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RSS not dead, just misunderstood

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Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#11

Post by danparsonson »

bmelton wrote: post #10
danparsonson wrote: post #6

This whole 'death of RSS readers' thing is a real surprise to me - I connect to Bloglines every morning with my mobile (the browser is a bit pants, and Bloglines works better for me than Google Reader), and read interesting stuff on the train to work. When I find a blog post I enjoy on a site like HN, I add the blog to my blog-roll to sample future posts. I find an aggregated set of articles all on one page much easi…

Perhaps you missed the articles where Bloglines is shutting their doors? I agree, I don't think that the technology is going anywhere, as it's pretty much saturated with support on almost every blog / publishing platform, etc. I think that the idea of an 'RSS Reader' is dying might hold more weight, as there are a number of issues with RSS that nobody is really working to tackle (that I know of -- I personally am, bu…

Sadly I saw that today too :-( As it happens, I have been thinking about developing a simple RSS reader for mobiles (my favourite bits of Bloglines + my favourite bits of Google Reader written to support the 'old skool' Blackberry browser) for a few months, so Bloglines' death gives me a kick to get started. If nothing else, it'll be an interesting little side project.

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#12

Post by marknutter »

I've always said that Twitter brought RSS to the masses. Try explaining RSS to any non-technical person and watch their eyes gloss over. Twitter is fast becoming a source of news - you "subscribe" to people's Twitter accounts and get interesting links and thoughts pushed to your Twitter account and favorite Twitter client. Couldn't be more simple. Parsing links from Twitter and Facebook is going to become the next big thing (and something my startup is has been focused on for the last year, too).

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#13

Post by danparsonson »

gnaar wrote: post #8

The problem with fast food is not the food, it's the way people use it. Once in a while - no problem. Every day - big problems. The problem with RSS is not RSS, it's the way people use it. Add a few sites whose content is enough interest to you that you read everything they publish - RSS is awesome. Add every site you come across that might produce something you're interested in between stuff you don't care about - b…

The same applies to any news source though, doesn't it? Newspapers, TV, HN/name your favourite news site - all will have articles you don't want to read, mixed with those you do. To me, it doesn't seem like that much of a chore to skim through and pick out what's interesting to me, and an RSS aggregator acts as a prefilter, further reducing your search space.

I guess what you're looking for is something with some level of intelligence as to what you're likely to be interested in reading. Maybe that's the next step in the evolution of RSS aggregators - software that takes an RSS feed and filters it based on learned preferences? On the other hand, sticking purely to 'what you like' could lead to a sort of tunnel-vision where you miss the odd random article that captures your imagination but lies outside your normal tastes. That is, of course, a problem with aggregators in general, and is one reason why I keep reading HN and don't just stick to my RSS feeds.

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#14

Post by ugh »

ZeroMinx wrote: post #4

Who's been saying RSS is dead? For me, it's been the main way to get news/web updates for years.

I always saw RSS as this dorky tool no one else uses that helps me to efficiently read what I want to read on the web. I don’t care at all how popular it is as long as the websites I want to read have a RSS feed.

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#15

Post by mike-cardwell »

I use rss2email to gate my various RSS feeds into a single folder in my email account. I then read them using Thunderbird and IMAP.

I don't like the idea of a dedicated RSS reader. I'd much rather import it into an application which I already use. Email is perfect for that.

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#17

Post by ax0n »

It's really funny how I came across all of the "RSS is dead" stuff in Google Reader.

Then I see people saying "I just use $PLATFORM to stay current" where $PLATFORM is Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed or any of a litany of other half-baked websites that don't easily track what you've looked at, nor are they capable of easily categorizing or prioritizing the influx of digital jetsam and flotsam.

Sorry, folks. I don't have time to grok a single website all day long while crap rolls in. I want to be able to sit down at my lunch break, get a glance at what's happened since my morning coffee, and get on with my day.

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#18

Post by cema »

danparsonson wrote: post #11
bmelton wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you missed the articles where Bloglines is shutting their doors? I agree, I don't think that the technology is going anywhere, as it's pretty much saturated with support on almost every blog / publishing platform, etc. I think that the idea of an 'RSS Reader' is dying might hold more weight, as there are a number of issues with RSS that nobody is really working to tackle (that I know of -- I personally am, bu…

Sadly I saw that today too :-( As it happens, I have been thinking about developing a simple RSS reader for mobiles (my favourite bits of Bloglines + my favourite bits of Google Reader written to support the 'old skool' Blackberry browser) for a few months, so Bloglines' death gives me a kick to get started. If nothing else, it'll be an interesting little side project.

Sounds good.

Which features ("bits"), btw?

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#19

Post by tingley »

RSS is not dead, but as a technology it is fairly stagnant. There were a solid five years when little was accomplished other than repeated version forks based on the dumbest sort of squabbling imaginable.

I don't think it's dead, because at this point it does solve a problem reasonably well, and it's still a problem many people are interested in solutions to.

Re: RSS not dead, just misunderstood

#20

Post by danparsonson »

cema wrote: post #18
danparsonson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I saw that today too :-( As it happens, I have been thinking about developing a simple RSS reader for mobiles (my favourite bits of Bloglines + my favourite bits of Google Reader written to support the 'old skool' Blackberry browser) for a few months, so Bloglines' death gives me a kick to get started. If nothing else, it'll be an interesting little side project.

Sounds good. Which features ("bits"), btw?

I like Google Reader's option to mark articles with a star to be revisited later, and the ease of adding new feeds in the full client; from Bloglines, I like the fact that it puts all new articles in one page - minimal UI interaction, and I don't need to keep a connection up.

One area I'm hoping to improve on both is the speed - both Bloglines and Google Reader, on the Blackberry at least, are a bit cumbersome and need several clicks before you actually get to read anything. Another thing I'd like to do better is that (with Bloglines) a failed page load still marks all new articles as 'read' - this does happen occasionally when I'm on the move, and I end up missing the latest articles.

I have one or two other ideas to experiment with :-)

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