Comments on: Is RSS Really Dead?

By: Stormy

Stormy — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:15:04 +0000

I think there is a vast confusion being created here between a web standard and a social web 2.0 community web site. Two completely different. As great and exciting as Twitter is, it aint the Holy Grail of the Web…just as AOL Chat, MySpace, YouTube, AJAX, Google Earth, and Facebook. are not “in-the-black”, all-consuming communication “end-games” to the World Wide Web.

Let us not forget….these are just web domain, SaaS service sites that deliver a service. Thats it! Nothing magical there. Maybe an API here and there to tap into, but its all data, and its all sent over HTTP. At the end of the day, all these services do NOT reinvent the Web or add much innovation. All these do is show us better and rather more interesting ways of using the same medium to communicate and connect with each other. We are still twisting and distorting HTML beyond what it was meant to do, and if anything, thats what makes all these “disoveries” exciting.

What is real innovation? When a bunch of these Web 2.0 companies getogether and agree to use a standard. HTML and XML and XHTML and RSS are things that form the backbone for all this “magic”. As time marches on, we will see more of these Web 2.0 domains come and go and reinvent new creative ways to bring people together online and share data. But the its the agressive pushing of new standards like XML that make it all possible and RSS is a part of that. It may not be giving us real time in a popular social site, but that could change tomorrow…..I think its wide open as a standard media in terms of building social sites around RSS. We just haven’t discovered that yet. But the key is knowing that innovation isnt at Twitter…its the underlying protocols, frameworks and servers that make it possible to innovate these things. Let’s not forget that…especially when in 3 years a new social domain comes along that replaces Twitter with the next hottest thing…

By: Ranjit Padmanabhan

Ranjit Padmanabhan — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:21:15 +0000

Steve’s article took an extreme stand to generate controversy. It worked.

RSS is plumbing, like DNS. The major reason for RSS’ lack of widespread use is that RSS Readers require users to know (or at least acknowledge) the existence of RSS. It’s like having to type IP addresses into a browser.

I’ve babbled a bit more on this topic at the MashLogic blog.

By: EG

EG — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:00:28 +0000

Can you expand a bit on what you mean by ‘sharing between websites’?

By: Lamarr Wilson

Lamarr Wilson — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:43:18 +0000

I use Google Reader daily. It’s hard for me to imagine RSS being dead when the term is not even mainstream. Ask any regular person what RSS is, and they couldn’t tell you, yet many of them use it. The My Yahoo page is a good example of this. I used that for a few years before I realized that it was RSS. I eventually went to the more powerful/flexible Google Reader.

Before RSS, I would spend literally hours going thru my favorite forums/sites to see if anything was new. Now, it’s pushed to me. That type of service isn’t dying anytime soon.

By: John Fox

John Fox — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:39:43 +0000

I completely agree with you, Matt. In fact, I have written a dissenting view to Gillmor’s article here. I’d appreciate it if you could leave your thoughts as a comment after reading it.

http://www.techyuppie.com/2009/05/rss-is-dead-not-hardly/

By: David B.

David B. — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:39:26 +0000

I have never been able to use an RSS reader, I know the benefits, I just can never bring myself to use the service. I do use RSS from sharing website to website like you mentioned.

By: The Bogus RSS Debate | CloudAve

The Bogus RSS Debate | CloudAve — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:26:30 +0000

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