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It's time to head back to RSS?

wired.com

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Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#61

Post by sedachv »

robobro wrote: post #4

Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead. RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared -------- When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new commen…

Very much agreed. Chris Wellons has a good description of why Atom supersedes RSS: http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/

Adding Atom support to anything is trivial even without using a library, and there is a good schema for validating feeds: http://cweiske.de/tagebuch/atom-validation.htm

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#63

Post by FranOntanaya »

zsau wrote: post #25

If you already use an email client and have a place to run cron jobs, I highly recommend a feed->email converter. No need for a separate RSS reader, and you get cross-device syncing for free. Options include feed2email[1], feed2imap[2], and my own feedmail[3] (just "released", but I've been using it for years). I prefer clients like the latter two that can upload via IMAP, since that gives better control than sending…

Thunderbird already supports feeds.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#64

Post by sdfmxiid1 »

geordee wrote: post #41

True. RSS gives control over what and how we consume information. The curated newsfeed is prone to gaming and misuse. In fact, we should be able to select feeds, curation engines and reader apps. This way it would be less of a "platform" and more of "www".

The issue of control with newsfeeds and RSS has been on my mind a lot the last year or so.

RSS and Atom are great as a protocol, but where things break down for me is in discovery, filtering, and selection of content.

There's a few traditional RSS/Atom readers I like, because I have complete control over the feeds I monitor. The problem with this is that then I have complete control over the feeds, and have no way to be alerted to content I might have otherwise missed. I think this is part of the "unread feed overload" problem mentioned by some others, that I just a firehose of feeds at me, with no prioritization of content.

The other end are more curated things, like Feedly. This is great, because I get alerted to things that are popular, but they're very centralized, and it seems like the more you get curation, the less often you're able to customize your feeds. Also, for whatever reason, with the curated systems, it seems like you kind of get the same things over and over again from different systems, like there's a set of feeds they all dip into and don't deviate from.

This is my ideal in an RSS/Atom reader (not saying it's realistic):

1. Open source

2. Good UI

3. Can import and export using OPML or other similar standard open format

4. Cross-platform, between desktop and mobile

5. Decentralized feed recommendation

The last part is where things go a little off the beaten path, which is that it would be nice to have some way to get introduced to popular content without it going through some centralized service, like a recommendation system that's decentralized.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#65

Post by imartin2k »

RSS has been the backbone of my online information management and news consumption since 2006 and it's still unrivaled. A web without is impossible to imagine. In my eyes, Feedly has done a fairly good job at making the format accessible even to average users.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#66

Post by edp »

k1m wrote: post #58
anomie31 wrote: post #35

Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I wa…

We have a service that can convert partial feeds to full-text for a lot of sites. If you're curious, you can try it here http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ and code for a slightly older version here https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss

Hi, just wanted to say I frequently use your "push to kindle" feature to read articles on my kindle and it's really great, thank you !

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#67

Post by imagetic »

Amen.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. But almost nobody is offering RSS at the moment and most publishers who do drop the ball. Feeds are broken or partial.

It might be time to start from scratch though, I'm not sure RSS is simple enough for normal people. Podcast delivery format would be nice, where you subscribe and discover from one aggregated portal and it's finding similar content and making solid recommendations. Maybe inject some type of medium / rank feature so you can track trending content and subscribe to channels of what's popular.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#68

Post by imagetic »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #39

I always felt RSS/ATOM were underrated, So in 2015 for the love of RSS and information consumption we set out to build a completely customisable news aggregator app with fast parsing (RSS/ATOM), category selection, reorder categories, notification customisation -(schedule, DND), image toggle, data saving mode, filter, youtube, sharing news with own voice attached called Talk about News - https://talkabout.co.in/ Shar…

They were. It was just too complicated for people. I couldn't get my parents to setup RSS. No way.

Re: It's time to head back to RSS?

#70

Post by stephenr »

k1m wrote: post #58
anomie31 wrote: post #35

Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I wa…

We have a service that can convert partial feeds to full-text for a lot of sites. If you're curious, you can try it here http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ and code for a slightly older version here https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/full-text-rss

This seems like a very weird model.

You charge for a hosted service. You also charge for a self-hosted tool. But you also offer an older (read: crappier) version of the same thing under AGPL.

I like the sound of the product, but there are too many red flags there.

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