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.
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.