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. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. This disconnect drove me away from partial feeds and toward the new owners of the blogosphere — the deep information space of those feeds that respected the reader container. As fulltexting carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news, navigating outside the comfortable walls of RSS required some additional value proposition. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed – whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Sam Diaz.
Robert Scoble. 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. Over the past two weeks I’ve been doing a little experiment: can I outrace TechMeme and TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb and all the others? The answer is a resounding YES. But it requires following a very select group of people on Twitter. RSS isn’t real time. Anyway, want to see how this works? That means I see new Tweets every few seconds. What do I do with them? What’s missing from my favorites? The thing is none of the four of us are normal. Marshall Kirkpatrick. 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. 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? And what do businesses think about RSS? A big part of the disillusionment techies are feeling with RSS may be misdirected. Gillmor isn't the only one to confuse RSS with the apps that deliver it. As Winer puts it so well, RSS is how the news flows. McKinsey Quarterly's survey was conducted online in June of this year, and garnered 1,695 responses from executives working in a wide range of regions and verticals. Fred Wilson. Dave Winer.
Home > Archive > 2009 > August > 26 Wednesday, August 26, 2009 by 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. Venkat. 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. Mike Arrington wrote a post on TechCrunch the other day suggesting that Twitter was killing RSS. I think there is some truth to the assertion that Twitter has replaced feed readers for some people. But RSS is way more than the readers it spawned. Kid Mercury, a frequent commenter on this blog and also its resident "bouncer" said this which I wholeheartedly agree with:
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. Update: Within hours another RSS reader called LazyFeed has announced that it will support RSSCloud as well. RSSCloud is an element that's always been present in the RSS 2.0 spec but has drawn new attention with the rise of interest in the Real-Time Web. The element was just added to the WordPress code this afternoon. Supporting feed readers will now be able to request updates from WordPress blog feeds as soon as they become available, instead of polling a server periodically to check for updates. Google Reader, the dominant RSS aggregator on the market, began a limited implementation of a related protocol called PubSubHubbub last month. Activist writers.