody really worked out how to recommend other sources or feeds from within the reader applications.
Twitter kinda accidentally nailed both of those issues.
[+] [-] saint-loup|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epc|14 years ago|reply
- a lot of energy was poured into the absolutely stupid who gets credit for what, who did what to whom, who linked what where, who’s the real napster wars of 2002-2005.
- RSS and Atom are frozen relics of the post web 1.0 pre web 2.0 era. Support for anything other than html or text is a grab bag of works in this reader, doesn't work in that reader, is silently and completely removed by this other reader.
- it's in no one's best interests (financially, spiritually, professionally) for RSS to “succeed”. It had many fathers, all of whom moved on to other things, even 410'ing their online selves.
- it's difficult to monetize RSS. Ads may or may not work, you have to resort to gimmicks and most savvy users (who are likely a majority of the people reading your feed in the first place) are blocking ads, so there.
- it's difficult to prove the value of RSS to the publisher: how many people read this item? Dunno. You can't trust the number of unique user agents pulling the feed, because more likely than not they're mostly spam bots looking for content to republish. You could choose to trust the feedburner statistics, if you're using FB.
- RSS feeds can't be styled in any useable, uniform way. To many people this is a benefit of RSS, but it means that inline images that work great in the original article end up out of context. Any attempt to use CSS styling to set off differences in an article are mostly lost. There are some work arounds but mostly manual hacks.
The public has moved on. It sucks. RSS feeds will continue to be available for years, if not decades because they’re built into the publishing plumbing of many systems. There were gopher servers running well into the late 1990s in various places, much to the surprise at times of security administrators.
When faced with a public user base that goes to google.com and then types in the web site they want in the search box, we responded with RSS/Atom. It is a much better way of reviewing and consuming a lot of information, but the user experience sucks, and it’s in no one’s interests to fix that.
Find a way to profit, stunningly, from RSS and it’ll take off again. Continue to confine it to the techno–geek ghetto and that’s where it will remain.
[edit:formatting]
[+] [-] pmr_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttunguz|14 years ago|reply
Second, these social streams provide an additional social filter to the news, something that RSS news never did. These social filters also provide a layer to comment, share and discuss, which is another feature altogether missing in RSS.
Lastly, social streams avoid the challenge most RSS readers faced: the inbox with 1000+ items to read and no way to sift through them. Social streams create a time value decay function for this data. Facebook’s EdgeRank uses a combination of different signals to ensure relevancy so when users login the feed is only timely, relevant content, not an inbox of every status update and share. Twitter uses time to reduce the number of items in the feed.
http://tomasztunguz.com/2012/04/19/rss-is-dead-social-stream...
[+] [-] Gormo|14 years ago|reply
And I follow HN via RSS.
[+] [-] tbatterii|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zupreme|14 years ago|reply
I think that YACG, AutoBlogs, and so forth have also made website owners question the value of publishing RSS feeds as well.
Personally though, as someone who has launched several niche blogs over the years I find publishing an RSS feed to most of the big feed directories to be the best way to get a ton of backlinks to a new sit in a very short amount of time.
Of course large established sites have no need of this "benefit" so they largely view RSS as brand-dilution factor, not a brand-promotion factor.
[+] [-] dhawalhs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|14 years ago|reply
I always found the idea compelling. I've tried using readers. Taken time to put in my feeds, but it never really became part of my routine. When I've been away loggin in feels like a chore. Frequently updated feeds drowned out the others. There hvae never been conventions that work around it either. What happens when an entry is updated, for example. What happens when you click the rss icon. etc etc.
I really wanted rss (and I still use it) but it was never right.
[+] [-] Andrew-Dufresne|14 years ago|reply
You should give a try to http://www.newsblur.com/ It comes with an intelligence trainer that will present the new entries based on your ratings of previous entries.
It also have very simple keyboard shortcuts to view the entry on the original site without leaving the window at all.
[+] [-] brlewis|14 years ago|reply