Slashdot Mirror
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 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...
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".
(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! --
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
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.
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.
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