If You Think RSS is Dead Then That’s Your Loss and It’s a Big One

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Sam Diaz at ZDNet tonight wrote the latest admission that he’s not using his RSS reader anymore. I have a lot of respect for Sam’s writing, but I am having a hard time believing that he and so many others say they no longer even bother to read feeds. Twitter, Facebook and aggregators like Techmeme or Google News suffice for Sam, he says. He’s far from alone.

They sure don’t suffice for me. I do get a whole lot of story leads, perspective and more from Twitter (something I wrote about in an article titled Twitter is Paying My Rent) but RSS is no less important for me today than it used to be.

I’m hesitant to write about my own research methods, to be honest, because if my competitors want to abandon RSS that’s just fine with me! But for other readers here, I will say that social media like Twitter has only added to my inflow – not replaced feeds at all.

I will tell you that I no longer use Google Reader or Netvibes. Instead, I use open source software on our own servers that is more customizable, more reliable and more efficient.

Our team scans over thousands of company RSS feeds each morning for updates (what news writer wouldn’t do that?) and we use an open source customizable meme-tracker to make sure we haven’t missed anything important. We use open source RSS parsing software to set up a dashboard tracking all our competitors’ feeds, we use an RSS to IM alert system to get some feeds sent to us right away and at least some of us use Gmail Webclips for another layer of ambient feed tracking.

We use Postrank to track breakout hits in niche blogs and we use tools like Snackr or the just-launched LazyFeed to keep an eye on specific feeds or general topics.

In other words, I use RSS all day long. Anyone who is competitive in their field and doesn’t just might be crazy.

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  • RSS isn’t dead… however, I think it’s usage is doing a massive shift and that RSS readers (and more generally any RSS tool) that we used in the past is probably not going to be used as widely.

    My bet is that RSS is slowly returning behind the scene where it belongs to power services without having the user even caring about them. RSS is a great technology, it’s never a good product!

  • Like many others, Twitter has become my preferred content discovery tool over RSS. However, Twitter is a compliment and by no means a replacement.

    I still have yet to find a great app that aggregates RSS feeds with rich social integration. If anyone knows of one, please share.

  • Alex Calic

    Totally agree with your position Marshall as its impossible to follow Facebook and Twitter streams in real-time- all day long. Eventually you will miss something that can be captured and consumed at your convenience through an RSS reader.

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  • Joe Perrin

    And here I thought I was cool by using Google Reader. I’ve used it since it’s release.

    But I’m looking for a better feed reader. What is this open source reader that “is more customizable, more reliable and more efficient.” ?

    RSS is my crack. Couldn’t imagine my life without it.

    Good post as usual Marshall.

  • I’d be information deprived without RSS. The breadth of information available in RSS eclipses Twitter. Better tools for getting at content found in both is what’s needed.

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  • I’m also using RSS as my main source for stories on various platforms: Google Reader for the full content, Lazyfeed and a Netvibes dashboard for real-time tracking and spidering further platforms for keywords like Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube etc. (all through RSS).

    What I would appreciate is a centralized storage for my OPML file. Rather that export / import from platform to platfom via a local file I would love to edit an online catalog of feeds and then import from there only the group of feeds I need on a new platform. Thus changes made to a group there would be represented on any other platform.

  • Marshall

    Benjamin, agreed – a really good OPML management service, probably in the cloud and good for colaboration, is an unmet need.

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  • I’ve been using Gist, which is still in beta. I use it to pull the feeds of my recent contacts to one interface. From there I can see what’s happening with those who participate in my community. For my workflow, it’s been a Godsend. However, my goals are focused on community development not breaking news.

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  • I also no longer use google reader or any other commercial project. I started building my own a few years ago and haven’t looked back. Marshall, since I’m not a competitor I’d be interested to know a little more about the reader your team uses, and perhaps find out things that I missed in my own reader.

  • Hi Marshall,
    You hit the nail on the head here “Twitter has only added to my inflow – not replaced feeds at all.”
    I’ll repeat it here that many people equate the failure of bad RSS readers with RSS itself. So let’s not throw the baby (RSS) with the bath water (Readers). Readers have failed, but RSS is thriving and getting re-purposed in thousands of ways, like the ones you have described. The savvy user will know how and where to use RSS.
    On a related note, we’re about to go public with our professional aggregation platform with deep content coverage around professional topics- where we insulate the user from RSS itself, but present well organized content along topics.
    Fact is most users don’t have the time to manage RSS feeds, and the end-result is a mess. Twitter feeds are also almost becoming unmanageable- it’s one thing if you follow 1 homogeneous topic (e.g. social media/high-tech), but what if your interests are spread across 5 distinct areas, so you have to start managing 5 groups of friends and we’re back to the RSS management problem, more or less. That last part- I will expand on in my blog, later.
    Long live RSS and all what you can build on top of it.

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  • Nice work William. Do you source only on the feeds semantics or also on individual posts regardless of feed? I think trashing the focus on the feed is part of the next level for rss readers. take a look at a toy I built a while ago, http://punchingsoup.com/.

  • Shawn,
    We parse/mine the post itself, not the feed title, and use semantics for filtering and classification. I looked at punchingsoup, and you’ve got a bit of what we’re doing, although ours is totally scalable now, and it’s a SaaS platform if an enterprise wants their own environment.
    Would you email me directly pls? I couldn’t find your contact on your blog wmougayar AT gmail.

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  • Great post. I love how you combine the technology (RSS, modified opensource software) with human power (team doing the scanning, reading, filtering, learning, and recommending). I get to enjoy the fruits of your labor by reading smart, filtered content. You nailed it!

    One thing, though, I actually do find your content through Twitter, not a Blog Reader. But that’s my choice of application, not technology. We need RSS!

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  • I would say it is not dead, as you have so many things you can do (Google Reader; Netvibes; Yahoo Pipes; Lazyfeed) and more is coming.

  • Superb timing and post! Rss is a protocol and its upto you how to use it. Thanks for sharing some of open-source readers you use, will definitely check them out 🙂

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  • I’d say lots of people don’t know how to use RSS readers. They add too many feeds and never learn how to tier them.

    Give the world a reader that can do that and RSS will boom.

  • For a news writer, yes, RSS is vital to their business. However, for mainstream, I’m going to have to go with Sam that it isn’t for everyone and not necessary to those that aren’t making a living off of news.

    It’s too much information for them and sometimes for some writers. Plus, Google does most of what RSS will do at a decent rate for them (though surely not for writers). I see your point though from a competitive standpoint and I wholeheartedly agree. However for the rest of the world, RSS might be dead or maybe just dying.

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  • It’s ridiculous to simply say something as widely fueled internet-wide as RSS is dead… though i do believe the reader concept is in need of an update, i still use Google Reader (in fact, it was google’s own “what’s hot in Google reader” RSS that linked me here).

    They’re getting closer to where i would like the Google reader to be as far as usage goes, i think if they keep the amount of resources dedicated to it that they should it will still be a viable means to read RSS for a long time.

    What i wonder about is what will replace delicious, reddit and stumbleupon, personally.

  • More people use RSS than Twitter.

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  • Mike Berkley

    Also remember that RSS and MRSS (media) are the standards in server-to-server sharing of content and media. They are the backbone of content syndication. Far from dead. Twitter won’t ever touch that.

  • kf

    This looks interesting. Though, I am out of luck because I don’t have a credit card…

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  • Tom

    I think it’s pretty crazy to say that rss itself is dead. It’s such a fundamentally useful mechanism for information delivery. I do think though that it’s about time we moved standards on a bit and introduced new recognised XML formats to share other kinds of information. Ok rss is great for basic news stories, title, description etc. But what about other fields? Address for example would be a great addition and allow Google Map API mashups, letting news stories be placed into geographical context. I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be done to make rss more useful and help bring about real progress with the development of a truly usable and re-usable semantic web of information.

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