True. RSS gives control over what and how we consume information. The curated newsfeed is prone to gaming and misuse. In fact, we should be able to select feeds, curation engines and reader apps. This way it would be less of a "platform" and more of "www".
It's time to head back to RSS?
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Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#42I just remember the overwhelm: opening up Google Reader and forgetting what I went there to do because there were so many unread things. I don’t think this is endemic to a protocol, but the social filter on top of content is how I find most of the things that I find useful and interesting today.
I always found RSS/Atom most useful for following sources (usually personal blogs and podcasts) that post infrequently, but where every post is worth reading. Like Oona Räisänen's blog: http://www.windytan.com/
For sources that post a lot, it's less useful, since I can just visit every couple of days and have stuff to read.
And this means one can easily keep up with the feeds.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#43It always has been. I've been a happy NetNewsWire user for well over a decade. It even supports shell script feeds, so you can write scrapers for sites that don't provide an RSS/ATOM feed themselves.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#44Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead. RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared -------- When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new commen…
intertwingly.net! Now that brings back memories! Sam Ruby, Dave Winer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Tim Bray, Mark Pilgrim, Joe Clark. XML, DTDs, XML Schema, Relax NG, XSL, XSLT, FOP, CSS and XHTML! WaSP, micro formats (and XML-RPC, SOAP, and WSDL (pre-WS-Death Star). Oh, heady days!
Apologies for the pedantry, but a nit: It's Atom, not ATOM. It's not an acronym like RSS.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#45Hey Wired, maybe RSS would be more popular if media outlets like you would put more in your RSS feeds than a title and single sentence for each article. But I get it. You need ads to make money, and just putting ads in your RSS feed is not enough because they're not "interactive" enough, or something. You need those "engagement" metrics that you generate by making readers press a button to read the full article. I wa…
I was trying and fell short of something witty to say. But you're right. I use feedly and have chrome extensions that's give me full articles in a readable fashion. I would LOVE to visit some of my favorite sites and read articles as the site designers meant for them to be read. But all of the js and ad fuckery makes reading articles online an absolute goddamn chore lately. So here we are. RSS revival? Bring it on. I…
Inoreader.com has a feature that loads the whole page in-app (and possibly even 'readabilitized' it). I'm sure other feed readers do it too though.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#46IMO, RSS is by far the best tool to get news content. Thanks to the ratio signal/noise.
Problem is, how to convince website editors to promote theirs RSS feeds while there are many social networks out there with built-in ads feature.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#47I just remember the overwhelm: opening up Google Reader and forgetting what I went there to do because there were so many unread things. I don’t think this is endemic to a protocol, but the social filter on top of content is how I find most of the things that I find useful and interesting today.
I dislike most RSS/Atom readers for the same reason. I made my own minimal reader for my personal use [1] that only groups entries together by date and displays a feed/title URL I can click on. My browser can remember which links I've read and which I haven't. I find it works really well, it does exactly what I want.
[1] http://magnusson.io/evil-feed-reader/ - in case anyone is interested in what it looks like
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#48Also be able to consume activitypub feeds. http://activitypub.rocks/ supported by Mastodon sites and others.
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#49Have been using https://inoreader.com since the Year Google Reader closed, and imho, it's better than Feedly. I'm also usually reading HN via my full-text feed. Meaning, I don't have to load a link every time, I focus on the articles first, and I can easily pre-load everything for offline reading on mobile. I think, in case of RSS such online services are superior to self-hosted solutions - whether server or client -…
What makes it better than Feedly? I've been using Feedly since Google Reader closed and I think it pretty much nails this simple tool. How is it even possible to be much better?
The dev has always been really responsive and closely watching the community, while Feedly focuses on premium support and feels more corporate.
Several features are free: Unlimited sources and feeds, entire search for your own feeds, unlimited tags, sharing via inoreader email
There is also: loading of mobilized content via single click/key, better shortcuts, comprehensive tagging management, more settings, better settings placement, contact management, better feeds stats info, save an entry as pdf or print it, more sharing options, better compact theme, more RSS export settings, export the entire profile which includes the content for favorites and save web pages
Free Feedly boards are limited to 3 and have been only introduced last year, while tags in Inoreader are more powerful, free and part of the service since 2013
Re: It's time to head back to RSS?
#50Days ago I received an email from the makers of Airmail about their upcoming RSS Reader app called Cappuccino and invited me to their beta app. It still early but a promising app.