![The Big Lebowski (Limited Edition) [Blu-ray Book + Digital Copy]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512F90yEqdL._SL75_.jpg){kind=small}
Monday
Dec212009
As the Decade Closes, Has RSS Faded Too?
Young Urban Professional
The decade is coming to an end. And with it, so has the era of feeds too faded - though you can argue it never got off the ground. Even with real-time technologies like pubsubhubbub, RSS today feels slow and it's clear its best days are behind it. Feed reading, like blogging, feels "very 2005." I wasn't convinced until recently, however.
Until a few weeks ago, this die-hard techie was clinging to Google Reader like a disco maniac might his eight-tracks. I felt like the last hold out; the guy still dancing to the Bee Gees when everyone else had gone punk - and maybe I was.
Now, however, slowly but surely I am moving more of my consumption out of RSS and into the Twitter stream. Twitter, not blogs, long ago became the focal point for reading and conversing around news for many. So it's natural, as this report on Read Write Web indicates, that most of us who were even using RSS readers to begin with have ditched them and have moved to tracking news in the stream instead. And we're not alone. According to Forrester, eight percent of US online adults post and read updates on Twitter at least monthly.
Personally, this is something I resisted for three reasons: a) I like full text feeds, b) there was a lack of organization/lists and c) Twitter remains very dependent on "now," making saving and digesting information at a later date in a Tivo-like way all the more difficult. That all changed with the advent of Twitter lists.
Nowadays I am bringing it all into Gmail, which other than my corporate email account is my sole productivity and social Ginsu Knife. I already publish to my Posterous-powered lifestream site via email. Couple that with Twitgether, a full-blown real-time Gmail Twitter client, NutshellMail for tracking social network interactions like replies and Listimonkey to bring me Twitter lists every hour via email (pictured above), my Google Reader is starting to get lonely.
How about you? Are there any die-hard RSS users out there who have not succumb to the stream?
Reader Comments (70)
I also considered myself a die-hard RSS user, but lately I'm more time on Twitter than in GReader... I somehow miss full texts and analysis, but can't swim against the current.
RSS is for what I cannot miss. Real time like Twitter is a news function. Bookmarking and Twitter along with curation pages are where it is at.
I had abandoned GReader for a while... but find myself using it again. Twitter is nice for realtime, and it's the first place I go in the morning to make sure nothing is "up", but RSS fills the void nicely allowing me to keep updated on less "newsy" and more "artsy" topics.
I need RSS to do my job effectively, otherwise I'll just miss to much important stuff. Until a better alternative comes around? I'm stuck with it.
Good Riddance, RSS!
I agree with a lot of the comments here -- Twitter is great for something breaking. But RSS still has a lot of use. If I'm not on Twitter, it aggregates everything I might have missed because I was actually away from the online personas that demand so much of my time.Reader is still my go to -- even if I see posts in my Reader that I've already read via Twitter.
Like james crawford above, I use RSS (via GReader) for what I don't want to miss. Twitter is for less important stuff.
I have to agree - I am a die-hard rss user as well. twitter is nice for realtime, but to make sure I don't miss anything I go through my feeds in greader as well, which allows me to share via friendfeed as well.Plus with twitter blocked at the office, greader is the only way to "keep up" with stuff during breaks at work.
The RSS vs. Twitter argument is overblown and initiated largely by those who didn't embrace RSS the way many of us have. I am among the most active Google Reader consumers and sharers. I find significant value in these shared items populating other networks, including Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. I am having great conversations inside Google Reader, which at times eclipse the conversations on the host blog. IS RSS dead or fading? Of course not. Is it faster than ever, thanks to PubSubHubbub? Absolutely.Would I be excited to launch "yet another RSS reader" to compete with Google? Absolutely not. But that doesn't mean the market is fading. It's just more mature than the Twitter app market, which is still figuring which way is up.I am waiting for all those people who can't wait for RSS to die to turn off their feeds. They can join those bloggers who say blogging is dying and shut down their blogs. More opportunity for those of us who continue to do things the right way.
Greader represents my three hots and a cot. Twitter represents the snacks, Very yummy indeed but can't live off of them.
I think of RSS as a technology-- often invisible to the user. Most people don't understand what RSS is, yet they still use it because they want feeds. As a technology, I think of RSS as more behind-the-0scenes-- and essentially unkillable. As one of the commenters above hints at, how do you find reliable news from consistent sources on Twitter? Twitter is for serendipity, not routine (at least for me). I think you are so far ahead of the curve here you may actually be behind it.
The problem with putting all the RSS feeds into Twitter is that your Twitter stream will move very fast and the potential to miss something is huge (as well as spend half your day doing nothing but look at Twitter). With RSS, it will all be sitting there waiting for you and you can browse through everything at your leisure.
You don't mean "RSS"; you mean "RSS Readers". RSS isn't a medium, it's just a technology for getting at data (like Atom or JSON). For example, I pull my Twitter stream into my RSS Reader. "RSS" can't be trumped by another platform, only "RSS Readers" can.Maybe what you really mean is that selling the unfiltered firehose of the web's content to end users is no longer of value to the marketing profession?Just a thought.
Steve,Give Snackr a try. Might change your mind about RSS. Who know a stockticker from the 1920's could be so useful when paired with RSS?It's at Snackr.net
I thought it was kind of funny that I was reading this article in my RSS reader (Google, of course).I think Twitter, real-time, the "Stream" promotes a short attention span, and is way too interruptive. I use Twitter (a bit), and check-in periodically, but I don't think that's an appropriate single source for news/info unless your workflow can handle constant input.And most people's workflow can't. Batch processing is a much more efficient way of doing things. You wouldn't try washing your laundry in real time as it gets dirty, would you? Let it pile up and do once a week."Oh yes, but then you're behind. I have to keep up to stay competitive!" Sure you do. What, are you day trading? This is a form of narcissism: the world needs me every minute; and a form of self-brokenness: I need the world every moment.It's inefficient, it's self-centered, it's mostly a distraction from getting work done. And remember- outside of a fairly small group of gurus (and a larger group of poseurs), Social Media, Twitter, the Stream, etc, is just a tool to help people accomplish other things, not THE THING people are trying to accomplish.
If you're a news junkie like me and you also want to use Twitter to communicate with others, you'll probably end up with a poor following-follower ratio unless you create multiple accounts. Sometimes it seems like more trouble than it's worth trying to separate Twitter's commingled uses.
It's all about Greader for me. I haven't found a twitter setup that lets me get a configuration that I like for efficient reading. In addition, where someone may post 1-2 good articles a day, often they'll post 10-20 tweets. Way too much noise for me. I only follow friends on twitter
I'm hardcore. I'm not sure how I'd operate without a good RSS reader (I recently switched from Bloglines to Greader, btw). I supposed I could survive with Twitter, but I'd need to learn how to organize the people I follow and their content better. I have not tried to organize the people I follow by topic, but that's where I'd start.
I don't understand the "RSS is DEAD" argument. In fact, I've grown more dependent on Google Reader and the feeds I subscribe to because of Twitter and Social Media. I have the followers I have because I share the latest content from my RSS feeds in Google Reader.Unless I'm missing some new tools, I'm sticking with Google Reader all the way. Although I must say I am becoming a huge fan of LazyFeed.
Scoble tries this argument as well. Depending on what you read, it may be possible to use something like twitter to keep up with the news, especially of you have lists of news providers. But Twitter does not let me keep up with my friends and their blog writing These are people who may (but not always) use twitter to converse and comment and blogs to write their stories. A Reader also lets me catch up with feeds on my terms, not as they flow past. It also lets me read people like yourself - I have little interest in following you on twitter but the blog in a reader works well.
Great comments. I am still experimenting with the system. I imagine where I will net out is using RSS for certain high priority feeds I want to see in full and Twitter for the rest.
there is no way i could ever leave the rss world. first off for me it's like reading the morning paper. twitter is way to fast. i need something static on my page in the morning. plus there is a new reader (not that i'm pitching it) called fever. and if you follow a lot of feeds this is a perfect way to have them on a screen. at least for me. PLUS if rss went away how would i do my daily rss review on itunes? i know they suck but come on... http://bit.ly/8ckKE2 anyways the point is that i read that article this morning about RSS going the way of the dodo but i never would have gotten it if it wasn't for RSS, and neither would have steve. so chalk that up for RSS.
and i never would have gotten to this blog post either if it weren't for rss... so take that twitter.
Steve, didn't you make this proclamation earlier this year? I think RSS is still an effective tool At least for me.
@Neil I did but that's less true now than before. I find it shows me "reruns"