The power of the RSS reader

Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open, and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting for me.

In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it later, at my leisure.

If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through old articles.

Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.

RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.

[1] - http://www.newsbeuter.org/index.html

I couldn't disagree with this post more. I subscribe to a lot of sites that accumulate thousands of unread items. In fact, I could care less about read/unread toggle. My RSS is indeed a river, but it's a river that sometimes I plunge wholeheartedly into and devour large chunks, other times I merely skim for items of interest. Then there are spots in which most is completely ignored. But it's still there and given the magic of SEARCH, I can pull up all the articles for a topic of interest, confining my query to just those sites I have pre-declared an interest in.

So I like the mailbox metaphor for being able to quickly traverse items and skim item summaries, so the real payoff for me is not just the increased efficiency in reviewing so much more than could be done by visiting each site (or even in a magazine/mosaic format) but also a repository ready to serve up information for any topic that I wish to browse upon in a future moment.

I use River2 for my high volume feeds while I stick my rarely updated and "must read" feeds into NetNewsWire. Has been working pretty well for me so far.

When using NetNewsWire, I'm in "slow down mode" where just about every item (in theory) is important to me. But when I'm using River2, I'm in "scan and click mode" and just trying to see what the latest news is.

Using separate applications like this helps keep me "in the zone."

If I were to put high volume feeds in NetNewsWire the temptation to read all the posted items would be too great. In River2, items older than three hours just drop off the page. There's no "unread count" or "read older items" button to tempt you.

Personally, my Google Reader has a folder for 'rarely updated', which I usually check first. Then I have the 'All Items' sorted by magic and skim the first few pages or so for things that strike me as interesting. Then I mark all as read.

I may have missed something but I haven't seen some tumblr post posted on G+ via RSS (yet).

> Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.

A good first step but they (facebook, twitter) all ended up removing it.

> Maybe the kids are on to something.

More like the parents (read: youngsters from the 2000) were on to something. I had high hopes for RSS and even higher for ATOM (I ended up writing my own flat-file blog system that only used ATOM documents as storage, I really liked it with the full xslt mumbo jumbo but in the end it's xml and that was it).

>I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.

Some tried to monetize RSS by adding ads in the feeds but that didn't take off. Reading a site's content only in the rss feed cuts off its authors from any kind of revenues (worse if the online reader displays its own add along the feeds).

I presented a project when I was a student. It consisted of a website that offered any registered user to transform the RSS/ATOM feeds they would have supplied into a mini updated WAP-enabled website for browsing the feeds on those old nokia of the 2000s. It was nice and all but when one of my advisors asked me "how would you turn it into something profitable or how would you bring it to the market?" all I could say was "this would never work because nobody with profits on his mind is promoting webfeeds".

I though the news-publishing industry would use RSS as a kind of copy-pasta medium but it doesn't look like things are going this way (at least not on the public side of things).

RSS (and ATOM because "i want to believe") isn't dead but I am not convinced it's going to make a come-back on any for-profit social network.