Twitter And Facebook Really Are Killing RSS

Memes like this bother me ala the whole declaring things dead. The problem of subscribing to content still exists. It always will.

When RSS came along did that kill email newsletters or email subscriptions to content? No. RSS was just another solution to that problem. Twitter, FB, social,etc. is just another solution to the problem, it doesn't mean it kills RSS.

Is RSS used less now? Yup, but that doesn't mean it's dead. RSS has become a background technology. I haven't clicked the subscribe to RSS feed orange thingy in a while. I do use Pulse and get updates from key sites there. I bet that uses RSS to get the content. That's fine, that's probably how RSS should be used. Now everyone wins.

If we're talking about direct syndication and subscription and not complementary tech ala fb/twitter, then I don't see anything killing it currently.

Until the problem is no longer there, it's hard to say a technology ala solution to that problem is "dead".

Maybe it means that many readers don't want to read every article that TC puts out, so don't subscribe to the RSS. When there's an interesting article forwarded from a friend, they go and read it.

Personally I love Reader. I use it for high signal-to-noise writers only, where I want to read (or be aware of) almost everything they write. I regularly remove blogs who feel they need to put something out every hour, just because.

I very rarely click through Reader to view the underlying post and I never stay subscribed to blogs that don't push their entire post through RSS. I don't have a problem with ads and the smart ones will embed them anyway. I just find it more convenient to read everything from a centralized setting. I like to avoid opening superfluous tabs on my crappy windows machine at work if I can help it, it needs all the free memory it can get just to stay unfrozen.

I dislike google reader. I prefer native clients which cache the content I read. Currently, I use newsfire (mac) [1], before I was using newsbeuter (command line). Yes, I am aware that you can technically switch reader to an "offline mode". It just isn't the same as a native client with cached content.

Maybe the trend has been away from using google reader, and towards using native rss clients.

[1] http://www.newsfirerss.com/ [2] http://newsbeuter.org/

TC is one of the now-days rare RSS feeds that includes the full article content; because of this I rarely have any need to click through to the full article.

Technology don't die it just re-emerges in other shapes.

The problem with these kind of discussions are that they confuse the product with the technology.

The real discussion they seem to be having is whether open is better than closed and we all know where that kind of discussion leads.

RSS is dying from its overuse (too many blogs) and misuse (spam and pointless feeds).

Also the lack of innovation from RSS reader apps isn't helping.

Of course it is -- Facebook and Twitter are nothing but aggregators for the masses, aggregating information that the masses care about in a centralized, simple way. The user doesn't have to download a reader, look around for an RSS button, copy the URL to an XML file, or anything like that; he just has to click "Follow" or "Add Friend".

Facebook and Twitter are not new concepts -- they are aggregators for their consumers and publishing platforms for their producers, and your mom uses Facebook or Twitter to follow the things she cares about for the same reason you use RSS to follow the technical blogs you care about.