I agree, but with a caveat.
Google closing reader wasn't RSS' tombstone, for sure.
Rss is stronger than ever and, as pointed out in the article, it's still widely used by small and big players on the Web.
Unfortunately Google Reader was the gateway into the RSS realm for those folks who just wanted a quick way to keep track of their news.
For those folks, who aren't certainly programmer nor can appreciate the subtleties of RSS' survival, RSS is definitively dead.
Those folks are the vast majority of Web users. I think we may say that the most popular front-end usage of RSS has died when Google closed reader.<p>I don't agree with the void-to-be-filled theory, because that void has been quickly filled already by Twitter, Facebook and other self-sufficing, closed and mind numbing services that have nothing to do with the fluid open nature of RSS. Many many users have quickly shifted to that mindset and they won't be back. Do you think those millions of BuzzFeed reader can give a crap about RSS?<p>So yeah, you can archive google reader closing shop in the "google's unforgivable mistake" directory.<p>Source: I'm a web editor (not for English speaking websites as you may have understood) since 2006. I've seen the shift all happen under my eyes. It's sort of disgusting.
If RSS "died" (and I don't think it did), then it was when the main browsers stopped showing the RSS icon next to the URL and started hiding RSS feeds and links.<p>From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients were designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ?<p>From a site perspective, most sites were stuffing the whole web page in each RSS article such that RSS was not a summary. Then they realised that people reading RSS weren't reading ads so they either killed RSS or made each article one line.<p>From a programmer perspective, writing an RSS client became a hello world of applications programming such that there were millions of very bad clients.<p>RSS is very much alive and very useful; but maybe RSS as we used to think of it is dead. It's a background thing that browsers and applications should make use of<p>I think the big challenge for RSS and the web in general is link rot.
I don't think very many people thought RSS "died", rather the _opportunity_ for RSS to become the dominant, cross-source publishing standard has died.<p>There used to be a world where all things on Twitter and Facebook were published to RSS feeds, drastically lowering the barriers to entry for experimenting with content consumption ideas, or cross-content aggregation, or personalization, etc.<p>There used to be a world where big, public technology players like Google and Firefox were helping on-board new users, and appeared to be making a long-term commitment to the technology. When Google Reader was a thing, the rate at which non-technical users in my personal network were starting to talk about RSS was astounding. And _everybody_ was thinking about whether or not RSS was a natural fit for their product/idea/platform/drone/toaster.<p>There was a moment in history where RSS was poised to become as ubiquitous as e-mail. But that opportunity was taken away, because the big tech companies either couldn't or wouldn't innovate on their business models, instead they're focused on the near-zero-sum game of user acquisition and retention.<p>A similar thing happened in the late 1990s with the major ISPs - AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy/etc actively encouraged you to only communicate in-network, e.g. how their chat clients initially worked. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for us), their core identity system was based on the already standardized technology of e-mail. And eventually the ability of others to provide better/different experiences via e-mail (Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, etc) changed how people viewed those networks.<p>This time around, the big tech companies are much more self-conscious regarding user base degradation, and the risks of having their core user experience compromised by out-of-network innovation. Consumers always lose this game.
Very well put!<p>My RSS reader (<a href="http://kouio.com" rel="nofollow">http://kouio.com</a> after Google's shut down) has always been my complete command centre:<p>- Google Alerts<p>- LinkedIn updates<p>- Every issue/comment/star on my Github projects<p>- The exact ages of my children every day (via <a href="http://howoldismykid.com" rel="nofollow">http://howoldismykid.com</a>)<p>- New questions per tag on stack overflow.<p>- New messages for individual Google Groups.<p>and so much more.<p>I was just lost when Google Reader shut down thinking I'd lose all that, RSS really is the universal API of web data.
I'm starting to that RSS isn't dead - it was just never alive in the sense that most people who say "RSS is dead" mean.<p>The majority of the population <i>does not</i> use RSS, <i>does not realize RSS exists</i>, and <i>does not care about RSS</i>. That's a fact, and has always been true and will likely remain true in the future.<p>When people say "RSS is dead", that's what they mean - it's a technology that never got a share of average users actually using it. So saying that RSS dies is ridiculous - by that definition, it was never alive.
I can't think of a better way for me to quickly browse hundreds of Web sources than RSS. Speed is key, and the option to save things of interest for deeper review later.<p>One of the things that made it hard to find a replacement for me for Reader was that so many new rss readers do too much while not offering a simple, compact list view.<p>As it happens I decided to go with The Old Reader despite some speed issues.
I have a side project that aggregates news for a sports team I follow. Over time I've been collecting RSS feeds from different sources on the internet related to this team.<p>I went back and validated whether the feeds were alive or not and about half of them are now defunct. The sites that removed them seem to have moved on to the main social networks as seen in the various chicklets in the page that accompany the articles.<p>I wonder if they no longer value RSS or if its getting killed in site redesigns? My suspicion is that not enough people use RSS to warrant providing that functionality. There seem to be too many steps for users to use RSS while it is easier to get that content by using something more "standard" like Facebook or Twitter.
RSS was never meant to be a product. It is a format and a spec. Products are built around the spec: apps that push it, clients that pull it. It has incredible value where machines speak to each other. Much of the 'dying' was fed by the deluge of RSS-as-product based companies that thrived at that time. Those companies and products probably are dead, but RSS is not. And that is not surprising; not at least for me.
"every major news site is broadcasting via RSS"<p>This is an exaggeration.<p>One of the biggest news sites in the world, bloomberg.com, serves up no RSS feeds.<p>Forbes.com doesn't have RSS anywhere on their home page, and has dropped it from, as far as I can tell, every single story page. They only have this page left: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.html</a> which is a dying collection of years old RSS links (on a page with an ancient template design).<p>I deal with RSS feeds a lot in my business, and many of the top sites are a mess when it comes to keeping their feeds properly linked to their site structures as they update.
I actually use Digg (<a href="http://digg.com/reader" rel="nofollow">http://digg.com/reader</a>) for my RSS needs. (Remember Digg?, right?)
I rarely find a site I want to subscribe to that lacks a feed.<p>An easy way to find RSS feeds in Firefox (this still works in FF 24 ESR, at least):<p>1) Click View > Toolbars > Customize<p>2) Find the RSS icon; drag it to someplace convenient on one of your toolbars<p>3) When you find a page/site to which you want to subscription but don't see a feed button, check Firefox' RSS icon. If it's activated (i.e., not greyed out), click it and subscribe.<p>Another solution that maybe is too obvious to mention: Search for (adjusting for your favorite search engine's syntax): rss|feed site:domainname.com
My very first thought whenever I want to read more about a website/blog, subscribe to the RSS.<p>I see less and less the RSS button though, so I have to play with the URL /feed or /rss to get the feed. Too bad.
> Then Google thought they could abandon the technology and assumed everyone would gravitate to their social networks instead.<p>This is probably the most baffling of all the pathetic attempts I've seen to shoehorn a nefarious motive into the closing of Reader. If the contention is that shutting down Reader would force people to social networks, WHY would Google expect people to go to Google+ instead of the social network with multiple times the usage (Facebook)? I've never seen a piece of data that indicated that Google+ was doing any better than a distant second to Facebook (depending on how you count YouTube), and it does even worse on referral traffic (which is more relevant when you're talking about a replacement for Reader). This is probably the funniest tinfoil hat I've ever seen; Google shut down Reader so that people would be forced to use Facebook more.
RSS as a consumer facing tech was never really alive.
The way it lives today is as an medium of transportation.
Its the equivalent of a news page in JSON format.
But unlike JSON, it is purposebuilt for article delivery, instead of being simply data delivery.
I never understood the issue with Google Reader, as I always used native clients to receive RSS updates.<p>Every time one uses a "web app" is giving control over to third parties.
From the article<p><pre><code> > no one ever has to know what feeds you subscribe to.
</code></pre>
Whoever runs the server knows you're reading that feed from their server logs.
Imho, The biggest threat to the public use of RSS is not the shutting down of aggregators, but the dire situation of Feedburner. Since RSS is no longer part of Google's business strategy, it might not be long before Feedburner is sacrificed as part of their annual culling. It's easy to import an OPML file into your new aggregator -- but due to the decouple nature of publishing and subscribing using RSS, if/when Feedburner goes off, millions of content pubilshers will be left in the dark with no way to connect with their subscribers. That's truly worrisome.<p>I'd elaborated on this in a blog post I wrote a while ago (When Google Reader shut down) -- <a href="http://dickfeynman.github.io/blog/writings/what-the-fate-of-google-reader-implies-for-the-future-of-rss/" rel="nofollow">http://dickfeynman.github.io/blog/writings/what-the-fate-of-...</a>
I hope it isn't uncouth to mention my RSS reader here: <a href="https://github.com/edavis/riverpy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/edavis/riverpy</a><p>It treats RSS like a newspaper instead of email. Here's a demo: <a href="http://riverpy-demo.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://riverpy-demo.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html</a><p>I'm biased, of course, but I think it's a pretty interesting take on what an RSS reader can be.<p>RSS is more active now than I ever remember it being when Google Reader was around. Really interested to see what the next few years bring.
I love hearing about this. I've been growing my reader Minimal Reader <a href="https://minimalreader.com/" rel="nofollow">https://minimalreader.com/</a> for the past year and can say that thousands of paying customers helps reassure that there's still a market for RSS.<p>RSS is here to stay as long as people using RSS continue to support it by building atop the infrastructure, funding innovative products, or even just requesting a feed from their favorite publishers if they don't have one.
i still dont understand why they killed Reader. all they had to do was say, "hey guys, would you pay $3-$5/month to keep it". people would have thrown money at them.
<i>Netscape invented the underlying code in the late 90’s, and then took away all documentation and support in 2001 after AOL bought them out.</i><p>So, what happened ?
If I remember correctly, I moved to using theoldreader after Google Reader went dark, then you were down for 3 days, then you kicked all the Reader's switchers out (like me) to keep a more a manageable operation.
For a little while it's not RSS that seemed dead, but online RSS readers were definitely a rare breed.
Happy to see that you've changed your mind about limiting access.
I hope RSS will never die. I used iGoogle for years. It was the best way to have a nice overview of all sites I would have visited each instead. Twitter for me is no surrogate so that I coded a simple clone: <a href="http://www.fyrup.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fyrup.com</a> Feel free to use it.
I have a whole folder full of RSS feeds. It's an easy way to keep up with blogs, webcomics, and news, all without wrecking my privacy by giving away my reading habits to a third party (formerly google, now whoever everything-as-a-website fans like instead).
Google still has a js rss api, in fact i'm using it with my pure client-side rss reader (backed by dropbox api) which is still in early stages ;)<p><a href="https://mparaiso.github.io/flowreader" rel="nofollow">https://mparaiso.github.io/flowreader</a>
Very happy with my post-Google Reader RSS reader: <a href="https://mnmlrdr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://mnmlrdr.com/</a>.<p>These guys really care about the user experience. The mobile interface is spot-on.<p>I do not think RSS is going anywhere.
rss is also a wonderful way to route data around the web, and lets a non-geek get into programmatic-like consumption of news with only a limited understanding of web technology.<p>its also fairly effective at storing and working with geodata. I really like the Geonames rss to georss geocoding API.<p>shameless plug for attention on a for-fun doo-dad I built:
intelmap.com uses an RSS feed generated by a hackernews clone at news.intelmap.com and drops it on an openlayers map. a better example of geoRSS is syria.intelmap.com, that is a collection of more lively feeds.
Yesterday discovered Inoreader, already tired by Feedly's lack of Android's notifications, ATM seems to me the best platform to substitute/improve Google Reader.
What a non-article.<p>RSS can never die, obviously, it is a technology.<p>What dies is it as a/the standard.<p>It simply isn't anymore, there are other ways to do what RSS does, similar to RSS except, whoops, it isn't RSS.