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RSS is dead

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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. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader.

I don’t go there any more. 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.

The race for realtime is already won. This is the world RSS created. Dare Obasanjo. Sam Diaz over at ZDNet wrote the following in a blog entry titled RSS: A good idea at the time but there are better ways now in response to an announcement of a new feature in Google Reader Once a big advocate for Google Reader, I have to admit that I haven’t logged in in weeks, maybe months. That’s not to say I’m not reading. Sometimes I feel like reading - and writing this blog - are the only things I do. But my sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web, not in one aggregated spot. I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News.

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. I take issue with the title of Sam’s post since his complaint is really about the current generation of consumer tools for reading RSS feeds not the underlying technology itself. Dave Winer was right about River of News style aggregators. 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. I’ve also started playing with a couple of new feed reading tools. What do I need? 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. He’s far from alone. Eric Mainville. Les flux RSS sont-ils devenus inutiles à cause de l'avènement de services comme Twitter? La question a été posée par un journaliste de ZDnet, Sam Diaz. Il fait un constat: il n'utilise plus les flux RSS. Cela fait des semaines, voire des mois, que je n'utilise plus Google reader. Ses entrées sur les articles se font par Yahoo news ou Google news, et également Twitter et Facebook.

Autrement dit, ce sont des services qui diffusent des flux, mais autrement que les agrégateur de flux RSS. Les flux RSS ne sont pas grand public Un autre fait: le grand public n'a pas adopté les flux RSS. En filigrane, on comprend aussi dans son article que Google reader, ça n'est pas très pratique. Avec Netvibes, c'est un peu différent: chaque blog a droit à son widget. Autrement dit, le jugement reste balancé: chacun à son ressenti sur les usages. Pris de vitesse par Twitter Les flux RSS sont supplantés par Twitter sur deux plans: l'aspect social et la vitesse. Pour la vitesse, l'avantage de Twitter saute aux yeux.