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RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

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71–80 of 98 posts

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#71

I use feedbin, and I love it. At this point I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS.

> I tend to stop visiting sites that don't support RSS

Same here. If the site is interesting enough, I'll try and contact the owner and explain why RSS matters. Basically.. few people have the time to visit and sort through individual sites on a daily basis.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#72
post #22

It's a shame that fewer and fewer sites offer feeds. Most of them still do, luckily, but I've had to dig up http://feed43.com about once every two months. Though I wasn't really aware that some feed readers could perhaps generate feeds automatically, I'll have to try that out sometime.

I was not aware of feed43. Thanks. But do I have to create my own? Can I not use feeds people have already created?

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#73
post #51
post #30

RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.

You mean the lost world of FriendFeed/Google Buzz/PubSubHub. It seemed like a great idea, but the social features really didn't work. People dumped their RSS feeds, but the decentralized nature meant that attempts at flowing comments between sites ended up losing context.

I was the guy that really liked Google Buzz. I think it was it was tightly integrated with Gmail.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#75
post #46

I am not the developer behind it, but I want to advertise it: http://fetchrss.com/ is awesome. I can fetch stuff from public Facebook pages I need (without having a fb account) and create a RSS feed of them. Then with ifttt.com I send updates to my mailbox: awesome. Also, fuck Facebook and long live RSS and the open web.

There's also https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge. It's self-hosted and has many many bridges for different sites that don't do RSS.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#76

I like RSS and use it daily, however the main drawback is a lot of sites tend to truncate their articles and have a "read more" link. Not so useful when you're in an offline environment like the London underground (where I usually catch up with my feeds at the end of the day) Facebook and Twitter suffer from the same issue though

Some self-hosted ROSS readers will fetch the full content or at least attempt to do so.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#77
post #30

RSS gives the user maximum control - but it lacks the social features. What we need is a way to connect our RSS feeds together.

RSS is feature complete. Like email. As soon as anyone tries to add something it ruins the whole thing by centralizing or proprietizing something or encouraging bad practices in there users or breaking something as simple as line breaks or copy/paste (outlookin' at you MS). Its fine that something else handle the social stuff, in fact, commenting tools often have rss feeds of their own.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#78
post #17

One interesting thing is that a specific twitter search sorted by latest, often produces very decent localized news/reports during some events. One of the first things I turn to confirm the scale of an event, for example blackouts, fire, or meteoroid sightings. Also there are specific feeds on twitter for some cities that report police/fire scanners. If you ever get a power outage you can track the scale within minut…

I usually just check the power company's outage map.

Usually takes them sometime to update it, never fast enough.

Re: RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News

#80
post #32
post #23

The problem with RSS is that most feeds treat all items the same so the same prominence is attached to a nuclear strike on New York as is attached to a child scraping its knee.

To me that is another benefit of rss. I want to do my own 'manual' filtering, to decide myself what is important to me. I do not want some algorithm to feed me. Especially not if that algorithm is commercially biased: its main goal is not to inform me, the goal is to make money from me.

The problem I've found with aggregating multiple feeds into a single chronological stream is that some feeds totally overwhelm others because they publish more frequently.

If Feed A publishes 10 articles a day and Feed B publishes 10 articles a year, the articles from Feed B get totally engulfed and pushed way, way, way down the list... effectively they become invisible.

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