Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS

This is super interesting. RSS has gotten really slow and bad, and a few years ago FriendFeed started to push for improvements with the Simple Update Protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Update_Protocol).

The world should move to a standardized JSON-based, OAuth compliant API, but unfortunately having two big, competing players like FB and Twitter means that things will probably partition into camps. It'll be interesting to see what happens when new websites start publishing content: will they define their own new standard or clone FB/Twitter?

The title is a bit of a double entendre. At first reading, I thought the claim was that (once again), Organization X had killed RSS (figuratively). As it turns out, Facebook and Twitter have, quite literally, killed RSS within the scope of their own systems by removing it from key locations.

In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you're only a part of the conversation while you're there.

In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don't want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I'm perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for "pushed" information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.

I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you can respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don't have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.

Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.

Based my usage patterns, I don't see this as "killing" RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I'm a dying breed though.

And thus become even more walled gardens (a proprietary API doesn't count as "open").

The pendulum is still swinging towards "closed", but I sense it's about to swing back.

I don't think getting you to visit their site is the point of the switch. Twitter and FB are in a position where they have enough addicted users that they can get away with messing with standards. RSS is outdated and slow, and FB and Twitter want people to use their data in a more sensible way, via their flexible APIs.

It's trivial to build an APP that generates an RSS stream for an arbitrary twitter account with their API, and I'm sure someone will soon. But the point is that they are setting a new standard for what can be done streams of structured data, and hopefully more sites will move away from RSS into cool APIs.

Of course, for now at least, there's no standard to this kind of API, but I think that people will eventually figure out what works and converge to it (as is the case with OAuth).

I hear people talk about how "RSS is so slow" all the time, but I still don't understand it. I see no failings or complaints about RSS. I get a headline and then I get an article. Are we talking speed between when content was generated and when it appears in an RSS feed? Honestly, I couldn't care less about that. I'll live if it takes fifteen minutes for an update to reach me. It's not like I'm getting a patient's live EKG readings via RSS.

As for yet another standardized API to replace it. As long as it provides the same functionality to all current services/devices that use RSS, that's fine with me. I would really prefer that it not be driven by Facebook and Twitter, however any more than I want Microsoft Office development teams driving the standardization of ODF.