The death of RSS?
Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 1:23PM I am always aware that RSS is still a bit arcane for your average web user and I do believe that more intuitive, user friendly ways of finding the good stuff need to be constantly sought after. Steve Gilmor kicked off a bit of a fuss recently by claiming that RSS was dead and that we now use Twitter to find things. I believe he overstated his case deliberately to trigger the firestorm that ensued but I do know what he means.
In terms of keeping across things that might be interesting but that don't fall into my own horizon, I use a combination of Twitter and various other tools, synthesised in Friendfeed to help me scan what is out there and find the good stuff. However RSS is such a core part of the plumbing of the web, enabling content to migrate and flow far beyond the control of the originating sites that claiming it is dead is nonsense.
Reader Comments (6)
For some it may be the death of RSS, for others. not so much. One thing i love about the web is there's no one size fits all. For me, RSS means I get to read those I like, those I've made a choice to follow, because I know them or because it's a news feed.
Twitter brings me things by serendipity. If i'm watching the stream at the time, if someone I follow decides to tweet a link. I don't know what I'm going to get. It's always a surprise.
The real time web, Twitter or Friendfeed or the latest incarnation of Facebook is all well and good if you are there at the time. For most, the web is something you dip in and out of. I'll stick with RSS as a complement to the others, it stores up my realtime web until I have time to read it.
That's pretty much how I use the combination of tools and as you say I love the ability to set things up to suit me.
I agree with Rachel. She articulated nicely how I use these tools in combination. I do not, and cannot, spend all day in any one channel - even if it is loaded as a sidebar / aggregator (eg. Digsby).
twits are too short.
So was your comment!
I think RSS is still underutilised, not dead. I am exploring the potential of using selective aggregation of content using RSS feeds and reformatting that content into specific and targeted newsletters.
I am playing around with Xenos software from Australian company, Metanews (www.metanews.biz). I can easily draw in content using RSS from selected web sites and then select the appropriate content into a newsletter template for scaleable distribution.
For example, I am looking at developing a newsletter using Xenos that tracks key development aid blogs so that I can distribute current thinking on this topic to selected stakeholders at work.