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Comment by urza | Hacker News Reader

You lost me here: "We think that formats like RSS don't make sense for today's internet".

And honestly.. another API? So it only works as long as you are in business (which is based on what by the way?) or decide to kill or change it? And also posting to my social media will be going through your machines? Seriously?

If you'd offer me an opensource script that I could call like "localhost/post?message="hello"&where="twitter,blog,facebook".. that would be different story. But hey, good luck locking others in your new service.

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RSS is full of embedded HTML. It's practically impossible to make a good news reader without doing some heavy manipulation on it and trying to extract/modify ugly elements. We have a full blog post on the topic here: http://blog.streamified.com/post/45846467833/the-future-of-s...

There's a discussion below this one why it makes sense to have a single API for this, instead of open-sourcing the code. The benefits are numerous (we're hooking into many paid APIs and covering the costs, for example).

RSS format sucks because XML sucks.

I agree that it would be awesome if it was opensource so you could mitigate any risks by having it run on your own hardware, but really it's a valuable service and they deserve to make some money, which will play into keeping the service alive.

I would agree if we were talking about a SOAP protocol that could be restful or something. But RSS doesn't bother me at all. You can just pass it through a converter to suit your fancy, and the bloat for an average use case of 10 results can't be that much. It's a minor miracle anybody decided to publish their sites through RSS so I'm happy they used the format that was hot at the time and got adoption.

I love RSS, I couldn't have built a ton of cool stuff over the years without it. For example I built @twuoted using twitter's search feed 4 years ago with Sweetcron, but that has long since been replaced by twitters API. I don't hate on RSS, I think it was a wonderful invention for it's time and was great for showing how standards can work.

But I still want it to die and JSON to become the new king in data transfer. That could be due to my work being in the web development arena and using node.js, but I honestly think it's just a better solution.

Thanks!

The stack which is required for the Streamified API is really quite large, too. Between node, mongo, elasticsearch, and a few other pieces of software... plus a few dozen node modules and even some custom linux configuration, it's really not feasible to expect devs to install it on their own machines ;)

You could open source it anyway, though, or parts of it. NewsBlur does this: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

One could run their own NewsBlur, but Samuel has stated it requires a lot of resources to pull RSS feeds, and so in practice it's much easier to pay them $2/month. (This may not apply if you plan on having business customers who are paying orders of magnitude more than that.) But it alleviates any fear that the service users depend on may disappear; in the worst case, run it yourself.

Fair points, thanks. I'd have to discuss with the team if this is an option, ultimately. I can promise that if we ever did go away, I would certainly aim to opensource it (why not?) But as a company w/ investors, it's not a decision I can make myself right now ;)

Your welcome! I get that the service your providing is more than the sum of its code. Someone is doing the website, marketing, documentation, fixing bugs, keeping up with changes etc... not to mention paying the bills to reliably run the servers.

If you want my opinion, I would recommend finding a small area of your tech stack that you wish was better and starting an opensource project to solve that specific problem. No one expects twitter to give away their source code for their core product, but they do appreciate bootstrap and bower.js a whole lot.

That's a really good point -- I'm going to look for a way to do that.

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