RSS not dead, just misunderstood | Hacker News Reader

RSS not dead, just misunderstood

swizec.com

16 pointsSwizec23 comments

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.

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 easier to consume, particularly when I'm going in and out of tunnels and losing signal - for that reason Twitter is of limited use to me since I'd have to repeatedly navigate links - not to mention the reduced load time and required number of clicks due to having the text all in one place.

Am I part of a dying breed? I thought mine was a fairly common scenario, at least among techies - talk about not looking outside my own four walls!

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, but that's another conversation.)

You may consider switching to Google Reader in the interim, as I don't think it's going anywhere.

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 :-)

Thanks!

I imagine you won't see this now, but just in case - the first version is now up, at http://dambr.com

Someone make an RSS reader for people. I think that's a good point; I've got too many subscriptions in my Google Reader, so many that I rarely access it: I feel overwhelmed.

I think there was a discussion on this in HN somewhere a week ago; someone suggested News Blur and it seemed a good solution although I haven't tried it out yet. http://www.newsblur.com/

Yep, I love RSS, but I don't ever read my feeds. Every feed reader in existence sucks. Fever sounds interesting, but I'm not going to fork over $30 for 'sounds interesting.'

I'm not sure if this is an inherent problem, or if it's just that everyone's scared of Google Reader, and RSS doesn't seem sexy anymore.

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 - big problem. You've invented yourself a new daily chore, and, worse still, you think you've done yourself a favour by doing it.

Same with twitter, too. Follow crap-spouters and you'll think that twitter is nothing more than the what-I-had-for-lunch stereotype. Follow people who 'get it', and you'll be annoyed at that stereotype.

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.

How would a rss reader for people look like? Would it be able to rate/rank items accordingly to the probability that I'm going to like it?

The main problem with rss feeds is the same as with many other media formats: people try to meet the standard volume (at least x posts per week) even if they have nothing interesting to say. Most rss feeds suffer from the same problem that also hampers novels that have to be X pages long, movies that have to be 100 minutes long, or CDs that have to have a minimum play time etc. even though the quality of the material would suggest something shorter.

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.

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).

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.

Feed Readers are like mailing lists. You have to scan the subjects and decide if you want to dive in. You don't have to read everything from everyone you subscribe to. Also Hacker News is for me a feed reader - I benefit from everyone else picking out good stuff for me to read and then I subscribe to that with RSS.

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.

You realize Thunderbird supports feeds, right?

Yes, but I also use Mutt, and my phones email client, and I have several installations of Thunderbird on different machines. Gating to email makes much more sense.

I run a sports news aggregation site. Before RSS existed it was very difficult to manage all of my sources because they would change so often. I now aggregate several thousand sources by myself and this wouldn't be doable without RSS.

Funny, I dont use twitter (I like it though) or facebook, but just started aggregating rss feeds to my mail inbox.

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