RSS and the future
July 21, 2009
Lately, I've read multiple articles about how RSS isn't cutting it anymore. Some, like "Fever and the Future of Feed Readers" by Alex Payne, are what I would consider rational commentary. Others (which I refuse to link to) rabidly claim that Twitter bloodily murdered RSS (and Google!) in cold blood and that the world is a better place because of it.
Though, either way - rational or insane - I completely disagree.
RSS has not failed. Aggregators have not failed. We do not need a replacement for RSS. It's the readers who have failed.
I have yet to see any compelling arguments against RSS. Some frequent complaints and my dismissals/solutions follow:
- too many feeds -- Unsubscribe from some! Or, better yet, don't subscribe to so many in the first place!
- too much overlap across feeds -- Again, unsubscribe! Only keep the good, unique ones! If you notice that a lot of the overlap is just reblogged from one place, then unsubscribe from the rebloggers and subscribe to the source. (Or if you refuse to unsubscribe, then filter with something like Yahoo's Pipes.)
- too many posts in each feed -- (you guessed it) UNSUBSCRIBE! Seek alternatives with less posts per day. Most high volume sites are not so unique that there aren't at least 30 alternatives.
- not real-time enough -- Know this: it's not supposed to be! Do you seriously need it to be real-time anyway? Will the world (or your job, or your relationship, or... anything) end because you see a picture of a cute kitten as late as an hour or two after it was posted on the internet?
- don't like Google Reader -- Well, you're on your own there. I've tried a lot and believe that Google Reader is the best, so it's kind of all I know. I've heard good things about Helvetireader (a "skin" for Google Reader), Fever (a web-based reader that you install on your own server that costs $30), Times (a slick non-web-based reader for OSX that costs $30), and NetNewsWire and FeedDemon (free, non-web-based readers for OSX and Windows, respectively). BUT I still think Google Reader is better than all of those. Depending on exactly what you don't like about Google Reader, this might be the only valid complaint. But this is a complaint about Google Reader, not RSS.
A lot of people (including Google) think that the future of RSS and the like lays in it becoming more "social." Maybe it does, but it should only be social by choice. Those who want to be anti-social should be allowed to be so. I personally read no RSS feeds which are chosen by popular vote (like Digg or Reddit). I would kill myself if I had to. I am not trying to be condescending (but merely truthful) when I state that my tastes typically do not match those of the general public. This isn't to say that they never match, but I'd rather a site like Buzzfeed or the random personal blogs I read to filter those popular vote sites for me.
Finally, I just want to make this absolutely clear: Twitter will not replace RSS feeds. Also, Twitter searching will not replace Google searching. I'm not slagging Twitter when I make these statements. They can (and will) all coexist peacefully, because they all do different things. (This goes without saying, but I'll say it anyways just in case you've never tried typing more than 140 characters at a time on Twitter. Or just in case you've never tried finding something more than 3 weeks old on Twitter.)
Posts
July 23, 2009 at 6:37 AM
Pipes may be the thing I'm looking for (and really, you gotta love a web service that introduces with "Like Unix pipes..."), but I think publishers should do a lot more to make their feeds filterable. I have a habit of trying to hack RSS feeds to only give me a specific category from a blog, or not waste time with dozens of posts I don't care about. And most of the time I think at least 90% of the technology & metadata is in the website backend, but they just have the feed turned off.
July 23, 2009 at 11:23 AM
I really love sites with customizable feeds. For instance, Download Squad has a whole page full of differently filtered feeds for you to choose from. If every site had a page like that, I think it would help make the world a better place.