Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS
staynalive.com
staynalive.com
In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you're only a part of the conversation while you're there.
In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don't want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I'm perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for "pushed" information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.
I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you can respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don't have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.
Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.
Based my usage patterns, I don't see this as "killing" RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I'm a dying breed though.
I use jwz's RSS workarounds for my Facebook feeds: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2009/12/how-to-use-facebook-with-a-f...
Unfortunately, in the past week, Facebook's RSS feeds have been behaving very erratically. As seen in Google Reader, the update feeds show up as entirely refreshed - all new items - even though only a handful of items are actually new. The links on the RSS items have changed from the proper status update link to flat links to facebook.com. So rather than killing RSS, this move by Facebook is killing Facebook for me.
My habits are such that if you don't offer RSS feeds of information I want, I probably won't ever get your information or go to your site. You're not going to sucker me into "visiting regularly", just because you don't offer an RSS feed. I'll just move on and get what I want somewhere else.
It's trivial to build an APP that generates an RSS stream for an arbitrary twitter account with their API, and I'm sure someone will soon. But the point is that they are setting a new standard for what can be done streams of structured data, and hopefully more sites will move away from RSS into cool APIs.
Of course, for now at least, there's no standard to this kind of API, but I think that people will eventually figure out what works and converge to it (as is the case with OAuth).
As for yet another standardized API to replace it. As long as it provides the same functionality to all current services/devices that use RSS, that's fine with me. I would really prefer that it not be driven by Facebook and Twitter, however any more than I want Microsoft Office development teams driving the standardization of ODF.
Consider the case of a real-time news aggregator. A news source doesn't update very frequently (say once every 5 minutes), but you want to provide updates super fast (say within 30 seconds). That means on average you have to scrape the entire RSS feed 10 times for a single update. On the other hand, FB/Twitter APIs give you the flexibility to do things like "download items after this id," which hog much less bandwidth.
Rather, the slowness seems to come from the lack of an aggregation mechanism. If I want to follow 100 feeds (e.g. 100 Twitter users), I have to query each of those 100 feeds. Even though I can query them efficiently using If-Modified-Since, that's still slower than firing off one query to find out which of those 100 feeds have updates, and then querying only those which do.
Actually there is but twitter is not interested (for obvious reasons): http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-2-s...
If I can't read it in Reeder I properly wont read it at all. I don't know (or care) if it's a slow and outdated technology as it seems to work okay for me.
It doesn't benefit me at all if RSS disappears and is replaced with FB or Twitter. Sharing news? Sorry no, the signal to noise levels are already low and I don't need to pollute the internet any further (said the man who is writing a worthless post on HN :-) But I guess it's not meant to benefit me anyway. So RSS will properly die and I'll silently adopt to whatever replaces it.
Using a well-documented feature of the API? That is not a hack.
Got a form to submit in Django? I'm hacking. Got nodejs to run a sample app? I'm hacking. Integrate a shitty jQuery plugin? I'm hacking. RTFM - nope, hacking.
I hope other people will will catch on and overuse the word to the point where it's not cool anymore and everything gets back to normal. (and hackernews can be renamed back to webmasternews)
I don't see any problem with referring to using a documented workaround as a "hack" in that context.
It is the straightforward and recommended way of doing something. Twitter didn't kill RSS, they just stopped advertising it to end users.
The world should move to a standardized JSON-based, OAuth compliant API, but unfortunately having two big, competing players like FB and Twitter means that things will probably partition into camps. It'll be interesting to see what happens when new websites start publishing content: will they define their own new standard or clone FB/Twitter?
I can see a use case where devs who don’t feel like building for Twitter’s API will want to use RSS to quickly get a user’s recent tweets. But I don’t think this will significantly impact anybody’s anything, and it feels like the author is exaggerating the consequences.
The pendulum is still swinging towards "closed", but I sense it's about to swing back.
I'm curious what you're seeing that gives you this sense? From where I'm sitting I see things swinging even further toward closed which is rather disheartening but I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.
What we need to focus on is making sure companies endorse open data. Allowing users to get data in, and out in a reasonable format.
/me added back the Page RSS feeds during a hackathon last year
On the other hand, reading facebook status or tweets is like listening or chatting with friends. Contents are impromptu and often out of context. However, it's much easier to interact.
That does not necessarily follow.
Way to support open source, guys!
Twitter and Facebook have NOT made anything easier for normal people, they just managed to get the mindshare to force people to deal with their inadequacies, whereas a million different sites offering RSS feeds somehow never turned into something everyone and their dog "had to" use to be cool.
I use RSS daily as my main news source, check Facebook maybe every other day and never could figure out the point of Twitter.