Why RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes -- not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything. In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don't want to hear about. You're in full control of what's in your feed and what isn't, so you don't get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you've got no interest in reading. Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don't miss anything. It's like putting a recording schedule in place for the shows you know you definitely want to catch rather than flicking through the channels hoping you land on something interesting. There's no rush with RSS -- you don't miss out on a day's worth of news, or TV recaps, or game reviews if you're offline for 24 hours. It's all waiting for you when you get back. And if you're on holiday and the unread article count starts to get scarily high, just hit the mark all as read button and you're back to a clean slate.

Comments

Indeed

[JohnFen]

When Google News changed their web site format (and rendered it much, much less useful to me), I switched to using RSS feeds.

I had forgotten how awesome getting news this way is, and wonder why I ever stopped.

news reader recommendations?

[Kludge]

Could someone recommend to me a newsreader that will integrate several news feeds into a single one? I do not want to use a web site that I have to log into. I just want an app or browser plugin. Thanks.

Lack of formatting = win

[DNS-and-BIND]

Sure, RSS is great for keeping up with your latest sites. Especially those low-volume sites that might publish an article every few months, and you forgot that it existed. But the real joy of reading by RSS is the lack of formatting. No more "read more" buttons, no more in-your-face javascript popup, no more loading 24 trackers. Just the article with photos.

In fact, I'm surprised that RSS hasn't been removed by the hipster designer crowd for being obsolete (because it's old, not because it's useless) and failing to track engagement or whatever. Frankly, I think they've forgotten that it's on their sites.