With very few exceptions, if you don't have a feed you don't survive past my first visit. I visit HN manually every day, and stackoverflow and my bank manually when I need to, and documentation sites. That's it. The web is much too large to visit sites manually, and every site is less than a drop in the bucket.
Do people still use RSS?
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#12I wouldn't have ever seen this submission if it weren't for RSS. Along with almost everything else I'm going to read online today.
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#13I use it everyday. In fact, that's how I saw this HN post.
IMO, when it comes to RSS, people are always asking the wrong question. RSS is a technology, not a product. It makes as much sense as asking whether someone is using GSM or TCP. I think a large part of that problem is that the technology appeared before a user-friendly way to consume it. Imagine email addresses being introduced before email clients existed. To most people, clicking on an RSS button displays garbage to the screen. They don't know what to do with it. Even after browsers started displaying RSS feeds in a pretty format, users still didn't know what to do with it. Should they bookmark this link? Why would they consume the barebones RSS feed in their browser instead of the rich and graphical website? RSS enables one to subscribe to a website, it's not the ends but the means. These questions still remain unanswered which is why some people like Gruber and TechCrunch like to claim that Twitter killed RSS, although I think they're completely different things.
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#14I wouldn't have ever seen this submission if it weren't for RSS. Along with almost everything else I'm going to read online today.
[deleted]
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#15I wouldn't have ever seen this submission if it weren't for RSS. Along with almost everything else I'm going to read online today.
I heard this post via FeedSpeak - http://feedspeak.tk
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#16Not only do I use it (that's how I saw this story) but also advocate it to people who like to consume news. When you think about it, RSS in a news reader is a much more efficient information consumption than visiting sites.
Twitter and other social feeds are interesting but the amount of noise to signal seems to be much lower than what you can get on RSS, even on some of the better sources.
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#17YES.
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#18Yes, 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.
How did I miss that. Thanks!
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#19What are the alternatives to RSS? Do people really use Twitter instead? What else is there?
Re: Do people still use RSS?
#20Yes, I believe people still do. RSS is about content and providing information. Everybody needs information, everybody needs something new - so it is here to stay..
I'm assuming by RSS you mean the content, not the technology.
In fact, got a site that uses youtube RSS feeds to show videos and create playlists.