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RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

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Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#31

Post by Lagged2Death »

The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox.

In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours.

The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#32

Post by doorty »

I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring this new kind of RSS to the masses.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#34

Post by angrycoder »

I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad.

Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#35

Post by spanktheuser »

glhaynes wrote: post #21
Alex3917 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS" Vastly superior for looking well educated to others, less superior for actually understanding how the world works.

Maybe you could expound a bit on that?

Obviously, I'm not Alex. But I'll take a crack at it. Seems to me there's an echo-chamber quality inherent in any community of like-minded individuals.

For example, if I sourced my tech news solely from HN, I might imagine that large corporations consist solely of oblivious, slow-moving dinosaurs incapable of writing decent software. But if I had http://cacm.acm.org/ showing up in my RSS reader, I'd be exposed to a somewhat competing view.

To me, the value of RSS is the ability to subscribe to a few sites I wouldn't normally bother visiting. It's not hard to remember to check HN. Remembering to swing by corporate IT and Microsoft-focused publications is a bit tougher. RSS can help with that.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#36

Post by TomOfTTB »

RSS is not dying.

There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds.

So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour.

As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything

(and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#37

Post by wyclif »

stanleydrew wrote: post #3
bretpiatt wrote: post #2

It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid. As a user though I also don't like it anymore and I'll share why... This isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS…

"It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid." But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for something that should really be a separate application.

Robert Scoble says he was told (ostensibly by someone at Google) that the Google Reader team has been largely disbanded, and that the project is no longer maintained. He's mentioned this a couple of times on Quora, on Buzz, and on his blog.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#38

Post by gregory80 »

just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying. already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more compact format.

The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON.

Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.

Re: RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

#39

Post by Alex3917 »

glhaynes wrote: post #21
Alex3917 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS" Vastly superior for looking well educated to others, less superior for actually understanding how the world works.

Maybe you could expound a bit on that?

Reading the frontpage of social news aggregators is much less schema-expanding than reading larger bodies of work from individual authors. This is especially true since content written for news aggregators tends to be infused with the sorts of biases that these aggregators reward; in the same way that NYT articles tend to favor establishment interests and authoritarianism, content written for HN is often tinged with Internet-inspired scientism, masturbatory theses, topical gossip, and all other manner of nonsense and pseudointellectualism.

The worst part is that when you read HN you actually feel like you're learning, because you are. The problem is that you're not learning nearly as fast as you would be if you were reading books. It's the same reason why 2-5 year olds who watch TV are measurably learning, but at the same time end up dumber than kids who aren't watching TV because they're learning at a slower pace. The fact is that even reading a book about something as seemingly mundane as the history of American homeopathy will teach you more about life, the universe, and everything than six months of reading HN. (E.g. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/13/1590.extract )

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