Comments on: Drinking from a Fire Hose: In Defense of RSS

By: Angela

Angela — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:09:35 +0000

There are tons of ways to slice, dice and organize your feeds. Only the fishy smelling partial feeds used as bait by those trying to keep control of the experience..
fire extinguisher

By: Kent

Kent — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:34:00 +0000

David,The conspiracy (and I was obviously using that term loosely) I am talking about is by the same old media who are also fighting with Google over the Google News/AP business. These are two battlefronts in the greater war over the future of media in general.My theory is that had old media embraced RSS and pushed full feeds, more people would have embraced RSS. The fact is that RSS isn't even an option for traditional news because old media only pushes partial feeds, which are only slightly more useful than spam.I agree that people haven't embraced RSS- for blogs or anything else. And most people who use Twitter don't care enough about the underlying technology to know that RSS is even involved.

By: David J

David J — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:11:00 +0000

When Google, the biggest new media player in the game, owns the most popular RSS reader around, I find it hard to buy the idea of a conspiracy against RSS.I think the answer is simpler – most people simply don't follow enough blogs to make them look for a solution like RSS. I agree that Twitter is a bad way to follow lots of info sources – but how many people really do that?RSS was the "next big thing" for at least three years before Twitter hit the big time (2006-2009) and never got picked up in a big way by anyone other than power users. That's not a conspiracy, that's just people using the tools that suit them. Note that despite all the hype around Twitter at the moment that far more people use Facebook – people are quite capable of ignoring hype and using the tools they find most useful.

By: Julien

Julien — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:10:00 +0000

I agree with you, RSS isn't dead at all (but I think it almost went alive : my father knows what RSS is… not yet my mother though ). However, I think that RSS is returning to where it belong : in the back. Behind all these fancy interfaces. RSS/Atom is the only ubiquitous API. What's in common between a blog, Twitter, flickr, craisglist, ebay, google news? RSS!We built superfeedr because RSS is a great technology to abstract data and decouple it from applications themslves. I'd love to have your input on that, as I see some of our users left comments already

By: William

William — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:42:00 +0000

Steve- Real-time has not been the issue for most users. The issue has been the organization of knowledge around content. Faster content means faster mess. It's what you do with content that matters, whether it's via RSS or Twitter. The irony is that micro-messaging is getting messy, and instead of managing RSS feeds, now you have to manage Twitter feeds,- so we're back at managing feeds. Instead, we should manage content- and let the feeds be totally invisible. The best solutions will insulate the user from RSS, while it might be there in the background doing its job of piping content in.

By: Kent

Kent — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:07:00 +0000

Steve,I'm all for faster, but what I'm also concerned about about is the RSS experience, not just RSS as the underlying pipe for other stuff.From an infrastructure perspective, speed wins, no argument. I would really, really love it if new content showed up in the pipe (regardless of destination) immediately. Ironically, the fact that it doesn't pushes us back to good old fashioned web browsing (as noted by OmegaMom above).But faster only works well if the destination works well. Faster to where? Twitter? Maybe, but only if the content originates at Twitter. Otherwise, it's the same slow pipe. And even if it gets to Twitter faster, the design, limits/features, etc. are just not robust enough to suit me.My desired result: faster to the pipe, regardless of destination.My acceptable result: a recognition that the destination has a material effect on the experience.

By: Steve Gillmor

Steve Gillmor — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:30:00 +0000

Kent, you're in denial. All this noise about what RSS is good for v. what the hose is good for misses the fundamental point. RSS created the disruption that is now being mined by micromessaging. There is no RSS app capability that can't be rendered via realtime, and the only difference between fast and faster is that one gets adopted and the other fades. Why would Dave reach back to respond to PSHBB if he didn't understand that speed wins. The rest of the argument is a push. The numbers are moving one way not back and forth.

By: Josh Kim

Josh Kim — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:24:00 +0000

I love that you use the picture from UHF. Nerd++.

By: OmegaMom

OmegaMom — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:11:00 +0000

Oh, good lord. What a bunch of navel gazers. Oooh, RSS isn't the latest, greatest, shiniest thing on the intertubes now!!!! Gah.What I have in my RSS feed? Blogs. Lots of blogs. And comics. And fluff. And when I have the time, I can sit down with Google Reader and cruise through my blog buddies' latest posts, read the latest installment of Girl Genius and Abstruse Goose and xkcd.I don't use RSS for news, so it works just fine for me. For news, I go to MSNBC, and my local newspaper's website, and follow links in Twitter.