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.<p>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.<p>RSS is free as in freedom, Twitter and Facebook are not. And that alone is a good reason to keep RSS around.
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.<p>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 (<a href="http://www.chebinliu.com/projects/iphone/feeddler-rss-reader/" rel="nofollow">http://www.chebinliu.com/projects/iphone/feeddler-rss-reader...</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>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".
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.<p>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.<p>I think this shows a partial transfer of content from blogs and sites to social networks, and RSS has been hurt by this move.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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)<p>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.<p>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?
I use RSS since 2005 and it's my primary learning source. Twitter is better for seeing "trending topics" but doesn't replace RSS.<p>Problem: too much <i>good</i> info to read(it's not the format but the tools for consuming it).<p>Solution: built an automatic summarizer: <a href="https://www.keenskim.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.keenskim.com</a> (works for webpages also). No more "read it later", but <i>right now</i>.
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.
Somewhat appropriate catchphrase from Martin's "Game of Thrones":<p><pre><code> > What is dead may never die.
</code></pre>
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.
How do you think podcasts get broadcasted? RSS baby.<p>I listen to podcasts all the time, and you sure can't find that type of information on twitter or anywhere else.<p>As long as podcasts live on, so will RSS.
> <i>No pressure. It’s all going to be here tomorrow, a week from now ... even a month.</i><p>> <i>By the way, anything older than a week or two stops existing on Twitter.</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Solutions die if the problems die.
Google Kils Google Reader<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?
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 :-) <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895662" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3895662</a>
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.
We just made a new RSS reader, please check it out and let us know what you think! <a href="http://readnewswire.com" rel="nofollow">http://readnewswire.com</a>
(still very much WIP)