Steve Gillmor
It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift. I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader.
Sam Diaz
The truth of the matter is that RSS readers are a Web 1.0 tool, an aggregator of news headlines that never really caught on with the mainstream the way Twitter and Facebook have . According to a Forrester Research study about the reach of social technologies, only nine percent of U.S. online adults said they use an RSS feed monthly, down from 11 percent the year before. By contrast, 50 percent are visiting social networking sites, up from 34 percent last year and 39 percent are reading blogs, up from 37 percent a year ago. The official name for RSS was Really Simple Syndication but for the many people, including those I helped set up with an RSS reader, it never really was that simple. It wasn’t that it just needed to be populated with subscriptions to what you wanted to read, but then came the task of keeping it organized, otherwise your local headlines were mixed with last night’s baseball scores, which was alongside political news and off-color commentary.
Marshall Kirkpatrick takes on the “RSS is dead” meme , started by Steve Gillmor, but really started by all those people who haven’t been using RSS much anymore. My answer to Marshall: I’m not in the news business anymore, but if I were I’d keep Twitter up on screen. I’ve been looking closely at Google Reader’s latest features, Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and I gotta say that most of what shows up on TechMeme shows up in my Twitter feed up to a day earlier.
Robert Scoble
Sam Diaz at ZDNet tonight wrote the latest admission that he’s not using his RSS reader anymore . I have a lot of respect for Sam’s writing, but I am having a hard time believing that he and so many others say they no longer even bother to read feeds. Twitter, Facebook and aggregators like Techmeme or Google News suffice for Sam, he says. He’s far from alone.
Marshall Kirkpatrick
Steven Walling
It's become fashionable among a certain set to declare that RSS is no longer the foremost pipeline for news and information on the Web. Steve Gillmor and innumerable others have said they've abandoned their RSS readers in favor of Twitter. Twitter hiring Feedburner's CEO seemed to compound this trend towards dismissing RSS as old hat (though headlines shouldn't always be taken literally). The usual suspects, such as Dave Winer and our own RSS geek , quickly jumped to the defense of really simple syndication. But where was the data to back them up?
Somehow the comments on my " 10 Characteristics of Great Companies " post yesterday drifted into the topic of the future of RSS . I was debating whether to wade into this silly debate about whether "RSS is dead" or not and was leaning toward ignoring it. But the discussion yesterday in the comments convinced me otherwise. So here it is.
Fred Wilson
Dave Winer
To Sam Diaz who says RSS was "a good idea at the time but there are better ways now," I have many things to say. 1. People confuse RSS with Google Reader. Let's be clear that there's a difference. Google Reader is an application that reads RSS-formatted data.
Venkat
these bills threaten to destroy the Internet as we know it. If either one passes, your favorite sites could disappear forever. This site has been taken down in protest of bills currently being considered in the US House and Senate. Called SOPA and PIPA , ACT NOW. SAVE THE INTERNET.
RSSCloud
All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in (using this plug-in ) will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud . There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer's brand-new reader River2 . That will probably change very soon.
