The most interesting part of the article (which is well-written and thought-provoking) isn't the mildly alarmist "regressive web" assertion, but the insight that Reader may have been killed because it was strategically opposed to Google's mission as it enters the mass-market phase of its growth.<p>Which mirrors the developmentally mass-market phase of the growth of the internet itself.<p>That doesn't necessarily mean that niche tools won't continue to be available to interested specialists. Ham radio kits are still around, right?<p>I'm not sure that the macro view of the web is as bleak as it seems. We're seeing mass-market effects take hold in our playground, which is a bummer, but we're also seeing mass-market adoption of tools which help keep information democratized and flowing freely in multiple directions, which is an improvement on the past 2000 years.
Those services are regressing because the general population of users is no longer dominatated by people who <i>like to read</i>. As mainstream consumers flooded onto the internet over the past decade, the demographic changed. Services that give you a lot of stuff to read, no matter how nicely delivered, are not the the services the mainsteam consumers want.
I don't think we are regressing because the AOL of olden days was an indicator of why the Flipboards of today is successful and why Google Reader is dead. We were never progressing to begin with because the mass was not interested in curating their own, rather, they are happy with the apps buttons, the beautiful looking magazines and what not.
One other form of regression: people navigating the web through custom apps on their phone, like "Hail a Cab" or "Shop at Target." The whole idea of the web was to create a neutral platform so that custom software wasn't needed. In addition, this is raising a generation who are illiterate of general computer principles, but have lots of brain-space for specific apps. "I'm really good with Hail a Cab!"
This isn't regression: it's <i>progress</i>. Alerts and Reader didn't fly - not because it didn't work - but because it <i>wasn't worth doing</i>.<p>There is an implicit assumption, perhaps borne out of the relatively 'youth' of the information sector that the only criteria for a successful idea is that it's "good". There are plenty of examples of inventions, ideas or concepts that seem destined to succeed and yet, in the long run, prove unsustainable or unsuitable to break through to a wider market.<p>Reader and Alerts would appear to be classic examples. Highly marginal services (srsly), filling a specialised but unloved niche (sry), for a set of low value customers (orly). And before anyone starts that up again, talk of "alienating the influencers" is highly exaggerated. Google's influencers are low-fi, not the tech-l33t, as much as it might pain HN.
This reminds me of a Dilbert comic. To paraphrase:<p>Boss: "We need to decentralize to remove bottlenecks."<p>[later]<p>Boss: "We need to centralize to improve efficiency."
Am I the only one who feels like the web is making a transition from being more like a library to being more like television?<p>The more content is sliced up into little digestible chunks and spread across multiple pages the less useful it is. There will always be great content online, it just seems like it might get harder and harder to find on sites whose layout is driven by pageviews.
This post ignores one fact: VCs did, in fact, throw millions at Reader-like services and competitors a few years ago, when the RSS scene was hot. Most of them went nowhere, the luckiest got acquired.<p>A few lifestyle businesses will forever chug along on a few million hardcore fans like me; nevertheless, the overall technology in its current incarnation is an evolutionary dead-end: it's heavy on resources (all that bandwidth!), fundamentally uni-directional and too user-unfriendly to break into the mainstream.<p>We need to ditch RSS and the current breed of pub/sub tools, rebuild them from scratch with monetization and aggregation in mind (while maintaining a fundamentally decentralised approach), and only then we'll be able to build an ecosystem of easy-to-use apps that can self-sustain in the long run.
Everything goes in cycles of human attention span. Technologies become tired and "crufty" because maintainers get bored with them and want the new hotness. This is nothing new and the up-and-down cycle will continue happening over and over. Witness desktop Linux, which has been around for a few decades and yet to this day is constantly being torn down and rebuilt anew because the maintainers (and users!) become too familiar with the problems the technology solves and want a new thing to play with.
The article is very true. But this happens everywhere, when a short term commercial interest is more important than user experience and solution of users problems. Take this hardware example. My moms favourite iron is a heavy chunk of metal with no self adjustments, regulations and it does not switch itself off. It is 55 yrs old. It just works. My wife changes modern irons every 2-3 years. It pushes economy forward.
It's really all about curation. Early on, it was yahoo's attempt to put all web content in a big hierarchy. dmoz after that. Then RSS let people curate their own content. Now people subscribe to friends that post interesting things. I don't think the appetite for curation has decreased - it's just that the best method of curation subtly changes as content generation styles change.
What about new sites like Instapaper and Newsblur?<p>And Digg (OK, OK), Reddit, Hacker News?<p>We're losing some things and gaining others. The web isn't regressing, it's evolving.
RSS specifically is being replaced by reddit and well.. HN. The leading edge of people who adopted and used it, people like us have moved to HN and subreddits, I'm not sure outside our demographic rss ever caught on to any great extent. Whereas reddit especially is becoming popular with a much wider range of people.
With regards to Google Alerts, wouldn't it be pretty easy to set up a scheduled task using any decent scripting language (or even just standard unix utilities) to just read a text file of search-terms, scrape the results on Google, and email you the results?<p>HN Challenge: Do the above, in any language, in the smallest number of lines. I have a feeling it can be achieved in one, so we may need to judge by number of characters :-)<p>And sorry, I don't see discontinuing Google Reader as the death of RSS, no matter what the author may feel. It's really just the death of a nice RSS reader. I do however feel that the author is correct in saying that RSS is not really compatible with Google's advertising business.
I wonder if you could create a service which uses RSS, serves ads and gives back royalties to the services subscribed. Think Spotify for RSS. The biggest obstacle would be creating an RSS tool usable enough so that people are willing to consume ads (or pay a (monthly?) fee) in exchange for a truly usable RSS reader.
Great article by Ryan! Had to post it. We actually interviewed him last year and some of his advice will be appearing in our book Accelerate that is currently 88% funded on KickStarter. <a href="http://kck.st/ZIgBXE" rel="nofollow">http://kck.st/ZIgBXE</a>.
Ironically it's published on a site that doesn't have an RSS feed (or atom, remember that debate) published. which is a shame really as the content on medium is usually pretty good but I'll hardly ever remember to go back on a regular basis.
It is not just things disappearing with no alternative, it is new "innovations" that are less capable than their predecessors.<p>-We don't have Flash or Silverlight anymore, we just have HTML5/JS/CSS.<p>~Well HTML5 is brand new and must be superior to those others right?<p>-No Both can do all that HTML5 can do and a lot more. Flash could do everything 8 years ago that HTML5 can do today.<p>~Well can I create my own Markup Language and alternative to HTML5/JS/CSS?<p>-You can, but most people will spit on you - leave the "innovation" up to the committee. Standard are all that matter to anyone. Just go along with the crowd and be a code monkey, Stick your ambition and innovations into a bottle.<p>~Is there really no way I can create my own Browser client technology?<p>-Well, there is one way. Just create your innovative/bleeding edge concept - then make it compile down to JavaScript. That is the only way.<p>~Wow, that sounds like a workaround/hack just to try bringing new and better ideas to web development. It still gets around the limitations, but sounds very daunting and a like a huge pain in the ass.<p>-Yeah - I think that this is the idea. Rather than creating a standard for HTML5 AND some sort of VM/API that others can use to create innovative and better technologies. The standards guys' strategy is to remain in a position of power (though it stifles innovation).<p>~So if I made a suggestion to the consortium to create something like you suggested, do you think that they might listen to me? I really am brimming with GREAT ideas.<p>-HAHAHA...