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The Importance of RSS
unfoldedorigami writes "Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati has got Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search. Hale thinks this is the reason behind why they've become so interested in feed reading and the procurement of revenue from them."
One solution would be to provide a single point of web-based RSS feed reader of sorts, where people could not only add their bookmarks, but also just log in and read their favorite feeds.
Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.
A sort of Google-news for RSS feeds, of sorts.
I mean, they could move people from other webmails to Gmail, this shouldn't be too hard, either. Build a nice system where people can add in their feeds and read them on the web in a non-cluttered, nice, manner and people _will_ use your system.
That would give them more power to search and catalogue user preferences - although from a Big Brother perspective, that isn't necessarily a good thing.
I sense a good opening for a web-application!
I won't be able to get this article on my /. feed for another hour...
I've been reading particletree for some time now and I found myself somewhat conflicted on aspects of this article.
For the most part I did find myself agreeing with the article but the part about AdSense for Feeds at the very end left me a bit confused. I tried AdSense for feeds out and even though my RSS traffic makes my site traffic look juvenile I still saw better results on the site than in the feeds.
Unmatched Style |
I like how Slashdot posts a story about the importance of RSS, but their own RSS service will ban you for 3 days if you just look at it funny.
"Derp de derp."
Search being the new search? Seriously; these online search engines haven't improved much in the past 5 years (yes, it's been 5 years since Google started growing by leaps and bounds, became the Yahoo default, and amazed us all ...).
"Y is the new X" is the new "Hello! 1993 called and they want their X back!"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's not reality or how you perceive things that's important -- it's what you're taking for it...
I mean, come on. RSS feeds are useful for stuff that you check daily, hourly, etc. This is usually stuff you are familiar with, and would know how to find in the first place. On the other hand, if I want to find something out about a subject I'm not particularly familiar with, I go to google and search.
..that it's just pure content without any layout or crap. In other words, it makes reading web sites as easy as it was in 1995.
Of course, at some point they will start putting crap in RSS feeds (they are already putting ads in the feeds.. I agree with Dave Winer: isn't the feed an ad ALREADY??), and someone will re-invent it all over again.
But for now it's a great way to just read content without crap. Say, that's a good slogan: "RSS: content without crap".
Funny how Slashdot has an article about RSS and their own RSS feed hasn't been updating as often as it should...
(Slashdot, if I understand correctly, limits RSS because massive monitoring kills the network and servers. But if they only transmitted a single multicast on an event - such as a FP update - or every 30 minutes, the load would be negligable and yet everyone would get instantaneous updates.)
In the end, RSS is a dead-end technology, because the network will always expand faster than any given pipe, which means point-to-point will inevitably fail in the end. It doesn't scale.
RSS is good, yeah, but only as a stop-gap until ISPs can be pressured into enabling technologies they should never have disabled.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
MIT called, and they want their X back.
I sure don't want my ex back. Friggin' harpy.
ever think that?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Similar to RSS, people can put whatever content in meta tags to explain what their content is about. The problem is that with everyone doing this there's a ton of data and a lot of it is junk. That's where the search engines come in.
RSS isn't going to replace search... the search engines will just have an easier job if the RSS feeds are provided for them.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
It would be nice if the RSS server set limits automatically for the RSS client. One less thing to worry about.
---
"Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 15 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment."
My confidence in OSS is greatly improved.
Your grammar, spelling, punctuation, and message content are all nonsensical. You're a slashdot editor trying to hide behind the good name of Anonymous Coward, aren't you? Busted!
[...] the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati [...]
It seems like sites like this end up with a few thousand hardcore users and the rest of the people using the internet don't care about them in the least. That is what Google has to be afraid of?
I think that people making such speculation are just too short of understanding to see that the internet is more than just Google. Using the internet for something other than searching the web doesn't hurt Google in the least.
"..that it's just pure content without any layout or crap. In other words, it makes reading web sites as easy as it was in 1995."
Books without whitespace.
The average porta potty is far cleaner than the average slashdotter.
Far, far, less chance of catching an STD.
Generic RSS subscription (where you just click the "syndicate this site" link or little orange button) is not very useful as a replacement for search because you don't get to customize anything. Unless the blog in question offers categories, then you're stuck getting whatever they push onto the feed, even though the strength of RSS is supposed to be that you're pulling the information over.
Instead, you want to go with an RSS subscription that gives you some measure of control, specified by you. But what? A search term? I watch news.google.com for "Shakespeare". And I get every hit -- shakespeare fishing rods, shakespeare references in businessweek, and some football player named shakespeare who fell off a boat and died. Not what I want. At least something like a delicious theoretically goes one step above, because by having an army of monkeys tagging URLs by the thousands, you're assuming that you've attached validated meta data to each link. When I search delicious for things that are tagged Shakespeare, I might not only get exactly what I want, but my odds are much higher that it will be what I expected.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I've set up blogs for a couple of people (including myself), and RSS feeds for providing other forms of information. One thing I've noticed was that once the RSS feed was created, there would be an increase in bandwith consumed, that was disporportionate to the increase in subscribers. Far too many people have their aggregators set to fetch far too often. The increase in web based aggregators has helped since then the feed is cached and reused by many people.
What do you know I wrote a novel
RSS - yeah, good.
=================
End of on-topic portion - on to gripe:
Got this the other day:
"Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 53 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment."
Exactly. How on earth is RSS going to replace search engines if there's no way to find the site with the RSS feed in the first place?
RSS is for things you want to keep updated on - things you ALREADY KNOW ABOUT! If you don't know anything about the subject yet, why would you want an RSS feed of updates with that subject? More importantly, how would you even find those feeds?
The reason search engines haven't improved much in the past five years may be that they will, by nature, always lack a human component. Yes Google's page rank is influenced by the links of other sights but because it is an algorithm it is vulnerable to exploitation. RSS feeds have a distinct human "breaking news" feel to them. An opportunity to search many different versions of the "breaking news" each moderated by real human beings could defiantly be a next step for the internet.
only one everything
The Slashdot summary is misleading about the content of the article. It's about new material on the Web, of which the most important category is blog entries. Del.icio.us is good at telling you about cool new sites. Google doesn't sort by date.
By "the new search" they might mean "the new cool thing now that search is largely done", but it's certainly nowhere near "search is over and replaced with RSS". RSS tells you about cool new stuff; search is how you find answers to questions. They apply to different web sites and different modes.
Pretty much as you said, and as the article said, and as the summary DIDN'T say.
We're working on exactly that here at Rice. FeedTree (paper) is a newsfeed distribution system, built atop the self-organizing Pastry overlay and the Scribe multicast algorithm. Scribe is self-organizing and low-maintenance; everyone shares the load of distributing new bits of news (i.e. no polling stress at the publisher), and it all happens in a timely fashion (i.e. no polling delay at the client).
We're working on a public (open-source) beta. Check back soon.
It interrupts me from my work every hour :-)
Feeds are really nothing more than supercharged bookmarks that are constantly updated. Google gets by perfectly well with bookmarks still around, so why would they suddenly feel threatened by feeds? Don't tell me you use search to get to sites you read every day whose URLs you know by heart. In response to the feed ads Google's testing, the reason they're experimenting is that such ads are a potential source of income, and as a company Google only survives as long as it has income.
I'm really suprised when people still mention delicious, but not spurl.net. As an social bookmarking system spurl is much more superior than delicious. It has also a nifty zniff.com, which you can search among spurled (bookmarked) pages. That guarantees no ads, and commercials most of times.
More users everyday putting their spurl rss feeds to their blogs, even some have created tools that post new spurls when they have added as blog.
I feel sorry for Google. They have to run in all directions at once, even if those directions are terribly absurd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When I had the need to collect lots of news sources together (mostly due to being sick of oodles of ads), I sat down one afternoon and wrote my own. Over the last couple of years I've slowly evolved it into the masterpiece (ha!) that it is today.
Posted from the wireless couch.
Google's dejanews database is a goldmine of information if you extract it properly. One problem with trend-tracking is getting back-dated data to help confirm that a trend is really in place.
n er/technology/hibernatevsrubyDejanews.png
http://www.realmeme.com/miner/new.php?startup=/mi
I can get backfill data from dejanews, but a more profitable solution is to catch the trend early. heoretically, you could do that from a good sample of RSS feeds by doing frequency counts on words and phrases.
I spent some time on an RSS trend tracker, but there are several technical and statistical issues in pinning down thresholds, maintaining original relationships, etc.
http://www.realmeme.com/seeker/index.php
The SBL is used to blacklist SMTP gateways, not URL's appearing in the body of an e-mail message. The SpamAssassin process used SRBL to scan messages for "spammy" URLs. It has nothing to do with SBL blacklisting of gateways.
When criticizing a tool as unreliable, verify your facts.
signature pending slashdot approval
if it where not for the SlashDot RSS feed, i'd probably never read the news. thank you slashdot on my desktop!
Ever notice that each site with NEWs has the same news? One would think that the internet would kill the monolithic ap feeds and provide more diverse coverage of world events. It seems that most news sites get their content from RSS feeds and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get.... *sigh*
Actually, the convergence of search and syndication is what led A9 to create OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a standard for search results that, not coincidentally, is built as an extension to RSS. In just a couple of months a few hundred sites have adopted it -- seems like there is a market there. (Disclosure, not that there is a conflict of interest there, but I am the lead for the project.)
And it's not just for A9 -- anyone can use OpenSearch to syndicate their search to anyone else. One example of a search aggregator other than A9 using OpenSearch is OSFeed. And example of a search engine that can be accessed by anyone is AWS OpenSearch, which lets you search Amazon via RSS.
So in other words, when done well search and RSS are highly compatible.
Stumbling is the new search. Try it out, it's free, and they provide toolbars for IE, Mozilla, Firefox and other browsers. I've not only ''stumbled'' onto great websites, but great people as well, as they also include a nice people matching system, and I've naturally met people just through the sharing of great links.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
The only people who need to worry are those that create "dotcode" and similar systems - with RSS feeds, you can see the new articles without the ads :)
Searching is looking for something specific. Feeds are for "what's new." These are quite different activities.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Whereas the article title hints to RSS being the new search, it isn't really the case unless you're talking about sites like PubSub which really do convert search queries into RSS (or pushed feeds.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
An excellent example is how Bungie uses RSS feeds for their Bungie.net stat tracking. You can read your stats in any web browser, but the real fun part is when 3rd parties use the RSS feeds to customize stats and have indepth tracking and archiving.
A great example is http://www.carnagestats.com/ for which I have used religiously since January or so.
I think it might mean you have to wait 2 minutes in between presses of the button.
It's a patience game.
I'm being patient.
Aw, fuck it
I think Google should worry about feeds because human input weighs much higher than that of a bot. Bookmarks provide vetting and categorisation that Google has taken some 7 years to build, albeit not perfectly. If you do a search on Google, you only get the most popular pages first, but are they the most relevant? Vertical searches WILL eventually take over from a general search. Check out projects like Gataga.com, they're already providing vertical search capabilities by indexing bookmarking sites. As the web embraces 2.0 applications, people will want to have more social based information, and this is where Google should/needs to focus on next. Yahoo! has is already providing RSS capabilities... why is Google behind? Are they just waiting for AdSense for RSS to be mature, so they don't squash their #1 cash cow.
Hey y'all, --- I didn't notice any other mention of this in here, but I also submit that I didn't read every comment... --- The easiest way to utilize the RSS capabilities of websites is to use the new browser Safari RSS from Apple. It shows right in the address bar whether or not the site supports RSS feeds, and with one click a user can switch to viewing the site in RSS format. --- Also, thanks to Apple's new search technology called Spotlight, a user can instantaneously search every article on the site and view the results in the RSS reader. --- If you haven't already experienced Sarafi RSS, you should try to find a way to test it out. I think you will be surprised with the convenience Apple provides, in addition to the elegant design that we all have come to expect from Apple. (Note: Safari RSS is the same as Safari 2.0)