Even though Google ditched Reader, Google Alerts still offer a RSS delivery option, which is extremely powerful when the alert is configured properly.
Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#12I think it is more a matter of; what else is there?
You want to follow an infrequently updated blog? You pretty much have to use Atom/RSS. The fact that, say, Facebook has gotten super popular doesn't really help. Facebook is the worst for infrequently updated stuff. It's mostly noise.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#13Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?) Basically a follow-based social graph on top of the excellent feedly experience. So there's a "Social" tab, a timeline of sorts, with things like: "Your friend just read 'Some Cool Article Title' from 'That publication'" "X commented on Y: ... " "X1, X2, X3 subscribed to 'Some Publication Making The Rounds'" Cal…
> Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?)
NewsBlur resembles that description.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#14Is there even a local RSS reader anymore (except Thunderbird and Emacs maybe)?
All the readers I found when I was last looking were cloud-based.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#15Is there even a local RSS reader anymore (except Thunderbird and Emacs maybe)? All the readers I found when I was last looking were cloud-based.
Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#16I evaluated using RSS for aggregating blogs for my graduate-school-aspirant users / clients.
The challenges I faced were mostly b/c of poorly formed RSS feeds on blogs I wanted to aggregate, but as someone who does a lot of web scraping, working with RSS for this use case is a boon.
It sounds like we're in adjacent businesses & would love to learn more about your use case, so feel free to shoot me a msg (brandon at admitbrain c0m).
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#17Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?) Basically a follow-based social graph on top of the excellent feedly experience. So there's a "Social" tab, a timeline of sorts, with things like: "Your friend just read 'Some Cool Article Title' from 'That publication'" "X commented on Y: ... " "X1, X2, X3 subscribed to 'Some Publication Making The Rounds'" Cal…
> Maybe if someone creates a more "social" RSS experience! A Feedly with Friends! (does this already exist?) NewsBlur resembles that description.
NewsBlur is my browser's home page. I was a refugee from Google Reader years ago. It supports many of the former's features, is open source, and a SaaS pro if you don't want to deal with self hosting.
But man, that's just a handful of it's features.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#18RSS/Atom is still used by most syndications. The average user may be unaware of its existence but that same audience is similarly unaware of most technologies that drive the web. Other than the death of Google Reader, there hasn't been much of a change. The only alternative to RSS right now (afaik) seems to be bespoke APIs and which is a pain for publishers to maintain and for software to syndicate.
Yeah I was myself surprised when recently I needed RSS feeds of a few parameters and was pleasantly surprised to see them still inplemented even with API’s on most of the sites.
We created an API at edX that is much more robust than our RSS feed. People still use the RSS feed because it is much easier than (a) registering for API credentials, (b) figuring out how OAuth works, and (c) learning what JSON is and how to parse it. The simpler solution was good enough for many clients.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#19I'm an active RSS consumer. I use NewsBlur after Google Reader closed down. I highly recommend it.
I found that RSS became an assumed protocol. It's so rare that RSS is missing that it's absence makes me startlingly grumpy. Beyond content RSS is embedded in many machine announcement services. I use Github's release feed for Ethereum[1] to monitor updates, for example. One stellar feature of NewsBlur is it's ability to find the feed address from a given URL, which makes discovering feeds far easier.
For what it's worth, RSS and feeds have graduated from the Hype Curve into widespread unobserved use.
EDIT: I forgot to mention my favorite Meta-Feed[2] for Clojure! It's all RSS all the way down.
Re: Ask HN: Is RSS making a real resurgence?
#20I think because it's enabled by default with most publishing platforms/cms it will naturally just stay alive into the future. It's a great medium in my opinion, and I prefer to use my feed reader to keep up with sites I would never normally visit on a whim.