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."

Comments

the important of RSS is..

[Anonymous Coward]

..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".

Searching can be one time, subscription can't.

[dmorin]

I think a key difference between subscription and search is that you may have use for searching for one thing, one time. As a matter of fact I'd think that this is by far the most common use of search. Maybe you hit google news everyday to check for "Free porn movie downloads" or something, and that you can subscribe to. But how about when I just have a one-time question, like what's a "xenops"? Google's perfect for that and I can't see RSS being a big problem.

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.

Re:I doubt it will replace search engines...

[DeadSea]

On the other hand, wouldn't you like to know if google found any NEW information about certain topics.

• Get an alert when google bot runs across a new page that mentions your name.
• Be notified when the when the search engine results page changes for a query that brings your site a lot of traffic.
• Have news results that match your query pop up on your RSS reader.

Some of these things are already available. For example pubsub.com will tell you about new pages for your ego surf. CNN has email alerts that it can send you when stories match keywords and topics.

RSS and Bandwith

[jockm]

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.

Ask, and ye shall receive (by multicast)

[dsandler]

RSS is pretty crappy, as it is a point-to-point protocol. What would be good would be if websites sent out multicasts when an update occured, as then all interested parties could monitor for that and we wouldn't get system overloads.

Right on.

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.

The REAL importance of RSS

[Beek]

It interrupts me from my work every hour :-)

Spurl

[camcorder]

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.

Pity

[MightyMartian]

I feel sorry for Google. They have to run in all directions at once, even if those directions are terribly absurd.

OpenSearch

[image]

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.

Nope

[smagruder]

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.