No, RSS is not dead
Lately there has been a lot of talk about RSS being dead, doomed, dying, a thing of the past, etc, etc, etc. (The latest wave seems to have been triggered by this article by Sam Diaz over at ZDNet.)
The arguments we’ve seen range from “these days I only use Twitter” to “I don’t use Google Reader anymore”. That last one seems to be a major gripe.
Come on, people.
RSS is a data syndication mechanism. RSS reader applications (such as the Google Reader) may or may not be losing some popularity, but that is an application issue and to go from there to saying that RSS itself is dead is just nonsense. That’s similar to saying that HTML is dead.
Here is the truth: RSS is and remains an important way to publish and receive data on the Internet and is used by millions of sites. It powers a lot more behind the scenes than we tend to think about.
Ways RSS is used today:
- Publication of blog posts and news articles from all over the Web
- Lots of sites and applications get their data via RSS (TechMeme, Google News, anyone?)
- And a huge number of different data feeds
So, RSS is dead. Ok, bloggers, discontinue your RSS feeds and rely on Twitter alone. And all you news sites, shut down your RSS feeds as well. RSS is dead anyway, right? Abandon ship!
And of course you won’t do that. Because thinking about what the Web would be without RSS makes you realize how widely used it actually is. It’s not all about Google Reader.
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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.
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Alxe
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:37 am
I myself knew about this article thanks to a RSS feed on Liferea
Mark Mathson
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:52 am
I read this article in an RSS feed reader. Thanks for a head out of the clouds view.
redwall_hp
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:03 am
Don’t discontinue your RSS feeds. If you do, I, and many others, won’t read your blog. Twitter is a much less reliable medium for receiving news. In my (desktop) RSS reader, I can see every unread item on a blog, and then decide whether I want to read it or not. With Twitter, I only see what has been posted in the last 2-4 hours. I miss everything that was published while I was asleep (often in another timezone).
I subscribe to the Royal Pingdom feed, but ironically I found this article through Twitter first. (I skim through Twitter before reading my feeds.)
John Moore
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I couldn’t agree more, RSS is far from dead, it’s full potential is only just beginning to be realize. If you’re interested, read my post from May on this topic
http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/rss-is-not-dead-in-fact-its-just-getting-started/
John
Dafydd Tomos
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Well said. Twitter can be used as a simple RSS ‘headline’ reader for the small minority that uses it at this time. It has huge disadvantages, particularly as it won’t scale well – both in terms of how many feeds you follow and in terms of the Twitter infrastructure.
ZequeZ
September 20th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
I use RSS everytime in Google reader. I only use twitter to post my own message, I don’t read another people tweets xDDD.