Hacker News Reader

A common "general" application of RSS is news, but this will hopefully be slowly phased out as well. The New York Times offers an awesome API (http://developer.nytimes.com/) which gives you a much better view of their data than their RSS feeds (which they still provide).

View on HN

So I'm supposed to use the NYT's custom API to get articles when RSS has, for years, provided a "general" method for me to do the same thing for not only the NYT but millions of other sources?

Yes, and they want you to install a special 'NYT app' for that, which will be future: every company and news outlet will have its own app.

haha, and they'll all be based on frontend UI accessing RSS.

I was thinking more along the lines of 'accessing their own specific API (maybe even a private, undisclosed API)'.

No, and that's why they still provide the RSS feed. My point is that in the immediate future, companies like FB, Twitter, and NY Times will experiment with APIs that provide richer functionality than RSS. Hopefully within a relatively short time frame, the APIs will start converging into a standardized, widely adopted replacement for RSS that builds on these ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com