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Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

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Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#51

Post by jeremysmyth »

afloatboat wrote: post #34

I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity for me. It allows me to read news at my own pace and to get all the news with a backlog so that I'm sure I don't miss anything. RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have…

RSS has largely become invisible. Many CMSs just support it, which is great if you use RSS, and irrelevant if you don't. Many RSS readers are flexible enough to find the feed if you point at a site's base URL too, so while that implicit contract is in place, life is good.

However, that very invisibility might prove to be its downfall: RSS is so incredibly useful to those who know about it that the only way to keep it going is for those of us who create to ensure our platforms keep creating it.

I miss seeing that little orange RSS icon though.

edit: I also miss seeing Dave Winer comment on threads like this!

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#53

Post by Concours »

afloatboat wrote: post #34

I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity for me. It allows me to read news at my own pace and to get all the news with a backlog so that I'm sure I don't miss anything. RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have…

Oh well, I heard you and you should check what we do. It looks like this:http://www.feedsapi.com will make your life with RSS nicer and should improve your user experience with RSS. Here are some of the things you can do: Turn those shortened rss feeds into full Text rss feeds, curate your feeds with keywords tomonly get what you really care about, curate your feeds with a more complex filter structure using RegEx, get your feeds items to be delivered everywhere in any format (htmk, txt, pdf, word...) and in full lenght ! 50 sites is a lot... And you may not need to read all of those feeds items so curation makes sense in this specific case.

I hope this helps.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#54

Post by Concours »

You should add RSS, it's one of the most passive ways ro share your content and gain new inbound traffic, you users will thank you, all prominents news web/mobile applications make use of rss to distribute their content and get new inbound traffic.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#58

Post by davewiner »

Without a doubt RSS is worth the time.

Think of RSS as an advertisement for the stuff on your news site or blog. If you don't publish RSS, how will people find your stuff? By visiting the home page of your site and looking for stuff they haven't seen before? Sure, some people will do that. But people who read your site systematically, people who you would think of as members of your community, can benefit from more automatic notification. That's what RSS is for. All kinds of networks have developed around RSS. If you don't provide a feed, your site can't participate in those networks.

Also, how do you think links make it to Twitter and Facebook? Very often they were posted by people who follow your site's feed. So while most people aren't aware they're getting their links from feeds, they are.

I'm not aware of how the plumbing works in NYC, but I live there, and depend on it. Water flows in and out. Treated on both sides. RSS is the plumbing for news. It's best when it just works without you having to even be aware of it.

Here's an example. Sometimes I get so interested in a subject I put together a river site dedicated to news in that area. Earlier this week I did one for Major League Baseball.

http://mlbriver.com/

The vast majority of the sites I went looking for feeds on had them, and they worked with my aggregator. I didn't need to contact anyone. And now they have a new source of flow, that didn't cost them anything, since they were already supporting RSS.

Re: Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

#59

Post by davewiner »

jeremysmyth wrote: post #51
afloatboat wrote: post #34

I fear the day that RSS will become so unpopular that developers won't support it anymore. RSS is the basis of my information aggregation and is a necessity for me. It allows me to read news at my own pace and to get all the news with a backlog so that I'm sure I don't miss anything. RSS allows me to go directly to an article without having to navigate through the website. Some websites (TheVerge comes to mind) have…

RSS has largely become invisible. Many CMSs just support it, which is great if you use RSS, and irrelevant if you don't. Many RSS readers are flexible enough to find the feed if you point at a site's base URL too, so while that implicit contract is in place, life is good. However, that very invisibility might prove to be its downfall: RSS is so incredibly useful to those who know about it that the only way to keep it…

I just posted a long comment at the top level of this thread. ;-)
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