One point I am missing on the whole "RSS is dead, long live Twitter" topic are their differences on the technological and on the legal side.
RSS is an open protocol, free for everyone to implement either way, producing or consuming, filtering or aggregating. Twitter and Facebook offer access to their feeds via their API, which you can only use when you agree to their terms of service. And they retain the right to change the API any time or to restrict access at their own sole disgression.
RSS is free as in freedom, Twitter and Facebook are not. And that alone is a good reason to keep RSS around.
RSS is free as in freedom, Twitter and Facebook are not. And that alone is a good reason to keep RSS around.
Yes, exactly! When I first heard someone suggest that Twitter was the replacement for RSS, I thought "oh really? so Twitter is now a protocol anyone can use?" And the answer is no - you have to register with Twitter. And no, I'm not going to sign up with Twitter or Facebook. There's a reason I run my own web and email server - I like my independence and not relying on some company that's trying to milk my personal info for all it's worth. I'm really surprised that these supposedly rugged individuals are so quick to toe the corporate line of Twitter and Facebook. But then again, it's always been the case that the market follows what it thinks is the cause of success, ergo we have everyone hawking closed protocols and walled gardens. They might be wise to remember that AOL was a walled garden with closed protocols too.
Edit to cleanup and followup: So RSS supposedly has problems; I can't tell, as I don't much care about UI (except CLI), and to be honest, Liferea+Firefox under Debian stable works pretty well for me. Who knows, maybe I'll be pissed at the changes come the next major upgrade, but this would lead me to think that RSS is not broken and not the problem; the client software is. And at least I have the source and a choice when it comes to RSS. Facebook and Twitter, not so much.
Sure, but your missing the point. RSS is also an ecosystem. If there are no producers, or readers, there are no consumers. If the ecosystem goes away people won't use RSS anymore. Making it effectively dead.
No, I don't believe jsilence missed the point at all. In fact, that point is the most important one: if all RSS feeds died tomorrow, I would still be able to re-create them on my own machine by periodically polling every single website that I care about.
Now if that sounds like a monster waste of bandwidth, it should: the publishers get something from this deal, too.
Plus they get readership, because I use RSS to remind me that there are articles on the web that I want to read.
When I want snippets, FB and Twitter are great. When I want to see what my friends think are important, and use their filtering, the social nets are great.
But when I want the firehose of a select group of sites organized around a concept, and when I want to see EVERYTHING they have... there is no substitute for a good RSS reader and an organized feed list. And since I found Feeddler (http://www.chebinliu.com/projects/iphone/feeddler-rss-reader...) for my ipad/iphone and dumped the overhyped Reeder and "social magazine" formats like Feedly, I find that I can catch all the things that my social network, love them though I do, miss. And they miss a lot.
I still use reader.google, though I miss Bloglines, for my online reading. That is an area ripe for improvement (aggregating duplicate posts, Techmeme-like threading of topics across multiple blogs, per-feed filters to remove posts that are not on topic without forcing you to drop the entire feed, etc.) but I don't expect to see much coming. BTW, Google Reader has some great keyboard commands if you haven't discovered them yet that make flying through content much easier.
Am I an old fashioned stubborn old coot, hanging on to dead technology? Well sure, just like those of us still using email and sms. Oh, didn't you hear? Both of those were declared dead a few years ago as well. Come on, one and all, join my club of "using uncool tech but still enjoying it".
>Come on, one and all, join my club of "using uncool tech but still enjoying it".
How much for an annual membership?
Honestly, for a lot of these things, I think news of their death has been greatly exaggerated. Though it would be nice to take this opportunity to fix some of the problems that pundits keep pointing to while shouting their demise from the rooftops.
When I launched my first website about 15 years ago (a Fallout walkthrough site, if you must know), I used to discover new referrals and links every time I checked my analytics.
These days, even though my blog gets the same traffic in one day that my first sites got in one year, my referral logs look strangely empty. All the traffic comes from Twitter, Facebook, HN, and nobody manually links to anything from their blog anymore.
I think this shows a partial transfer of content from blogs and sites to social networks, and RSS has been hurt by this move.
Add to this the fact that the whole user experience about RSS has always been mediocre at best, and outright bad nowadays. It takes me something like 5 or 6 clicks to add a RSS feed to Google Reader, and that's after installing a Chrome extension.
So yeah, RSS will never die. But that's only because it's already a zombie.
Well, what I find depressing about RSS is that it's been around for 10+ years and there's been no real innovation.
There are two user interfaces seen in RSS readers: (i) show headlines from multiple blogs in their own little windows, (ii) show headlines from all blogs in one big mess.
It's always seemed possible that you could have a better user interface, or that machine learning could be used to pick out stuff you're actually interested in -- but no, it's never happened. Every so often some organization would come out with a new RSS reader and it was always the same boring stuff.
(In fact, Andraz and the guys at Zemanta have a lot of experience with content analysis and they can't even find anything interesting to say about this subject... That's the point, nobody's even trying to make a better RSS reader)
Now, to be fair, most of the alternatives aren't much better. Twitter makes no attempt to be discriminative (and with the short stimulus, filtering Twitter might be tough.) Facebook seems to have some sense of priority over what it shows you, but it doesn't give you a lot of control.
What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
> What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
There are already a number of these: different planet* aggregators for technologies, longreads for "longer pieces", etc...
A single aggregator? The world does not need it, because it's absolutely worthless and makes little to no sense. I probably don't want to read what you want to, and neither does the next guy.
> If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription
There's a reason why newspaper are dying: by and large, people are not going to pay for a newspaper subscription.
I definitely agree that personalization is the key - but on an individual basis.
That is the focus of our company - and why we feel RSS won't die - but its role will evolve as more info is consumed via Twitter/ etc/ etc - ignoring the social signs(data) readers/ users provide doesn't make much sense.
But personalization should always be an option - because the firehose is still very useful
UI #2 works for me: one big list of things I probably want to read. If your feed reader looks like "one big mess", maybe you should unsubscribe from some of the noisier feeds before reaching for machine learning.
Alternatively, use folders. Have a "quiet" folder with all the slow feeds you follow closely, and a "noisy" folder for all the feeds you just skim.
FriendFeed was/is an innovation in RSS reading. It has a real-time web interface and uses your friends to surface interesting material. It has smart handling of Media RSS and geoRSS.
Interesting concept. If you don't mind, some comments on your site/service:
1. The slides on the main page aren't showing up for me in FF or Chrome.
2. You're targeting avid readers, and are trying to save them time, but you're pushing video how-to's? Text + screen shots, please! (Or maybe A/B testing will prove me wrong)
3. Why are all the images of articles tilted and in such small font? I want to see how well your service works for me, and what's better than reading an article it's analyzed?
4. Your how-to for RSS scares me a bit. It goes by so fast, and I have to copy-paste URLs? I have to find RSS URLs that as this article mentions, are getting increasingly hard to find? I'm already subscribed via Google Reader. I could copy the URL from the 'Details and Statistics' of a feed, but why can't you use their API to bulk import my feeds (competitors to Reader do this). I'm not sure if you could automagically rewrite Reader subscription URLs once scraped, but it seems like the easiest option to me (as long as you have an intermediate page where I can exempt certain feeds.
5. Is there any way I can see the results of your bookmarklet on a few actual articles before signing up? Even if it's just a mirror of some popular articles with the highlighting precomputed, as long as it's the whole article. I feel like you have a lot of work to do to convince someone that they're not going to miss some crucial bit of information by ignoring what you don't highlight.
7. Why do I need to remember another username? Is this a 'social' service? You already have my email!
8. It doesn't seem to work with Readability
9. Why do you need to track me with cookies? You already have me running javascript on every page I use the bookmarklet on...but I appreciate being told about them
10. How are you going to make money?
(just used the bookmarklet on this Wired article[1] currently on the front page of HN. Very surreal. And I'm not sure if I got the main point of the article or not...)
1. my bad. I was doing some optimizations on the web server (via http://gtmetrix.com ). Now it should work
2. true! received same feedback yesterday. will change.
3. just thought it would look better. but that doesn't mean better experience. will change them (for bigger images just click them)
4. originally KeenSkim was built for RSS feeds. After starting the alpha testing we pivoted to the webpage bookmarklet. It works so well that we didn't improve the RSS part. To be fixed in the next weeks (opml support)
5. Not yet but great idea! we'll do that
7. It's not social (not built with this intention in mind, but could be). Social auth and simpler login are in the top 3 priorities after stabilizing the summarization algorithm
8. will look on that
9. the cookies are for the site, not the bookmarklet (cross-domain calls). It's mainly for login (standard Django). Does it bother you in any specific way?
10. mainly a freemium approach. the exact business model is not clear (we'll test it after we get an idea about usage, costs, growth, ...). Do you have anything in mind?
About the results: there are pages on which it work good, on some pages great and on some really bad. The problem on this article is that it has several story-lines and KeenSkim doesn't work well on that (interviews, lists, tutorials won't be properly summarized)
EDIT: There is still space for improving the service. That's priority no. 1
3. It might be good to keep the tilted pics in the slideshow, and straight pictures (or actual text) elsewhere. Or maybe tilted everywhere! I can tell you what bothers me, but what really matters is how many clickthroughs you get, right?
7. IMO, it shouldn't be social (how would it be?) so no usernames are necessary, but I'm probably not your average user. Nor have I ever created an online service/business, so keep that in mind when following my advice.
9. I don't know about bothered, since I have cookies enabled for everything else. It'd be less weird if you made it clear the cookie didn't track me across other sites,
10. No, just want to make sure you're thinking about it before possibly getting attached to a service that might not survive (e.g. you get bought and the buyer shuts it down). If I found the service useful (and especially if I were a CEO/executive, I think), I would love to pay for it, either a 1-time fee (like I did with Pinboard.in), or yearly subscription. Crazy idea: maybe you could license the software to news sites so they can have built-in highlighting with the click of a link (similar to 'print-friendly' links every article has)
My RSS reader has few enough feeds that I've been able to read them all, but I've been careful to only add feeds that I could keep up with (with keenskim, that might change). Other than that, I stick to the top of HN.
I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS. While I do agree it's too complicated for the mainstream, for people who know what RSS is, I always though that it was clearly better than Twitter/Facebook. You have a lot more control with RSS feeds. I have over 100 feeds, there's some feeds where I truly care about the content and will always what to know when there's new content. There are other feeds where I might check them out in detail if I'm bored, but most likely I'll just skim through them. With twitter this kind of prioritization is simply not possible, there is only chronological order, and it's very likely that I would miss some of the stuff I care about.
Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content. With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as well.
For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.
[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative. Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]
I agree with the fact that RSS is not a good protocol. But as you said unfortunately there's no alternative. I guess what really surprised me is that people consider Twitter/Facebook an alternative to RSS.
the <cloud> element solves the problem of polling, it lets you subscribe to feed-updated notifications and read the feed only when it changes.
also, Atom has threading and RSS has some community efforts underway to make "replies" decentralized and aggregable (new word) http://xmlns.inreplyto.me/
Somewhat appropriate catchphrase from Martin's "Game of Thrones":
> What is dead may never die.
RSS carries on, but so do mailing lists, newsgroups, bookmarks etc. People claiming that Twitter will replace or has replaced RSS generally don't make universal claims. Niche use remains; question is, where does the mainstream flow.
We're building a brand new HTML5-powered client-side mobile app, and it depends on RSS. Because the RSS feeds are already there, and it makes a whole lot of sense for our use case (displaying multiple streams of different types of media). Twitter just wouldn't cut it.
> No pressure. It’s all going to be here tomorrow, a week from now ... even a month.
> By the way, anything older than a week or two stops existing on Twitter.
Great point. One of the most annoying things about organizing articles based on a single timeline like Twitter is that old stuff gets pushed into oblivion too quickly. Most of these don't use pagination either, so I need to scroll like crazy and wait for AJAX to catch up if I want to go back more than a few days.
Sure, you could do search, but how do you search for something you don't even know exists? Like a blog post that appeared two weeks ago while I wasn't looking. With any half-decent RSS reader, each blog gets its own section, so articles don't get lost in the noise even if Blog A only publishes once a month and Blog B publishes twice a day. Even if Blog C only publishes once a year, the little "(1)" next to its name will stay there even if I miss it by several months.
Not all of us are always looking for the latest news from the last 30 minutes. I routinely read articles from several years ago, sometimes even from the previous millennium. Any method of finding and organizing articles that makes it difficult for me to figure out what happened last year is not welcome in my mind.
RSS will die if isolated blogs à la Wordpress die. RSS is a solution to the problem of following those isolated blogs. Collective platforms like Tumblr or Facebook solve this problem by featuring an integrated reader. There are other solutions like using Twitter to notify the availability of new posts.
Is an interesting thought experiment. In one stroke Google could wipe out a large tent pole for the RSS eco system. Wouldn't that effectively make RSS dead?
Not only do people use Google Reader as means to read RSS,
way to many RSS Readers use Google Reader as the crawling infrastructure for there app.(Newsblur being a notable exception). So killing google reader would pwn a large number of apps.
After the main support is gone, why would you build RSS into your product at all? Can RSS, that is propped up by one tenuous pole, last forever?
Probably people who are using RSS will switch to some alternative client/reader and learn an important lesson about relying on "free" services.
why would you build RSS into your product at all?
The problem RSS is trying to solve, being informed about new articles (and remembering which ones you've already read), still needs some alternative solution. Neither twitter nor facebook are providing one.
I think as long as there is no superior way to keep up with different sources of information, RSS will stay alive.
Twitter was designed for a process of acquiring information, results (the information itself) are irrelevant. RSS was designed for results, the process of acquiring them is irrelevant.
In other words - in Twitter what matters is When and How, not What. In RSS it is the opposite - What matters, not When or How.
RSS will be just like now for years. Twitter will be indefinitely more popular all that time until any moment in the future more trendy network will emerge all every one will leave the ship in months. And probably no one will compete with RSS. It is like a Unix tool - no point in touching it, if it works.
For those in this thread that are complaining about RSS UI and lack of better way of consuming RSS content, we were trying to address some problems with consuming information when oversubscribing to RSS feeds in Smart Reader. Please check it out and provide any feedback :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895662
So many of these posts are comparing Twitter to RSS. How the hell is Twitter (a single provider streaming 140-character messages) anything like RSS (a way to collect arbitrary data from many providers). Oranges are dead because everyone uses Apples these days.
RSS is an open protocol, free for everyone to implement either way, producing or consuming, filtering or aggregating. Twitter and Facebook offer access to their feeds via their API, which you can only use when you agree to their terms of service. And they retain the right to change the API any time or to restrict access at their own sole disgression.
RSS is free as in freedom, Twitter and Facebook are not. And that alone is a good reason to keep RSS around.