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Do people still use RSS?

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Re: Do people still use RSS?

#2
I didn't post up my answer on the site because someone else had already covered it. In short, yes people still use them and given how easy they are to implement I see no reason not to put them onto your site.

Re: Do people still use RSS?

#3
post #2

I didn't post up my answer on the site because someone else had already covered it. In short, yes people still use them and given how easy they are to implement I see no reason not to put them onto your site.

Absolutely, especially if your readers are tech-savvy. Personally, having a feed drastically lowers the "compellingness barrier" a site must exceed to gain my sustained attention. There are very few sites that are interesting enough to make me visit them manually every day, but lots of sites interesting enough that I'll add them to my feed reader.

Re: Do people still use RSS?

#4
I think my best way of answering the question is that because some magazine authors don't have per-contributor RSS, I don't follow them and forget them.

Twitter is a very interesting development, but the only site whose RSS it's replaced is Daring Fireball.

However, finding a good RSS client is the biggest pain in the ass, and I don't know what I would have done, if I didn't discover Fever, when Bloglines died and took all my data and saved updates with it.

Re: Do people still use RSS?

#6
post #2

I didn't post up my answer on the site because someone else had already covered it. In short, yes people still use them and given how easy they are to implement I see no reason not to put them onto your site.

The "given how easy they are to implement I see no reason not to" part is what bugs me the most about this. I don't think there's a modern language in existence that doesn't have at least 3 free ways to implement an RSS/Atom feed. Every framework I can think of (ASP.Net (MVC and Web Forms), Django, Rails) has it built in and it takes virtually no resources.

Unless you use an ad service that doesn't support it I can't see a reason why you wouldn't implement (I can't speak for other languages but in ASP.NET MVC I could implement a feed in the time it took him to make that post)

Re: Do people still use RSS?

#7
Yes, it's the best way to keep up to date on things that are not updated very often. I probably have 400-500 feeds subscribed to in google reader, but never use google reader directly.

On Mac: Reeder On iPad: Reeder On iPhone: NetNewsWire (until Reeder comes to iPhone??)

Twitter has replaced some of that news gathering, but a lot of times if I'm away for a week, I'm not going to go through thousands of tweets to see what I missed, but it's pretty easy on the lower volume feeds. I don't necessarily read everything, but at least the headlines give me an idea of what's going on.

I don't know what I'd do without them.

Re: Do people still use RSS?

#8
post #7

Yes, it's the best way to keep up to date on things that are not updated very often. I probably have 400-500 feeds subscribed to in google reader, but never use google reader directly. On Mac: Reeder On iPad: Reeder On iPhone: NetNewsWire (until Reeder comes to iPhone??) Twitter has replaced some of that news gathering, but a lot of times if I'm away for a week, I'm not going to go through thousands of tweets to see…

...Reeder is on iPhone. And it's brilliant. Go get it.
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