I see a resurgence happening and a great example of that is Micro.blog -- a social network built on top of RSS, JSON Feed, and other open standards for posting and comments.
The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
141–150 of 192 posts
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
But with RSS you're receiving content directly from the publisher's site. There's no third-party involved, and the publisher can provide as many text bites as desired. There is no problem there as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman.
> as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman. That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls... As much as I like desktop tech, that boat has likely sailed, at least for the mass-consumer market. You might maybe get away with a mobile app, but you'd still need help from browsers to "subscribe" to feeds - something that was pretty awful the first t…
We can invent new, mobile-friendly protocols for discovery, especially if existing methods become difficult under new laws.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (RSS is, like, objectively the best way to follow multiple webcomics. I don't understand why it's not more popular.) The core feature of RSS is that it takes content and moves it from a site the publisher controls and into one the reader controls. This is immensely valuable to readers! It's perhaps less valuable to publishers, however. Many publishers invest significantly in adding value to and gaining value from t…
If the "economic" publishers all agree to be monetized and harvested by Facebook and Google, this could be a self-correcting dynamic. The only people left using RSS will be the classic web of independent readers and writers, who are still free to donate directly to each other with only a payment processor as middleparty.
If the "economic" publishers all agree to be monetized and harvested by Facebook and Google they would be mice sitting in the cat's paws.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#144I miss Apples native RSS readers (Safari and Mail used to have native readers, with Mail being configurable to send you RSS feeds to your inbox). Sadly they dropped them with Lion if I'm not mistaken. RSS is/was nice to be able to stay up-to-date with infrequently updating blogs, and it's honestly a shame that it's no longer used as much as it used to. One thing that could possibly re-ignite the use of RSS feeds is a…
MS Outlook still has a feed reader, although it is pretty limited.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#145This is a remarkable deep-dive into the history of RSS and the ideas and vision behind it, and how those camps diverged. But despite beginning the article with Kevin Werbach's prediction that syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass, and RSS took on the role of moving media between aggregators and consumers, rather than between authors and aggregators as orig…
> syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass
This has happened in at least one media segment: podcasting. Ads are simply inserted in the medium proper, or the feed gets paywalled, or money is generated while producing the content (live shows).
It is entirely possible to reproduce this achievement in other media sectors, it just needs to be done wisely:
1. a catchy name ("rss" or "atom" are too geeky, "feeds" or "syndication" are too generic, "newscasting" is another thing).
2. leave clients and formats independent, so the immediate needs of users prevail over broadcasters' ones. Broadcasters are good at telling people what to think, but terrible at telling them how to use or consume anything. It also removes the petty fighting like "we won't rely on a platform built by $competitor".
3. Leave ad-management and general money-making schemes up to publishers. They can license feeds to specific clients only, they can do paywalls, micropayments, embedded ads, whatever. The client should assume nothing, simply move content from A to B on a schedule. All this can easily be implemented on HTTP codes, they are all there already.
4. The real point of feeds is exactly this: move stuff from A to B on a schedule. Metadata is almost irrelevant. Content display is a side-show. What podcasting delivers is control: it gets the content a user wants, as soon as it's available, and makes it ready to be consumed when the user needs it, in the way s/he prefers. This concept is what should move the effort, not dreams of semantic sheeps.
5. Because it optimizes pre-fetching, the format shines where on-demand fetching is time or money-expensive. Niches where it would (or does already) work well, ae things like auto-downloading TV episodes, delivering big images (something for visual artists to cut off Pixiv and friends... ?), delivering big binary updates and so on. With the rise of single-page-applications, one could even devise a format that delivers an entire website, ready to be consumed instantaneously without requiring lots of mobile data usage. Bootstrapping it in "stingy" markets (Southern EMEA etc) could help.
6. Good directories for clients to use. Podcasting really took fire when good directories emerged.
(on a sidenote: AMP is evil and publishers are shooting themselves in the foot. It seriosly risks to become an "iTunes" moment, where an entire industry relinquishes control of their market because they don't understand long-term consequences.)
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the "economic" publishers all agree to be monetized and harvested by Facebook and Google, this could be a self-correcting dynamic. The only people left using RSS will be the classic web of independent readers and writers, who are still free to donate directly to each other with only a payment processor as middleparty.
If the "economic" publishers all agree to be monetized and harvested by Facebook and Google they would be mice sitting in the cat's paws.
Indeed!
At the same time, it's worth considering that those publishers are often much worse off when they escape the cat's malicious paws. More than one newspaper has learned this to their considerable sorrow.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#147I still use RSS and it's, in many ways, better than the web stupidity that surrounds us. The title is misleading. People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising. RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in a…
Having worked at a giant company, I know there are many competing motivations, teams, and personalities involved - companies are not uniform entities. Still... Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader. They killed…
EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds.
Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else."
However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever).
Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics.
It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as long as no content aggregation web site is acting as middleman. That would imply people will go back to installing things, hunting for feeds, copypasting urls... As much as I like desktop tech, that boat has likely sailed, at least for the mass-consumer market. You might maybe get away with a mobile app, but you'd still need help from browsers to "subscribe" to feeds - something that was pretty awful the first t…
We can invent new, mobile-friendly protocols for discovery, especially if existing methods become difficult under new laws.
I was going to say "you can invent anything you want, but good luck convincing "Appoogle" to help you", but in truth, they've actually let the door open on mobile with their support for custom urls, so you are right there.
On the desktop it would be harder though.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#149Podcasting is RSS. That means that 26% of Americans (I don't have worldwide stats handy) depend on RSS every month. So, more Americans use RSS every month than use Twitter.
That's quite interesting. Do you have more stuff to read about it? I never really used podcasts so I always wondered how people listen to it and assumed people use spotify or something like that.
Podcast 'subscriptions' are a perfect RSS use-case.
A 'podcatcher' (ie whatever app downloads it) is downloading the 'enclosure' url (which can point to any type of media) of the latest RSS 'item'.
Re: The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
#150As a developer of a feed reader that supports both RSS/Atom and Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Instagram/VK (https://bazqux.com) I say that making client for well defined API hosted by one provider (silo) was much more simple than support RSS/Atom feeds.
Here is an incomplete list of various problems you'll have if you want to write a feed reader http://inessential.com/2013/03/18/brians_stupid_feed_tricks
It requires a lot of work to make a feed reader that supports all possible feed generators from all possible sites. And it's more related to multiple buggy producers than to multiple feed formats (for example repeating item IDs, different item IDs for the same items, missing IDs -- no matter what format you use you get same issues).
Another complexity is feed updating itself. Silo hosts content and knows what was updated. Feed readers don't. So they need to poll and update a lot of content even if they have just a few users (but with thousand feeds each). There is a PubSubHubbub, but again, lots of providers and implementations could be buggy (for most feeds I just fetch them directly when receiving a push instead of use push data itself since it's more reliable).
So the open nature of web syndication itself dampens its usage by making developing and running feed reader a costly task. It's really simpler (and maybe more profitable if you're lucky) to write a silo.
And there are more problems that are not related to feed format at all: relative complexity of subscribing, not everybody need syndication (many people prefer occasional visiting of the site instead of reading each article), new forms of "syndication" (related videos, algorithmic feeds), less blogs (maybe it's good -- let people post cat pics in social media), less popularity (not a part of big sites, browsers), less education (social media and messaging apps is the only Internet some people know) and so on.
But there are people who want to follow every article from interesting sources in software optimized for this task. And feed readers are the best thing here. For example, some people use my feed reader for Facebook/Twitter feeds only (no RSS feeds at all) just because it's more convenient to read them here.
In the end, I think, process of reading subscriptions is more important than underlying format. If RSS will die (quite unlikely) another methods of getting articles will appear.