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'RSS Has Already Won' (brianschrader.com)
Brian Schrader, an independent software developer, writes: It's been a little over 5 years since Google Reader shut down and the world of RSS readers was tossed into the junk drawer of collective memory. But, looking back on it today, I'd actually argue that RSS and Feeds as a whole never really disappeared, only the Feed Readers did. In building Pine, and as a long time Feed Reader user, I've been pleasantly surprised over these last 5 years to see that most sites still have RSS feeds. Sure, Facebook and Twitter don't support them, but YouTube, Reddit, Squarespace, Wordpress and so many more do by default. Feeds of all kinds still exist, nearly forgotten, in the markup of most websites, and this means that Feed Readers can, and will, make a comeback someday. The foundations are already laid; the hard work is done. RSS Feeds became a standard, and were built into the tools we use to make the web today. It's almost as if we laid the tracks and built the trains for a trans-continental railroad, but we've just forgotten how to sell tickets.
I found this post via a RSS Feed reader.
Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"? Regardless, I've never stopped relying on them. I have several readers on my Android phone, and use Thunderbird on desktops to collect feeds for review alongside e-mail, which seems perfectly natural to me.
Its not dead.... perhaps not well publicized, but not dead...
-beaker
For me at least, if a website doesn't have an RSS feed, I'm not likely to frequent it. My RSS reader is how I interact with a large amount of the web. I honestly can't fathom how people can use the internet without one. It's so mentally taxing and you miss so much stuff.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I don't know about you but I personally love RSS. Have 14 sites that add new articles daily (this place included), go to one page scroll through what has been added, don't need to refresh or look to see if any of them would have updated. Basically I can pretty easily keep up with reddit, Slashdot, and random other news sites. Plus the places that barely update once a week or so I don't have to check them, but since I'm checking my feed anyway I see their new posts right away.
Google Reader shut down and 10 more readers popped up - and today Feedly is much better than Google Reader was, or ever would be with Google's stewardship. It revitalized things.
I'm not sure anyone thought RSS was dead though, except the people who want it dead like Facebook.
YouTube does, technically, support RSS feeds, but you have to know the secret handshake in order to get the feed address. Saying that feeds are "supported by default" is a little over-optimistic. Google does everything short of completely banning feeds in order to get you to stop using them and sign up with their tracking service instead.
For the secret handshake, use either:
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[your channel ID here, alphanumeric string]"
or
"https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=[username here, but the username is not always the display name. Check page source.]"
and copy that address to your RSS reader.
I was working on a project with a guy who loved to over-engineer things. At one point, we wanted the ability to share XML documents between sites by advertising them and allowing remote sites to download them on their own schedule. He spent the evening in his hotel room drawing up a complex client-server system with an elaborate API. When we met the next morning, I said, "Why don't we just do it with RSS?" And over the next half hour we verified that RSS did everything we wanted it to, already has developed tools and APIs, and is super simple. We stood up that system in more or less its current state the Monday after we got back from the meeting. RSS FTW.
I think lots of people here have some server running somewhere. Install Tiny Tiny RSS (TT-RSS) on there, and be able to access it from anywhere. Totally open source. https://tt-rss.org/
What's great is that there are a number of RSS reading apps that you can point to your server, so it doesn't matter whether you're on mobile or on your desktop browser. For Android, I'd suggest just use the app from the same author. For iOS, I use Tiny Reader (App Store link).
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Was just a blatant move to kill it off to get people to use G+ / FB / Twitter so our every engagement can be tracked and sold to the advertisers (and possibly nation-states).
RSS "lost" like Obi-wan lost in Episode IV. It was never really gone.
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RSS is a standardised XML format for publishing lists of articles.
That's pretty much it.
Its strength is that it is standardised, so if you build a reader for the RSS on one site, you've built a reader for the RSS on almost every other site. An RSS reader has the advantage over a web browser that you don't have to wade through all the crud of advertising etc to find the articles. They'll be listed in whatever order you like in a nice list view. The reader can also maintain state so it can flag articles you haven't read yet and it will give you a list of all the site RSS feeds and how many unread articles are in each one.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Feeds are great but they don't align with the business models of Facebook, Yahoo, Google, et al. A feed is something outside of their control, their algorithms, their aggregation. These days if you want to use feeds you have to get an extension to do it. I use Feedbro in Firefox which is quite nice for this purpose.