Rest in Peace, RSS

I found this really ironic because I actually came across this article in my RSS reader. I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

i like how RSS is dead because this one guy doesn't open up google reader anymore.

in other news: i've never visited austrailia, so i posit it no longer exists.

What's the point of this article? It's as if the author wrote it just because he had to write something, much like how the talkative guy talks about the most useless things just for the sake of talking.

You know how fortune cookie fortunes are better if you add "in bed" to the end of them? New rule: add "for me" to every blog post title.

Following up on that...

I'd like an intelligent RSS reader that aggregated information from various social sites to tell me which posts are worth reading, preferably normalized based on the number of readers, so I don't get a zillion Engadget posts and zero niche blogs.

The data could come from links from my friends on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Delicious, etc (after following shortened URL redirects, of course. sigh), top posts on social news sites I read (namely Hacker News and the various sub-Reddits I'm subscribed to), etc.

It would cross-reference all that data with the RSS feeds I'm actually subscribed to, and present me with ranked list of unread articles, so I can read through the best articles first, and ignore the rest if I don't have time.

Separately it could suggest a few other articles on sites I'm not subscribed to, but might be interested in, also based on all of the above data.

Ideally it would be be "passive", not requiring manual interaction to "train" it, other than looking at my subscribed feeds. If there were some more advanced "learning" aspect to it, it could heavily weight my own actions on social sites, i.e. voting up articles on social news sites, linking to articles, etc.

This is what happens when people who used to report on the news, think they are creating the news. Gillmor has an acute version of this disease, as is highly evident from his Gillmor Gang podcast.

What we have here is a wonderful example of filter failure.

See this link: http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/

It's a video of Clay Shirky's web2expo keynote titled "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure."

Here's what's happening: For every wonderful blog post there are several mediocre ones. And when you oversubscribe to RSS feeds, which many of us do, you start drowning in a flood of posts you don't feel like reading.

Links you get on Twitter, on the other hand, are already pre-filtered. Somebody must have already read the article and decided it's worth sharing. You also know from previous experience who is sharing good links and who is sharing crap, so you know whose links are worth clicking.

But this can only work as long as some people keep on reading lots of articles and only share the good ones. You're not gonna get any new links once everyone decides to abandon RSS and only read articles shared by people they follow on Twitter.

Some people may like the "firehose" method of getting their news through Twitter, but I still prefer the asynchrony of RSS readers for everything except perhaps breaking news.

It seems like the author is being satirical, but there are people that really do think this way.

Definitely some fluff in the article, but I think his point is simply: "RSS is too slow".

I think this is solvable. One option:

http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com

This stream-of-consciousness style of writing is a sure sign of a fluff piece.

Narrative is not a convincing argument, and two pages filled with "this is so" statements do not interest me.

Let's see how twitter manages through the valley of the shadow of spam. Hello, /Dani|Erica|Loni|Heather[A-Z][1-9]{4}/! Thanks for following me. Uh, not.

Any blogger who doesn't use RSS isn't worth reading, much less putting at the top of Hacker News.

This article is annoying, but I agree with the title - RSS never really lived up to its potential. Actually, scratch that - RSS was never the right tool anyway. Neither is twitter, for that matter. And Atom is cool but it's a solution looking for a problem.

What we need is real pub/sub for the internet. XMPP is a kind-of OK first stab but old, ugly and overly complex, AMQP is lovely locally but not really suited for consumers. I get the feeling we haven't cracked this particular nut yet.

And as for Twitter being a replacement for RSS - are you kidding? Is this guy really suggesting that every single RSS source in the world publish their entire feed to Twitter? That would actually be kind of funny, come to think of it. Hardly a solution, though.