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> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment.

It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"

Other than the fact that RSS and NNTP are both built on TCP, they have virtually nothing in common neither technically, architecturally nor in terms of use case they are trying to solve.

IOW, wat

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306232

In particular, my friend asked what people use RSS for. At the time, lots of people used it to stay current on news.

No wonder the space program has stalled! Your friend's memory has failed him, usenet bears no resemblance to rss in anyway. Usenet was a discussion forum, rss is link syndication.

In the early days of RSS, Dave Winer himself compared RSS to Usenet, so it's not a completely ignorant thing to say.

Except for the mailing list, RSS is the only relatively-heavily-used thing on the internet that shares Usenet's "openness" virtue: namely, there is no single "gatekeeper" organization that a reader must rely on to follow the authors in his RSS feed -- the sudden trouble that the OP experienced when upgrading to Mountain Lion is about the most disruptive thing that could happen to a reader's relationship with the authors in her RSS feed.

(If the assertion I was responding to had been that the designers of RSS should have tried harder to emulate Usenet's subtler virtues, I would have agreed.)

What kind of virtues you mean?

I remember back the late 90's when these formats were being created (I was involved with cdf's inception) and while I'm sorry this woman has been disrupted with mountain lion's removal of rss from the mail app, I disagree with you on the claim that rss is anything like usenet. Rss is, like cdf, a content delivery format which is just a simple agreed upon set of XML tags for title, snippet and so on. If rss had discussion or comment capability, it might be reasonably compared to usenet, but rss has nothing in common with usenet as it stands, it's a one-way protocol, I subscribe, or I publish, there's no discussion, as there is with usenet. In that it's open, with no single gatekeeper, it is no different to http, but comparing rss to http would also be pointless.

"No, because RSS actually exists, while no one has yet successfully reimplemented USENET."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306232

Looks like your explanation of RSS was not entirely successful, as RSS has very little in common with Usenet except for the fact that they both deliver information using pull model. RSS resources are individual data streams, Usenet groups are unstructured assemblies of multiple messages. RSS resources are delivered automatically by site aggregators, Usenet messages have to be posted. Usenet needs NNTP servers that store huge amounts of data, RSS doesn't need anything but reader. Usenet is centralized, RSS is distributed.

In short, calling RSS "reimplementation of Usenet" makes very little sense.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306232

What you say is true, but my friend asked what it's used for. At the time, it was largely used too keep up with news.

> the fact that Apple didn't even think to solve it is, in fact, disheartening

Probably Jobs would have caught it, his attention to such details was painful, probably both for him and the ones at the other end of the table.

Simplicity is an amazing difficult thing to get right. If you don't have the right man, well, just look at Gnome3's Unity or even at this incident: RSS removal could have easily been done in the name of "simplification" by someone who doesn't get it. The sad fact is that his supervisors didn't either.

Would this be the Steve Jobs who ditched floppy disk drives when people still had piles of disks around, and Firewire ports when people still had plenty of devices requiring them, etc.?

If I buy a new computer, I hopefully understand what features it has and lacks.

It is another thing altogether for a operating system upgrade to purposefully destroy user data.

As the article indicates, the data wasn't destroyed, just obscured. Maybe equivalent for some users, but somewhat overstating things, especially here.

Even with expert advice, she had to manually recreate the data, going from snippets she could see. Surely that counts as 'destroyed' or at least 'damaged'.

Dropping a feature is one thing. Silently making a user's data disappear is something else altogether.

His attention to detail only extended as far as things that excited him. I'm sure he wouldn't even notice the RSS feature was gone. OS X and iOS had lots of small oversights like this even when Jobs was around.

Classic example being the replace instead of merge of a folder when you put another folder with the same name at the same path.

I remember was taken aback when one of my coworkers showed me his newly-acquired iPhone toy and it turned out it does not have copy-paste function, so if you want to copy URL from some place or take a phrase and put it in the search you have to re-type it on that cute small on-screen keyboard where your finger covers three letters at once. I was repeatedly told since then nobody really needs copy-paste function - up to the day Apple finally implemented it and it turned out everybody need it. So when I hear Apple never misses an UI detail I say "yeah right! and moon is made of swiss cheese!"

RSS is passe? That's news for me. I've been using RSS almost exclusively to get my news/blog/entertainment feeds for years now, and I know many others do the same. So what's the cool thing now to use instead?

Actually, when Google Reader removed social features, I stopped using it, and actually I don't miss it much. It turns out that HN and Reddit do a better job of curating the same sort of feeds I was reading anyway - and selecting the best posts from a much wider variety of sources, to boot. The simple fact is that its a rare site that consistently publishes things I want to read. Anecdotally, it turns out that forming a community with others with similar interests provides a far better experience consuming information. (I say this because the "hit ratio" on the HN home page is much much higher than my feed ever was. And I'm not sure if it was ever possible for me to achieve that high of a hit ratio on my own just through subscribing to feeds).

That said, I think that everyone probably has 2 or 3 primary content sites (as opposed to aggregator sites like HN or Reddit or Google News) that they should probably read all the time, because it aligns so closely to their core interests, and RSS in a mail reader isn't a bad solution for such a small number of sources.

That depends on what do you seek. I never seriously used GR social functions (though I miss "share" a bit but I can just copy the URL, not a big deal), I use it as information source, not communication medium. I usually know what I need and I am capable of choosing my sources. I would never trust the Reddit crowd to curate my news intake (if anything, any mass internet forum like that makes phrase "wisdom of crowds" sound like an oxymoron) and while I do read and enjoy HN, I would never limit myself to it as the only source.

I have literally dozens of content sites I read (or skim, depending on value) via Google Reader, and RSS is still the best way to do it. I haven't heard about anything being even close to it by utility for me. That's why I was surprised reading the claim that "RSS is passe".

They didn't remove her data. They removed the app. The data is still in the original location. The fact that she was able to "recover" it is unimpressive.

OMFG, seriously? When someone rapes you, takes secret pictures of you naked, or wears your underwear while you are out and then puts them back without you knowing, then you have a right to feel violated. When a company removed a feature, but leaves your data intact, you have the right to be annoyed. Seriously, use the correct term so when you are actually violated, I don't assume that you're just being a whiny little...