I'd be bored out of my mind between sets at the gym if I didn't have my Feedly RSS feeds and gReader Pro on my Android.
Facebook and Twitter are much poorer cousins in comparison.
It's time to head back to RSS?
161–170 of 503 posts
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#162RSS never went away. Podcasting has made careers (e.g. deboarah francis-white, roman mars, andy & helen zaltzman, ollie mann and many others). The technological underpinning of podcasting is entirely RSS. And it ain't going away, or getting embraced and extended any time soon.
> andy & helen zaltzman
The Bugle and the Allusionist are tiny rays of light in these dark times. Podcasting is a simple and honest business: I download an MP3 and maybe listen, they get paid to read some ad copy.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you and HN in general vastly overstates the gravitas of the Google Reader shutdown. I loved it too but the demise of RSS happened probably more because of people switching to Twitter, Facebook and others as their "aggregator" than by killing off one RSS-Reader.
If Google had just added comments or other social elements to their reader instead of killing it they might not have missed the boat. Instead they killed their popular Reader and made Orkut and Google Plus.
The same could kinda be said for YouTube. That is, Goggle had a massive and active community, but it needed some tweaks. Instead they build Google Plus and wait for they to come. We know that outcome :)
I think the problem with RSS was - and still is? - is the data it provides. A social network can harvest MUCH more data (due to the endless number of connections between "the nodes.") RSS is too old school.
Put another way, imagine being hired by Google - while FB and Twitter are taking off - and being told you're going to work on a new & improved RSS reader. That would have triggered a mass exit.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#164Funny, I've set up a RSS reader again just this week.
Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about.
But lately, I saw more and more posts I wasn't interested in. Well, it always happened, but those made me wondering because they were posts about brands, or very specific products. Was this promoted content? I don't have a clue.
Be it promoted content or not, I realized I was vulnerable: anything could be pushed to me and I would think I see it because I'm interested in it. And I have no way of checking why something appears in my feed.
So I decided to get back to RSS, and realized I could still have the discovery of new sources using... google alerts. I can set a google alerts using the advanced search semantics of google search, and get the result as a RSS feed. This means I discover new sources and I can verify why it appeared (it matches my custom search). Best of both world.
And obviously, I can also subscribe to specific RSS feeds to be sure to not miss something I love.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…
An example: My server sends notification emails to the company automatically. Everyone is using gmail to view their emails. When there is an update about a previous notification, I send an email with the in-reply-to header. Oh wait, gmail doesn't use that. Alright, I'll just make sure that the subject line is exactly the same as the original notification (as gmail says to do). This works for a bit, but if someone hit…
Good points - so federated email works so well because most of us decided to federate to a single server. Something sad about that.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#166Hey 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…
This is my biggest gripe with RSS. Not the fault of the protocol, just the user experience. I mostly consume my feeds on the London Underground, so offline reading is perfect for that, but I tend to have to scroll through articles that are truncated because there's no point in reading them. You could argue that the infrastructure of the tube network is the problem, not the state of the modern web, but still, it sucks…
You can get RSS apps that will download the full articles for offline reading, including images.
I use Newsify with my Feedly account on the iPhone, and it’s perfect. Android clients are also available (sorry, can’t remember names).
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
RSS is, fundamentally, just links to web pages. Why would it need to have built-in commenting? Just go to the linked page and comment there.
We don't need it to have comments. But I think the lack of commenting is the big problem of an RSS focused ecosystem. Shooting comments off into the ether is fine by clicking the page and commenting there. But, if you have a couple of dozen blogs in your RSS feed, and leave a handful of comments a day, clicking back through the specific place to see if you've been responded to is way too much effort. Sites like HN, R…
Don't most blogging platforms have the option to email replies? In any case, I prefer a bit of friction in the comment process, since it discourages people from "shooting off" without thinking.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#168I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…
That's the actual problem. I don't get why everyone is putting such a strong emphasis on the google reader shutdown. It's the fact that everyone stopped providing RSS feeds. Probably because you can't put 500 tracking pixels and ads and scripts in them, so they hope by shutting them down people will visit the page directly more frequently. Which might actually work out in general.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#169I completely agree. When did RSS go out of style anyway? The other day I wanted to subscribe to an author's posts on Medium, but I couldn't find a RSS feed anywhere, so I never did. Seems like a loss for the author to me, seeing as gaining influence and credibility is probably the goal of many who write posts. It would also seem as if Medium doesn't want to add RSS as it would take control away in terms of recommendi…
It went out of style for the mainstream because they haven't (yet) figured out how to lace it with ads.
That is a keen observation. I guess rss is a technology from simpler and more explorative times of the internet instead of the current oppressive and commercialized phase we are going through now.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting you say that, I got into podcasts recently (a bit late I know) and found the space very confusing. It's kind'of all on iTunes, but not really, you can get them from their source sites, but also some apps have a subset. Understanding the model is not easy. I didn't know it was powered by rss until this thread. I am really pro federation, and I am not deterred, but I am an engineer on HN. I wonder why email…
The email protocols are hell. Absolute hell. I don’t think anyone truly groks how it works all the way down either. A big difference is that email has slowly been developed over a period of decades, and so a lot of great software (both libs and GUIs) were built on top of it, and “perfected” over the time. Maybe what prevented RSS from reaching the same level of development is that RSS is only composed by “creators”,…
:-) RFC822 mail is fairly simple at its heart - X.400 was a lot more detailed