The power of the RSS reader
marco.org
marco.org
I don't want to read professional writers who have to write their quota whether there is good material to write about or not on that day. They too often focus on gossip and sensationalism. Although I might be entertained briefly, in the end I will not have gained much from reading this type of articles and it's a waste of my time.
I want to read the authors who mostly spends their time doing things in their domain of expertise and get out of their lab/office/cave once in a while to write a post on something they feel is interesting and worth sharing. Because they are not frequent writers the prose might be dryer but the facts, ideas and insights are usually much better than what you get from those who's main job is writing.
I love insights that comes directly from an expert's keyboard. They are pearls of wisdom and it would be sad to lose them because of a decline in support for RSS.
Tumblr already has RSS features on the publishing side which means they don't lock in their users content in their platform. Imagine if facebook would allow their users's public posts to be viewable in g+. That's what Tumblr does.
Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.
Maybe the kids are on to something.
I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.
I may have missed something but I haven't seen some tumblr post posted on G+ via RSS (yet).
> Having RSS publishing is a good first step for an open and interoperable social platform. Add to that the ability to see all unread posts from a group of subscriptions and the ability to subscribe to outside rss feeds within Tumblr and you got yourself a very good social network/feed reader/blogging platform.
A good first step but they (facebook, twitter) all ended up removing it.
> Maybe the kids are on to something.
More like the parents (read: youngsters from the 2000) were on to something. I had high hopes for RSS and even higher for ATOM (I ended up writing my own flat-file blog system that only used ATOM documents as storage, I really liked it with the full xslt mumbo jumbo but in the end it's xml and that was it).
>I wonder if there is a business model for a social network that keeps posts in the open and encourages consumptions from outside platforms through rss.
Some tried to monetize RSS by adding ads in the feeds but that didn't take off. Reading a site's content only in the rss feed cuts off its authors from any kind of revenues (worse if the online reader displays its own add along the feeds).
I presented a project when I was a student. It consisted of a website that offered any registered user to transform the RSS/ATOM feeds they would have supplied into a mini updated WAP-enabled website for browsing the feeds on those old nokia of the 2000s. It was nice and all but when one of my advisors asked me "how would you turn it into something profitable or how would you bring it to the market?" all I could say was "this would never work because nobody with profits on his mind is promoting webfeeds".
I though the news-publishing industry would use RSS as a kind of copy-pasta medium but it doesn't look like things are going this way (at least not on the public side of things).
RSS (and ATOM because "i want to believe") isn't dead but I am not convinced it's going to make a come-back on any for-profit social network.
But for the kind of sites Marco mentions (which I read most of, actually) that update on a semi-daily or weekly basis, RSS readers are perfect because I don't want to go and visit those pages individually just to see they don't have any updates. Typically those sites are narrowly-focused personal/organizational blogs in areas I am interested in.
I do have a way of using it productively with high-volume sites. Specifically, I read some of reddit via RSS. Sometimes I go deep into a project, and avoid distractions for quite a while. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on the zeitgeist. So I set up an RSS feed that takes the top n items over a certain period - for example, the top 3 weekly stories from proggit.
Then when I'm done the project I can go back and see what important items from the group discussion I've missed. Basically just turn a constant stream into a small amount of the best content that I don't want to miss.
Oh, I really like that idea. how do you set up that feed?
You just add .rss to the url you get when browsing, before the args.
Then I used yahoo pipes to extract the top 3 items from that feed. I take the output of the yahoo pipe as input for my RSS reader, which collapses duplicates. I used google reader, so I didn't even need to open up my RSS reader for the top items to accumulate.
Here's the URL of the top 2 daily proggit posts: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ee7c0181150e421fa...
I've also used it for Craigslist searches and store updates when items go on sale, which are infrequent enough that I would miss them unless I checked every day.
I would like to use RSS to grab frequently updated tech news, but in a separate bucket that doesn't count as "unread". I'd rather strip out the site design and just focus on the content. That's what news is, right?
For instance, if I read something at home that I want to share with the crew at work, I'll star it. Likewise, if I come across something at work that really doesn't apply to my job, but it's still interesting, I'll star it so I won't forget to read it at home.
Granted, those functions are not part & parcel to RSS readers, but it's one way that a reader can be extended to offer value beyond the normal RSS featureset. Much like the "note in Reader" feature, which I also used multiple times a day...
This lets me keep up with all of those low volume feeds, but also skim the daily news when I have time.
I also prune my feeds pretty aggressively.
This is probably a much fiddlier setup than most people will want, but really so is any RSS reader.
Years ago I came across someone's excellent strategy for organizing Google Reader under two top-level groups:
* Must Read
* Can Miss
The low-volume or high-importance feeds go into "Must Read" and the rest goes into "Can Miss".. Can Miss is for skimming, for catching up on the last few days of high-volume feeds or just for finding something to read through when I'm bored..
I regularly hit "Mark all as Read" on the "Can Miss" group, and I don't feel bad about it for a second, nor do I feel like I am somehow using RSS incorrectly.
But the "Must Read" label contains feeds that I really want to make sure I read all of, or don't miss anything from.. Like infrequently updated blogs, security update RSS feeds, some serial web comics or web shorts, etc.. In the last several years I don't think I've even once hit "Mark all as Read" in that label.
So while I agree that if your current approach to RSS is leading you to ignore most of what ends up in your reader, you might need a different approach, but that approach doesn't have to be "don't use RSS".
http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/1528/imageiq.png
I read all the things in the "Interesting" label, they get one new item once every few days at most.
In the mass news section, I keep up to date with the first site but all others I only check up infrequently (hence they regularly get to 1000+ and I don't mind, that's normal).
And the Occasional label is kinda in between, but in reality I don't really read anything there anymore.
It's a common complaint about Twitter that once you start following a few people who produce high volumes of crap, it becomes useless. The usual advice is to be quick to unfollow, but I've always missed a "must read" feature for Twitter, to specially mark those few people where you really do want to see every single tweet.
A volume slider per feed, and perhaps also a global one.
If a feed is posting too much stuff, but I still like some of the stuff on it, I'd prefer not to unsubscribe if I had a better option.
If I notice a feed getting a bit noisy, I'd like to open a view for that feed, with titles and timestamps. Then I'd just move a slider and watch stuff drop out, until I've turned it down to a volume I can handle.
Hopefully, the lower-signal items will drop out of view first and the higher-signal items last. The more data available for making these rankings, the better. Comment counts or scores from the hosting site should help. So should links/shares/likes/comments across the major social networks.
I like the volume slider ideal; I that you could leverage social media outlets as a scoring system. (I'd include HN in that - the more points, the higher the score.) That could give you a nice way to "bump up" the things past some "volume" you haven't seen in priority.
I don't like the idea of "just don't subscribe"; why can't the tool figure this out for me?
Edit: "aren't nice" -> "aren't that nice". I do think counts are useful, just far, far from perfect. What I find myself dong is finding a feed with unread items, skimming, then marking all as read. (Well, when I use Reader, sigh.)
I used to have a ton of unread items sitting in the feed reader; now everything is either immediately discarded or immediately shunted into Pocket. (A good phone interface for me might be: swipe left = discard, swipe right = send to view-later service of choice and discard. Fast!)
Of course, that means I now have a ton of unread stuff sitting in Pocket. So I think services in that category could benefit from this kind of scoring too. I can see my Pocket stuff in reverse chronological order. I'd love a really intelligent, adaptive “sort by magic” for that big bucket.
You suggested using HN as a source. That's absolutely along the lines I'm thinking. It's like this: every site can be a source of stories, but every site should also be a potential source of scoring signals for stories -- either its own or elsewhere.
I for instance, can't be bothered to read all of Hacker News. So I read only the posts that have 150 points or more, via http://hckrnews.com/ (a by-points curator) in the form of an RSS feed.
Firefox isn't very well suited for keeping up with blogs and news sites like HN because it's so damn bloated and slow, and you can't really save any articles for later reading without upvoting, opening them in a new tab, or bookmarking them. Bookmarks in Firefox are a total pain in the ass, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I already have more than enough tabs open, and don't want to waste more keeping some possibly interesting article waiting for me.
In my RSS reader (Newsbeuter[1]), all I have to do to save an article for later reading is not delete it. It will remain marked as new and I can read it later, at my leisure.
If I go for some days (or weeks) without reading HN at all, I can come back whenever I have time and still have all the articles waiting for me, instead of using HN's shitty time-limited "more.." prompt to painfully page through old articles.
Some years back, there were even a couple of "HN Full Feed" RSS feeds that would show the entire linked article in each RSS item, so I could read it in my RSS reader instead of having to click through to some crappily designed website and get pissed off at how long Firefox took to load it.
RSS is really one of the very best ways to read virtually any blog or news site, whether there are a ton of new items per day (like HN), or whether it's some little blog that's updated once every few years, or anywhere in between.
check out http://www.readability.com/addons
That's a curious blind-spot.
1. "If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed." (emphasis mine) If you're skimming all the items in a feed and deriving value from it, this piece of advice doesn't apply.
2. "RSS works best when following a large number of infrequently updated sites." Works best, not only works.
3. "It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm [...] because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets." It's not enough, not that it's categorically not valuable.
The whole article dovetails nicely with Instapaper's purpose, which is to ensure you don't miss reading articles you find important. Relying solely on a river of news that's filled with high volume sources leads to a high chance of missing stuff you otherwise want to keep close tabs on. Pretty uncontroversial stuff.
These sorts of prescriptive statements don't read as "I see the value others may derive from other use cases." They explicitly read as "I don't see the value" and "I've looked and I don't think it exists."
Further, using an RSS reader to skim a frequently-updated site, of which I read only a few articles, is precisely the point.
High quantities of postings exacerbates the flaws of their designs. But with RSS, it's easy to skim pages of headlines. After a long weekend I can deal with hundreds of unread articles precisely because I'm interested in so little.
If there were aggregating services that delivered what I was looking for, I'd certainly prefer that. But I haven't found them.
From the article: The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere.
I feel like I've been shouting this into the void over the last few days of RSS-related submissions, but RSS is not best suited as a news-discovery paradigm. Aggregators like HN or Reddit serve that purpose. RSS's sweet spot is tracking deeper content on niche sites or topics that don't get swept up in hype mills, and if you're interested in more than two or three blogs or sites like that, RSS is essentially the way to track that content. Being able to share that and discuss with a select group of people was icing on the cake that Google Reader added.
Without seeming overly defensive about it, I feel like everyone who dismisses RSS lately with "that's what HN is for" has never used RSS in the way that many of us find indispensable.
I think it's a different model of consumption. HN/Reddit is browsing, "let's see what the chatter by the watercooler is today". RSS is "I am more than casually interested in particular content and want to be notified of updates".
Different people internet differently
1. Following a user on reddit via rss:
http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama/.rss
2. Following a search term on reddit via rss:
http://www.reddit.com/search/.rss?q=manbearpig
3. Checking a mailinator throwaway email via rss:
http://www.mailinator.com/rss.jsp?email=webmaster
4. Google Alerts (RIP.)
Now I don't have to check anything these days, except my email, which of course I check everyday anyhow!
Moreover, one of the great benefits of RSS is that it is customizable and one's reading experience pertains specifically and only to them. With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the newsletter editor. This is not to say that newsletters aren't valuable. Their spontaneity and conciseness provides a great reading experience. (Although, I think Twitter is superior at this type of thing anyway.)
But, given the idiosyncrasies of newsletters, I just don't believe that they are tenable alternatives to RSS. Those who want to read a lot of content from an eclectic array of specific sources still need something like RSS.
With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the newsletter editor.
This is part of the appeal for many non-power readers. The majority are not particularly interested in curating or even controlling their sources and are happy to outsource it to either trusted editors (see almost the entire print media or something like Techmeme) or the "cloud" (e.g. Reddit or Hacker News).
For my part, it's a lot of browsing, including places like Hacker News and Reddit, and notably a lot of great things get submitted to HN but never get any votes.. those are always the coolest finds. There are also a lot of Twitter users to follow who produce content and tweet about it. I also get a lot of direct e-mails from people who create things, perhaps a third of links come via outreach from authors.. but that's the sort of thing that only happens after you've been doing it a while.
Take a slice en route and you have a business model.
...I feel like I should append this to the top comment so that it gets seen, heh. I'm not interested in doing this. Someone else do it.
I couldn't disagree with this post more. I subscribe to a lot of sites that accumulate thousands of unread items. In fact, I could care less about read/unread toggle. My RSS is indeed a river, but it's a river that sometimes I plunge wholeheartedly into and devour large chunks, other times I merely skim for items of interest. Then there are spots in which most is completely ignored. But it's still there and given the magic of SEARCH, I can pull up all the articles for a topic of interest, confining my query to just those sites I have pre-declared an interest in.
So I like the mailbox metaphor for being able to quickly traverse items and skim item summaries, so the real payoff for me is not just the increased efficiency in reviewing so much more than could be done by visiting each site (or even in a magazine/mosaic format) but also a repository ready to serve up information for any topic that I wish to browse upon in a future moment.
I find that is the wrong way to adress the problem. A more useful solution seems to be a different way to structure an rss reader. Opera for example incorporates one that works alongside its email client. It fixes the issue by treating individual feeds as email folders which can be structured inside more folders and highlighting folders with unread contents as well as displaying their content counts.
This screenshow should demonstrate usefully how easy this makes it to notice new updates on low-frequency feeds while still allowing skimming of high-frequency ones without one interrupting the other:
Maybe give the option to accordion out a "100 tweets hidden" link.
I use River2 for my high volume feeds while I stick my rarely updated and "must read" feeds into NetNewsWire. Has been working pretty well for me so far.
When using NetNewsWire, I'm in "slow down mode" where just about every item (in theory) is important to me. But when I'm using River2, I'm in "scan and click mode" and just trying to see what the latest news is.
Using separate applications like this helps keep me "in the zone."
If I were to put high volume feeds in NetNewsWire the temptation to read all the posted items would be too great. In River2, items older than three hours just drop off the page. There's no "unread count" or "read older items" button to tempt you.
The death of newsgroups, was also the death of an structured, parseable discussion forum, where the end user had the final say on how they'd see the discussion. Nowadays, we need moderators and the forum software on the server to re-implement these things that newsreaders had worked out.
I've setup my own ttrss instance, and it has some basic scoring abilities. Unfortunatly not all rss feeds provide the text of the article (or even the lede) in the feed directly, so the scoring ends up crippled.
Now when I want to see the current state of affairs in Ineternet Explorer security issues, I can simply search for "Internet Explorer" in my RSS reader. I am then presented with the traffic on the latest issues, their possible resolutions, and even possibly the person who discovered the issue.
The beauty of RSS is that it lets me decide what it will be, and when I want it to be that way.
Everytime I feel that my feed reader is overloaded, I write down every site that I follow, and decide about which sites I really care, and which sites i can easily unsubscribe without problems. I also try to remove sites that post the same thing (this happen a lot with news sites).
If the need for RSS reader remains, then others will simply fill the GR niche?
Actually, this could be an interesting feature of an RSS client. If the user keeps marking items of a feed as read, either put the feed in silent mode (no longer shows up in inbox) or lower the relevance of its items so that they go down the list (if the items are sorted by relevance).
The problem of obscure, rarely updated blogs with fantastic information (but no reader base) is plainly evident here. I can think of a blogger who is a fixture on "who's who" lists, but publishes a blog so ill-trafficked you can hear the crickets chirping. There are hundreds of these guys.
I'm at work on a finance-specific version of this. Hopefully we can announce something before the readerpocalypse.
Personally, my Google Reader has a folder for 'rarely updated', which I usually check first. Then I have the 'All Items' sorted by magic and skim the first few pages or so for things that strike me as interesting. Then I mark all as read.
As a consumer, set up a Twitter account dedicated to reading "long tail" low volume twitter feeds or use a fancy Twitter client like Tweetbot that manages lists.
Twitter has none of that.
I have folders in Tiny Tiny RSS that never accumulate more than a couple of unread items, and I have a folder with 22000 unread items, it works just fine.