hell no RSS isn't dead. Twitter and social media is great when you're sitting at your computer or have time to monitor those things. But for people like me who may only have a few hours a day to even look at a computer for personal stuff, we live and die by RSS. I can go days without touching the internet and I know all the important stuff is saved for me in my reader.
Jorge_S
· 7 months ago
True that. It is also great that website like Mashable are sending "enriched" RSS through FeedBurner. I don't need to open additional browsers tab, I can read 30+ headlines from different sites all through my Google Reader account. It is much simpler to sort interesting stuff when you can glance a lot of headlines at once.
Rob
· 7 months ago
Those that believe that RSS is dead should get out of their technology fishbowl and into the real world. Get in front of an audience, as I do for a living, and ask 100 people if they even know what RSS is.
Of the 100 in a given audience, 85 will have no idea.
RSS dead? Ha! RSS has not even found mainstream internet general populous acceptance/usage.
Eric McGinnis
· 7 months ago
For those who're interested in discovering valuable information streams regardless of whether they are RSS feeds, microblogs, and social media feeds, I'd like to recommend to check out www.feedmil.com.
No way. For a while I thought it was neat to get updates via sites and friends on Twitter and FriendFeed, but a good RSS reader is way more efficient (and it doesn't come with all the noise and distractions).
Devin Johnston
· 7 months ago
I use Google Reader daily. Although Twitter and other social media services are better for discovering content from sources not familiar to me, RSS is perfect for staying current with what the best bloggers are saying about the topics in which I'm interested. By subscribing to sites that I know to be high-quality, insightful, and regularly updated, the signal to noise ration of my RSS reader remains unbeatably high, while Twitter gives me access to more exotic and scattershot online content.
Shane Harris
· 7 months ago
I'd be interested to find out how many URLs posted on twitter are directly correlated to someone reading their RSS feeds.
WatchMeRise
· 7 months ago
Most of mine are either straight from google reader or StumbleUpon. I'd say quite a lot.
Brett Trout
· 7 months ago
"information moves almost instantaneously on Twitter." You said it all right there.
Jen
· 7 months ago
I do use google reader to catch up on news. But I check it less than 3 or 4 times a month, while I'm on twitter 24/7. Some of the updates I get through twitter do have an rss feed, but I find it more appealing to see the tweet pop up. I think Shane's comment has a very interesting perspective about the urls that get to twitter.
Gerri
· 7 months ago
I love it when an interesting blog to me has an RSS feed!
jyoseph
· 7 months ago
100% absurd and a total stretch. You cite one writer on slate.com who says he gave up his rss reader because of the guilt he felt by not keeping up with the latest stories. Hey Farhad, that's when you select all of your missed stories, mark them as read and move on.
In your article you mention using twitter for news, that's great. But using Farhad's logic that puts you two in the same boat. Missing tweets and falling behind your news stories in an RSS reader is the same exact thing.
No offense intended (I mean that honestly) but I think this story was a quick effort to just post *something*. Cite some analytics of rss reading being down in numbers. Or maybe some other credible article based on some actual figures to build something with some substance.
Robert
· 7 months ago
Yeah totally bogus article. Poor headline. I have been noticing this more and more on the web, people's personal opinions expressed as popular consensus to gain attention without any substance to back it up.
If you really want to maintain credibility and respect AND readership, then the articles need to be more carefully written. Writing stuff for the web just to have content written is not a great idea. It leads to wasted time and buyers remorse.
As for me, I don't have time to tweet. And based on the quality of the tweets I get, it's practically worthless. anyway. The real question is whether twitter is just a fad. It certainly hasn't been around long as RSS. I guess only time till tell.
Personally I use feed demon on a more than daily basis. And I love it. Found this post in feed demon and replied accordingly, although my time would have been better spent watching TV.
mashable
· 7 months ago
Tend to agree that we overbaked the title on this. And absolutely think that numbers would help. Thanks for keeping us on track.
Jasper
· 7 months ago
Yes, I agree with everyone here.
RSS is good for those (like me) who have too many website to visit in a day. Just open Google Reader and it's easy to see which site has updated their content. Beats opening over 50 sites just to see if there is anything new.
I don't even see how it compares to Twitter, StumbleUpon and Friendfeed. Sure, it goes out earlier in those media but try to get THAT particular news in Twitter (if you have a lot of followers), StumbleUpon (keep on stumbling and hope you stumble on it) and Friendfeed... good luck.
mashable
· 7 months ago
Thanks guys - I revised the title to something more sensible.
Jim
· 7 months ago
I find that a lot of the people I follow on Twitter are the same blogs and special interest sites that I read with Google Reader. I still use Google Reader, but not as much.
Al Shaw
· 7 months ago
Timely piece as it just popped into my RSS feed in Google reader as I was tidying up some folders and making some other adjustments.
With over 150 feeds coming in, I would find it difficult to begin to imagine how to use the social media platforms to access that amount of information in anything like a systematic or structured way.
To me, the ability to organize is at the heart of what makes RSS work.
iTbay
· 7 months ago
GREAT!!!
The relevance of information diminishes with time; although RSS continues to meet these information demands, the social graph as stated above provides a clear indication that the information and news remains and will continue to remain social. Not all of your friends or followers or whatever subscribes to the same RSS feeds - there is no mechanism such as retweeting or the compounded integration of (feeding) information that the social landscape provides. I think when we look at topics such as swine flu, for instance, everyone using an RSS reader in the past would not have had the same media effect that twitter, friendfeed, and facebook has to name a few - this begs one question - has retweeting killed the RSS party?
@itbay
Daniel Brusilovsky
· 7 months ago
I think RSS is dead. I don't do anymore RSS. If I want to read it, I'll just go to the URL and read it.
James Crafton
· 7 months ago
This "article" is complete complete crap, I hope you didn't get paid for this. What a lazy effort to come up with something sensational.
Chad
· 7 months ago
I think the biggest issue with RSS now is similar to the issues with email, or any other electronic media. Too much noise. As the Twitter's and Friendfeed's grow, they will be hit by the same issues. The big win will come when somebody figures out the best way to filter the noise.
Alberto
· 7 months ago
Noise has always been the problem for information discovery, email lost the battle because of spam and although RSS readers provided a reliable opt-in solution it doesn't scale as much as we would like to (I used to rely on Google Desktop for alerts and Google Reader for delayed information discovery).
Twitter brings social filtering and although there is already noise, in this case I don't need to be subscribed to the publisher to get the news I am interested in (Twitter clients have replaced my use of Google Desktop for alerts) and if I still have time to get more news I go to FriendFeed to check what has been shared or commented. Both are the best tools available currently until track filtering arrives.
Of course, if you don't have too many feeds or you don't need close to realtime capabilities to receive the news, RSS readers are still good enough.
onecaseman
· 7 months ago
I still use RSS, but admittedly, I found this article from your Twitter. I would like to see some actual statistics showing users switching from finding news via Twitter or Digg versus an RSS Reader, because I think the social methods are very inefficient for that. You get what's popular/controversial, not what you're interested in.
ArabCrunch
· 7 months ago
we are not 24/7 on twitter so RSS is helpful, plus u need to read stuff that u might miss in twitter tweet clutter. Netvibes is a great way for me to read the most important blogs and news, Google Reader is for the 100s others, i check once in a while. i am not gona check 100s websites to see what is new? and twitter or facebook can not provide a solution to that. Though as we all know the most RT posts will get the best attention. However, no way to say RSS is dead.
ArabCrunch
· 7 months ago
I have also to admit that i found this post via Facebook from Cashamio, but again i am not there 24/7 so netvibes let me see what i missed from Mashable in twitter and facebook
Simon Carr
· 7 months ago
Social media is not a clear successor to RSS (in my 'pinion). *but*, if you're willing to let other people be your ears it is one way to get your news fix. I do find that with RSS if I don't use proper discipline I end up subscribed to *everything*, which then becomes a chore.
And as you have said, Twitter is to-the-minute.
I do a few things to keep my RSS reading sane; 1) I unsubscribe from feeds liberally, and 2) I don't actually read every story, I'll skim and hit space bar liberally as well. If something legitimately catches my eye, then I'll stop. 3) If I feel overwhelmed I mark all as read and I don't freak out that I'm missing a story somewhere.
Social media *can* be an amazing news aggregate of course, in between people posting that their cat is on the keyboard, etc. And the plus of getting your news from your friends is that they've pre-filtered for you. The minus is also that they've pre-filtered for you. You may end up with nothing but wacky YouTube clips to check out, or a zillion vanity-blog posts on improving your SEO (barf).
Personally I'd rather stick with RSS for reliability of information using my "low focus" filter method to weed through the garbage. With Twhirl running in the background :)
phayke
· 7 months ago
Lies and falsehoods! I'm subscribed to a couple hundred feeds- DIY projects, desktop wallpapers, music blogs with embedded music, and a constant feed of most popular digg pages, I don't know how I could recreate any of that in twitter or however you suggest. The poll would be a little skewed i think, since this site has a pretty net-savvy demografic. I'm still the only person I know (in person) that uses RSS.
gbattle
· 7 months ago
Similar to how Google is a filter for the broad internet, Twitter and the "now" web are the filter for RSS. Currently, it's indirect, but eventually, every feed reader will use your social graph or some designated subgroup of your social graph as a direct filter for the RSS feeds you choose. RSS is bound to sequential consumption where time alone determines the context. If you combine the now with the historical with the influential - via Twitter, Google and Facebook respectively - as an overlay to RSS, the feed reading experience will become much improved. Triage the information, but still encourage individual discovery.
Mark
· 7 months ago
Wow that slate article is a mess. Instead of actually organizing his feed reader, he organizes sites using bookmarks and then spends time trying to find stuff in the fluff that rss cuts out. The real kicker is that his newfound bookmarking system is the same one heavy rss users already use for organizing feeds. Amazing my ass.
Anyway, my use of rss encompasses everything, not just news, but also audio/podcasts/video/photos/shopping/comics etc. It is really an update system for me, not just a news reader so things like twitter is not even remotely going to replace it anytime soon. If there's anything twitter is replacing, it would be digg itself.
Brian Schuster
· 7 months ago
I've only got an RSS about 2 months ago and I love it. The problem with twitter is that I have to listen to what other people want me to read, not my own stuff.
Plus, one of the problems with twitter is that people have way too many followers and will more then likely miss good article posts. An RSS wouldn't have that problem.
No, it isn't. Go to an URL everyday and read the news is a waste of time.
leliathomas
· 7 months ago
I think the key assumption here is that those who have RSS feeds also have Twitter (and use them the same way). However, that's far from the case. Most people who have a site with an RSS feed do not post every blog link to their Twitter account, I've found, which means a RSS reader is the only way I actually get to find out about all the content on their website.
I tend to subscribe to Twitter feeds for massive sites, like, well, Mashable. When I subscribe to your RSS feed, I am overwhelmed. Twitter helps me manage that, because in 140 characters, I can decide whether I want to read onto your post. It helps me manage content overload in the case of sites like Mashable or Popurls. This means that for sites like this, I only follow via Twitter.
For other sites, though, I tend to follow just the RSS feed. If I'm interested in the author(s), I will follow their Twitter account, too, if they have one. Most of the time, Twitter is much more personal, and if I do this, it's because I'm genuinely interested in the author and/or the interests he talks about.
When new technologies come out, it's a bad idea to announce the death of an old technology, because it's rarely accurate. The Internet hasn't killed TV, just changed how we use it. Mobile phones haven't killed landlines, even, just changed the cases in which we use them. Television didn't kill radio. I could go on and on and on.
Twitter and other services (PostRank, anyone?) are just making us change how we use RSS, either by way of changing our management techniques or by enhancing our existing RSS experiences.
MattWilsontv
· 7 months ago
All the time. But i see way more stuff thru tweetdeck that I want to read everyday.
Sean O' Grady
· 7 months ago
RSS will never die. The usefulness and tidiness of it make it a winning formula. Twitter is handy for finding new blogs and tidbits, but to read them, you need to use a reader
Craig (lapp)
· 7 months ago
I have noticed that our rss on http://www.worstpizza.com has remained stagnant, I think something might be wrong with feedburner
Steven Cahill
· 7 months ago
pfft!
I don't have the time to sit on Twitter 24/7 or to scroll back to see what I've missed; nor are all my interests available via twitter. RSS on the other hand allows me to consolidate all of my interests in the one spot and allows me to read them at my own leisure
Renee
· 7 months ago
I use RSS less, but more selectively now, quality over quantity. It still keeps me on top of the meat & potatoes issues and interesting conversations. The latest news isn't always the most important news.
radiantarchon
· 7 months ago
the only reason why i am responding to this article is because it came up in my google reader feed
Peter Robert Casey
· 7 months ago
I retired from RSS reading and rely on specific Twitterers for catching up on news.
Rick Boretsky
· 7 months ago
I only recently started using RSS feeds in a big way. And now I feel that I could not live without it. I got rid of every email subscription and will only read via RSS. Although, I do agree with comment above that it becomes somewhat of a chore at times.
I wish that I could figure out how to manage ALL twitter feeds in a similar manner so that I could follow everything that I want to read from twitter at my own leisure?? I have found groups in tweetdeck or seesmic difficult to work with and unmanageable.
What I only recently found, is that you can RSS feed a twitter account and therefore group those users as you wish and follow them at your own pace. Not as much or as exciting as using twitter itself, but pretty useful. I would appreciate any other suggestions on how to group and follow users in a more effective manner, where I don't miss anything I want and can read at my own leisure.
Rick Boretsky
· 7 months ago
I only recently started using RSS feeds in a big way. And now I feel that I could not live without it. I got rid of every email subscription and will only read via RSS. Although, I do agree with comment above that it becomes somewhat of a chore at times.
I wish that I could figure out how to manage ALL twitter feeds in a similar manner so that I could follow everything that I want to read from twitter at my own leisure?? I have found groups in tweetdeck or seesmic difficult to work with and unmanageable.
What I only recently found, is that you can RSS feed a twitter account and therefore group those users as you wish and follow them at your own pace. Not as much or as exciting as using twitter itself, but pretty useful. I would appreciate any other suggestions on how to group and follow users in a more effective manner, where I don't miss anything I want and can read at my own leisure.
ranjitp
· 7 months ago
Farhad wasn't dissing RSS. He was questioning the value of RSS Readers, and I completely agree that RSS Readers have stifled and limited the value of RSS. I posted a detailed response to The Fray, in case you care to hear about a revolutionary alternative 8-).
acurrie
· 7 months ago
I found this through Google Reader, so... PWN3D!!1!
Edwin Khodabakchian
· 7 months ago
feedly (http://www.feedly.com) is a good example of how RSS, twitter and friendfeed can be integrated and work together.
barefootmeg
· 7 months ago
i noticed about 6 months ago that, try as i might, it was increasingly hard to force myself to slog through my newsgator feeds. about a month and a half ago, i realized that i was keeping up with mashable better thanks to seeing the posts mentioned in my facebook feed. but since switching from tweetdeck to nambu, twitter has opened up as a far better means of keeping up with news, blog posts, and friends. (and i've almost entirely stopped using facebook.)
the only value i see in RSS feeds anymore is to hook them into twitter via a twitterfeed.
Bamboo Forest
· 7 months ago
I opt for e-mail subscription, though that still uses RSS.
As long as blogs continue to be popular I don't think RSS is going to go anywhere.
Tim
· 7 months ago
RSS provides the news that is then disseminated via social networking in my workflow. Hopefully RSS never dies, but lives cohesively with Social Media
Tim
· 7 months ago
I found this through Twitter!
Trigeia Twins
· 7 months ago
As twitter and social media sites that use status updates evolves they are becoming similar to an rss feed. However we do not think that RSS Feeds will every become obsolete they will just evolve as every other media does (finding ways to share content in more efficient ways.) keep in mind organizing the content you want to receive from users on twitter etc. can become a little more work then just simply subscribing to an rss. In Conclusion, RSS WINS!!!
allen
· 7 months ago
"Is (X technology) dead?" is code for "(X technology) looks poised to gain widespread end user acceptance in its current or next version and I must look like I'm ahead of the game." (No, RSS isn't there yet. It's still only knowingly used by power users or experienced users.) You don't see articles on dying protocols or software as they die.
Doug
· 7 months ago
I get 27% of my news from Twitter. Twitter gives me updates from news organizations on traffic conditions. Just tonight I got the tweet about the accident on the 215 fwy in Perris, Ca and then a Tweet from a friend that he was stuck in the traffic delays and re-routing that resulted from that accident. Now I am anxiously awaiting a Tweet saying that his family has made it home alright. That is about as real time as one can get. And it is all from Twitter.
joespake
· 7 months ago
I would like to see numbers on the percentage of the overall population that uses RSS. Usage seems low in this part of the country.
temp-
· 7 months ago
google reader at work
also use mibbit at work for IRC and twitter
mIRC + NNS at home as a IRC client and rss reader
Amílcar Tavares
· 7 months ago
Very efficient! I'm a huge fan of blogs and news, and now with RSS they come to instead of the pain to go after them.
remlap42
· 7 months ago
I use RSS to follow "sites"...I use twitter to follow "people". It's as simple as that. They serve different purposes -- and they are both tools I probably can't live without now.
I don't use twitter to follow sites -- although, often I may happen to follow someone who has a blog that I also subscribe to via RSS. What I find happens: someone I follow on twitter posts a link to a site -- and I end up subscribing to the site via RSS.
If I had to give up one -- it would be twitter. A rich set of content fed to me via RSS is something I have grown addicted to.
I use google reader solely as a place on the net to store the "state" of my RSS feeds -- I never log into google to read my feeds. Instead -- I use native clients on Mac (EventBox) and iPhone (byLine) to read the content. This works great: if I read it on my iPhone using byLine, google reader marks it as "read "-- then when I get back to my Mac, EventBox shows only the unread feeds.
roundstone
· 7 months ago
Not about twitter but still on RSS: just thinking aloud, is it not good for the original content's reach if it is standard protocol for RSS feeds to allow convenient "RSS to html" resyndication by bloggers? Copyright? How about putting the word "Syndicated from" or something prominently after the title, include original ads so original contents do not lose revenue. The re-publisher should be happy with the new content without sweat as the reblog is crawlable by spiders...
DukeXC
· 7 months ago
"Use?" Well, my Google Reader has 198 separate subscriptions, so I guess you could call it that...
I browse it mostly, probably only read around 30-50 percent of the items I get, but it's a huge amount of information in a quick and efficient format. I get news from friends in Twitter as well, but I *post* links too. Prefer to get the news from the source in an organized fashion than hope I'm looking when someone tweets it.
sull
· 7 months ago
most prob prefer a balance of different info-consumption methods and technologies. i used to evangelize RSS feeds forwarded to Gmail for organization. Then came Google Reader and eventually, I settled on it for my mostly newsy blog type of subscriptions plus a some random blogs i follow. It's ideal as an organized repository that you can always go to and delve in when convenient without missing anything.... and nice built-in search and share features etc.
I prefer my twitter to be 99% real people with only a few exceptions of automated data streams. However, if Twitter would provide filtering and groups, I'd be open to getting more RSS feed headlines there and jumping to the web page to read. I often enjoy being on actual web page where content originated so thats cool with me. I know some twitter clients help with filters/groups but I use tweetie and love it and grok why they expect twitter to provide this top-level functionality instead of bloating the client app with such tasks. So Twitter should be working on this- I hope.
I'd still use Google Reader even if I doubled up in Twitter with filtered RSS feed streams.
Of course RSS is also important for media publishers who take advantage of "attaching files" like video and audio as enclosures/media:content for iTunes, Miro and any other media aggregator software. So let's be careful not to suggest RSS as being dead when RSS is used to deliver more than just text headlines/articles.
Using the Social Graph to bring you the goods is fine but it's also likely to be most useful by introducing you to new sources of content that you may enjoy and inevitably add to your RSS Reader. So, the RSS Reader is just a Content Inbox.... Not too different as your Email Inbox. The desired content is sent and stored for you (Online/Offline) in both cases. And that's just logical use of common available tech. RSS is fundamental and not going away, even if people dont know what RSS is exactly. Its a means to an end.
@sull
RK
· 7 months ago
This twitter hype is dumb. Two sentence worthless blurbs will not take the place of actual articles with rteal information
ttocs
· 7 months ago
i have fields of rss feeds for topics and sources of interest. i don't think rss is going away. twitter serves an interesting role in filtering though. some articles are brought my attention sooner than the other sources. like this one for instance. @scottabell
Paul C. Shirley
· 7 months ago
I think there are merits for both... Using a reader is liking watching a news programme on the tv - you get just news. The good: you get just news, and you can choose the sources and topics. The bad: you only get it at certain times (on tv, when it's broadcast; on a feed, when you get time to check it), which means it can be old news. Using twitter, friendfeed, etc. is liking watching tv all day - a lot of fun, entertainment, chat, and news. The good: you can get breaking news, as it happens. The bad: you can't filter the news you get - it's all or nothing. Personally, I much prefer to use a reader because I want just the news I'm interested in without all of the noise.
10cre
· 7 months ago
Netvibes rules !
Maria Tchijov
· 7 months ago
I still prefer to stick to my Google Reader. Twitter is great for glancing over headlines to see if something captures my attention, but RSS feeds make news much more digestable. There is only so much you can get across in 140 characters.
Productive Pinoy
· 7 months ago
I use google reader maybe 3 to 4 times per month. Is that good or bad?
MonTemplar
· 7 months ago
A lot of stuff that I used to read using Google Reader now comes to me via either Facebook updates or Twitter, so my RSS reading list is mainly composed of friends blogs and sites that are not yet syndicated via other means.
C.S.
· 7 months ago
Google Reader has been useful for aggregating multiple blogs for me to read. If people are giving up on RSS I think it's because the content they're subscribed to is uninteresting or less interesting than what they get on twitter.
Jeroen de Miranda
· 7 months ago
Still using Google Reader, combined with the PostRank plugin it still gives a quick overview of some topics in which I am interested.
The trend is definitely there but it's not across the board. I don't think we'll be able to confirm the trend without measuring RSS adoption by industry, and how it affects email usage - especially in the workplace.
I think that B2C will continue to target the inbox, while IT and technology marketing lead the B2B marketing trend targeting RSS readers.
Extended PR and influencer relations via social media marketing will take on added importance.
taylan
· 7 months ago
I use Newsgator for my feeds. Average 2 hours a day to reading my RSS feeds are, around 30 feeds that have followed. I checks them twice a day, because of time difference.
Rahul Chowdhury
· 7 months ago
I think that RSS is a good way to read new articles, but still, reading the article on a website is a better experience.
MsMomentum
· 7 months ago
I think RSS will always have a place. Subscription based delivery of of media content is a long standing method for a reason. People want to choose the content delivered to them whether it is an RSS feed, magazines, or specific cable channels. Personally I am definitely opting for a quality over quantity approach to my RSS feeds. I subscribe only to those that consistently deliver what I'm interested in.
Twitter also has a place in this. The news is immediate and recommended by people I have chosen to follow. I have discovered some new resources this way and I have added a few to my RSS subscriptions. Most of the time however, I read the article from a given tweet and move on to something else. Twitter has been a great resource for new (and I mean new to me) providers of current information, but I don't think it will or should replace RSS.
Jeff Hobbs
· 7 months ago
Too bad the results of the poll run directly counter to the (poorly thought out) thesis.
marshall24
· 7 months ago
RSS and Twitter really should offer something different. If a Twitter account resembles a site's feed then I'll subscribe to the RSS in a reader so I can read the content.
RSS feeds enable me to keep up-to-date with the latest article, tutorials, news blog posts...
Whereas, Twitter helps me keep up with the person behind the RSS feed. With Twitter you can learn more about the person, converse and share... and vice versa.
VitaminCM
· 7 months ago
I use Google Reader all the time. I actually post links to twitter right from the reader using the Google Reader + Twitter greasemonkey script.
a_usman
· 7 months ago
I do follow.... and my favourite one is netvibes.... a cool online place where I can see in one glance what is happening all around.
leonard waks
· 7 months ago
The RSS mechanism seems like a good way to get everything you want in one place. But it has several flaws that cannot be fixed.
The worst is that it is computer specific. Like many Americans I have a desktop and a laptop. Like a large number of them, I also have a second home, also with a working desktop.
The result is that aggregation depends on where I am. Of course I can constanmtly bring my feeds up to date, and yes, it wouldn't involve either rocket science or an industrial strength effort. But I don't do it and I doubt whether many people do.
The other problem is that even with all of the organizing, too much stuff ends up in the RSS. As a result I would far prefer to use feedburner and get my feeds in my in-box. Some In look at, some I delete, some I push off until the weekend.
Paolo Amoroso
· 7 months ago
Although I do use Twitter and social media, I still use Google Reader all the time because it scales much better. At 303 subscribed feeds and counting, even one more click is an unnecessary waste of time. For the same reason I don't subscribe to partial RSS feeds or, worse, partial and truncated feeds (there must be a special place in hell for this deadly sin).
Other reasons why I prefer Google Reader: it keeps handy and groups information sources I regularly read anyway, makes massive headline skimming/skipping possible and fast, and improves readability by forcing a minimalist, virtually complete post layout that works well even for sites created by clueless designers who think they know better.
sliackymartin
· 7 months ago
I use Google Reader, because i visit cca 50 sites and blogs per day. I use Twitter like RSS too, but there are just links to posts, It's not bad, but 100 cliks per hour isn't good choice.
dave
· 7 months ago
I'm one of the people who posts news items to Twitter, and guess where I get them from -- RSS. I use NewsRiver, the aggregator built into the OPML Editor.
The problem is most people use feed readers that don't stream new stuff past your eyes, like Twitter does, so people are left to their own devices to find the new stuff, through hunt-and-peck, and yeah they miss a lot, and are constantly reminded how far behind they are. But that's not how news works -- when was the last time your newspaper told you that you hadn't read 8921 articles from the last 289 issues? You let it go. There's too much news for one person to read it all, and that's as it should be.
Basically, the news readers people use are obsolete. I think they were obsolete since day one, but people didn't believe me when I said it. Now, don't blame RSS because most RSS software is designed wrong.
Chris Allison
· 7 months ago
Depending on your Reader it is social media. Google reader lets you star/share/comment/leave notes...that's just as much social media as Twitter it just doesn't have as large engagement.
Readers have the pleasure of not being time sensitive and being much more filtered. I personally would rather just browse, but since I work in social media and search I think I'm obligated to stay on top of things in a more thorough manner.
Spq96
· 7 months ago
Nah, I don't really like to use it.
slowblogger
· 7 months ago
I think it's apples and oranges. For news and blog posts, Twitter could be a way to receive RSS feeds.
Rob Knight
· 7 months ago
Ben, interesting article. It is one of the reasons we set up Blogbite http://www.blogbite.com Having used RSS for what seems like a lifetime and having a love hate relationship with it I and my business partner felt there was a better way to get over the headlines of a blog, that was more entertaining, reached a wider audience and was a benefit to the blind and partially sighted. What is a Blogbite? In a nutshell it's your company's blog presented in a regular (weekly/monthly), professionally recorded, short (1-5min) audio highlights package. Check us out at Nokia Conversations. http://conversations.nokia.com
skykid
· 7 months ago
I became addicted to RSS about a year . Currently I have 383 subscriptions on Google Reader and most of the time am able to follow them. Yet at the same time I follow I use Twitter and Friend Feed as well. I think that RSS would evolve with time - but by no means would disappear.
Elf Sternberg
· 7 months ago
Absolutely, all the time. As a political junkie, the list of feeds from various sites organized in a simple, rapid-read, reliable and consistent interface allows me to rip through the morning's news without having to struggle with odd UIs or be subjected to constantly flickering advertising. And that's a real benefit.
Caroline Quintanilla
· 7 months ago
If you use Google Reader, I can understand why you might stop using RSS. Compared to Viigo on my Blackberry, it's a dinosaur. I too easily had too much information----and I haven't found the way to delete read and uninteresting posts.
Twitter and Facebook are good for finding new blogs and information----but I am looking for a good RSS client on my computer to follow the blogs I want to read regularly. Any suggestions? I will probably look at Firefox add-ins next.
Chris in Montana
· 7 months ago
Sorry, Ben, but in plain English, you're talking a load of bollocks. OF COURSE RSS is still useful, and the poll results back that up.
David Jackmanson
· 7 months ago
I think that RSS will be essential for serious consumers of lots of information - anyone from the serious amateur blogger up to those running major news websites in any medium-sized or larger niche.
What will not happen with RSS? It will never become the information-consuming method of choice among casual web users. I'd always make the link to subscribe to the feedburner emails from my websites very obvious indeed - I don't think the casual user will ever bother to make the effort to find out about RSS. It's just not relevant unless you are dealing with a lot of info and need to gather it all in one place.
RSS will remain a niche - a very important one to bloggers, jornalists, etc, but it won't ever become a mass thing, IMO.
arif
· 7 months ago
One guy found his way back to run a bulky browser for himself with all the memory hogged websites, and just because Twitter is the only service which has taken our focus away from everyone else, we now feel retiring RSS?
Amazing.
rob
· 7 months ago
i use rss all the time. mobile me (mac) keeps my feeds synced between computers and iphone. i found this article with an rss feed!
i think even more useful for anyone publishing content is feedinformer.com ....you give it a feed (s) and it allows you to publish it into any html page (similar to wordpress plugins that are all the rage now) ... i use them all over my website. rgranholm.com
Kevin Rochowski
· 7 months ago
I use RSS for "essential" information that I can get through quickly. For content that I need to pick through (such as mashable, due to the large number of posts) I use Twitter - if the content sounds interesting, I click through. Twitter is also my preferred medium for discovering new content that I'm not subscribed to.
joshua motto
· 7 months ago
i use google reader DAILY for the most important, well written information that i need. if, and only if i need specific information thats as up to date as i can get wealth on the alternatives you suggest.
Tom
· 7 months ago
Well, looks like RSS is still way ahead. It's important to roll with the changes as the Internet evolves, but you have to give things some time before jumping on, there is always something new that gets hyped up (like mahalo and Wikiesearch taking out Google). I do admit, Twitter is looking good.
@memo_alo
· 7 months ago
Okay and just to vote and tell them that I use the 2 channels of news networks, and RSS have no way of substituting for podcast rss eg twitter and I learn things that otherwise would not have known, saludos .
Bueno ya vote y solo para contarles, que yo uso las 2 vías de noticias redes sociales, y los rss no tengo forma de sustituir el rss para podcast por ejemplo, y con twitter me entero de cosas que de otro modo no hubiera sabido, saludos.
William Mougayar
· 7 months ago
The results of the poll are very telling. You can't throw the baby (RSS) with the bath water (RSS readers). If RSS readers aren't providing the right user experience, that doesn't make RSS the culprit. And the talk about Twitter replacing RSS is also another narrow minded view of reality. If there's a new highway (Twitter), that doesn't make roads (RSS) obsolete. RSS (roads) are the on-ramp to such highway, and they are needed. Furthermore, a lot of the new social media is available via RSS whether it's comments, twitter posts, on Disqus, Backtype, etc. so RSS is the easiest and most universal way to exchange content. What you do with it is another story. If RSS Readers have failed us, don't blame it on RSS!
RSS Readers aren't going anywhere soon. Social Media is good way to find breaking news and hear about stuff, but the majority of people simply can't manage their social networks ALL DAY LONG. The real-time social media like Twit, FF, FB moves too fast sometimes. It's good to have one big source of news that DOESN'T move too fast. I use Google Reader 2-3 times a day to skim headlines to see what's going on. It's much harder to filter out the information you want to hear, through social media.
Jose
· 7 months ago
Hi, I use Google Reader for blogs and sites I follow on a regular (usually weekly) basis. And use bookmarks for content I tend to read at irregular patterns. I also usually check the amount of new posts per week a feed has before subscribing. This way I make sure I'm going to be able to read it, if not I just bookmark-it.
JLA
· 7 months ago
I use it (Google Reader) slightly less bc of some redundancy via twitter however it's still essential. Twitter is great when I have the time to check out links and articles in real time - and for discovering new bloggers/articles etc through others - but when I don't have the time, I catch up on what I know is relevant using Reader.
I think that it's clear from your poll that RSS is certainly not dead. But that you and many other users are overloaded trying to keep up with their RSS feeds. I've written a detailed post on the Bscopes blog discussing our approach to supplementing your feed reader with a visual overview of the blogs you are interested in. I'd be very interested in what you and the readers of Mashable think of this new technology. Does it help you cut through the clutter? You can see the Bscope of the Mashable blog at http://www.bscopes.com/viewbscope.html?feedid=564
Brad
Don.a.dio
· 7 months ago
I don't really understand this article. With RSS, you can get twitter updates, along with everything else, including photo feeds and video feeds into Miro...Browsing the web isn't convenient if you have over 100 or so sites you'd be interested in checking. And a lot of major organizations, like the UN or let's say many International statistics websites, don't use twitter or social media. It also helps if you have limited bandwidth preventing you from downloading podcasts, which def can happen when you're in other countries. But you can still easily listen to podcasts through a feed reader.
Shawn Dibble
· 6 months ago
I use Google Reader all the time. Check it everyday, although, I skim through most of what I have and stop if anything catches my eye.
kalyan
· 2 months ago
rss snowball is yet to toll and regular visitors of mashable obviously know about rss but thing is poll shows some good results about rss
All Comments
It is much simpler to sort interesting stuff when you can glance a lot of headlines at once.
Of the 100 in a given audience, 85 will have no idea.
RSS dead? Ha! RSS has not even found mainstream internet general populous acceptance/usage.
I think Shane's comment has a very interesting perspective about the urls that get to twitter.
In your article you mention using twitter for news, that's great. But using Farhad's logic that puts you two in the same boat. Missing tweets and falling behind your news stories in an RSS reader is the same exact thing.
No offense intended (I mean that honestly) but I think this story was a quick effort to just post *something*. Cite some analytics of rss reading being down in numbers. Or maybe some other credible article based on some actual figures to build something with some substance.
If you really want to maintain credibility and respect AND readership, then the articles need to be more carefully written. Writing stuff for the web just to have content written is not a great idea. It leads to wasted time and buyers remorse.
As for me, I don't have time to tweet. And based on the quality of the tweets I get, it's practically worthless. anyway. The real question is whether twitter is just a fad. It certainly hasn't been around long as RSS. I guess only time till tell.
Personally I use feed demon on a more than daily basis. And I love it. Found this post in feed demon and replied accordingly, although my time would have been better spent watching TV.
RSS is good for those (like me) who have too many website to visit in a day. Just open Google Reader and it's easy to see which site has updated their content. Beats opening over 50 sites just to see if there is anything new.
I don't even see how it compares to Twitter, StumbleUpon and Friendfeed. Sure, it goes out earlier in those media but try to get THAT particular news in Twitter (if you have a lot of followers), StumbleUpon (keep on stumbling and hope you stumble on it) and Friendfeed... good luck.
With over 150 feeds coming in, I would find it difficult to begin to imagine how to use the social media platforms to access that amount of information in anything like a systematic or structured way.
To me, the ability to organize is at the heart of what makes RSS work.
The relevance of information diminishes with time; although RSS continues to meet these information demands, the social graph as stated above provides a clear indication that the information and news remains and will continue to remain social. Not all of your friends or followers or whatever subscribes to the same RSS feeds - there is no mechanism such as retweeting or the compounded integration of (feeding) information that the social landscape provides. I think when we look at topics such as swine flu, for instance, everyone using an RSS reader in the past would not have had the same media effect that twitter, friendfeed, and facebook has to name a few - this begs one question - has retweeting killed the RSS party?
@itbay
Twitter brings social filtering and although there is already noise, in this case I don't need to be subscribed to the publisher to get the news I am interested in (Twitter clients have replaced my use of Google Desktop for alerts) and if I still have time to get more news I go to FriendFeed to check what has been shared or commented. Both are the best tools available currently until track filtering arrives.
Of course, if you don't have too many feeds or you don't need close to realtime capabilities to receive the news, RSS readers are still good enough.
And as you have said, Twitter is to-the-minute.
I do a few things to keep my RSS reading sane; 1) I unsubscribe from feeds liberally, and 2) I don't actually read every story, I'll skim and hit space bar liberally as well. If something legitimately catches my eye, then I'll stop. 3) If I feel overwhelmed I mark all as read and I don't freak out that I'm missing a story somewhere.
Social media *can* be an amazing news aggregate of course, in between people posting that their cat is on the keyboard, etc. And the plus of getting your news from your friends is that they've pre-filtered for you. The minus is also that they've pre-filtered for you. You may end up with nothing but wacky YouTube clips to check out, or a zillion vanity-blog posts on improving your SEO (barf).
Personally I'd rather stick with RSS for reliability of information using my "low focus" filter method to weed through the garbage. With Twhirl running in the background :)
Anyway, my use of rss encompasses everything, not just news, but also audio/podcasts/video/photos/shopping/comics etc. It is really an update system for me, not just a news reader so things like twitter is not even remotely going to replace it anytime soon. If there's anything twitter is replacing, it would be digg itself.
Plus, one of the problems with twitter is that people have way too many followers and will more then likely miss good article posts. An RSS wouldn't have that problem.
Brian
cleverwebtech.com
I tend to subscribe to Twitter feeds for massive sites, like, well, Mashable. When I subscribe to your RSS feed, I am overwhelmed. Twitter helps me manage that, because in 140 characters, I can decide whether I want to read onto your post. It helps me manage content overload in the case of sites like Mashable or Popurls. This means that for sites like this, I only follow via Twitter.
For other sites, though, I tend to follow just the RSS feed. If I'm interested in the author(s), I will follow their Twitter account, too, if they have one. Most of the time, Twitter is much more personal, and if I do this, it's because I'm genuinely interested in the author and/or the interests he talks about.
When new technologies come out, it's a bad idea to announce the death of an old technology, because it's rarely accurate. The Internet hasn't killed TV, just changed how we use it. Mobile phones haven't killed landlines, even, just changed the cases in which we use them. Television didn't kill radio. I could go on and on and on.
Twitter and other services (PostRank, anyone?) are just making us change how we use RSS, either by way of changing our management techniques or by enhancing our existing RSS experiences.
I don't have the time to sit on Twitter 24/7 or to scroll back to see what I've missed; nor are all my interests available via twitter. RSS on the other hand allows me to consolidate all of my interests in the one spot and allows me to read them at my own leisure
I wish that I could figure out how to manage ALL twitter feeds in a similar manner so that I could follow everything that I want to read from twitter at my own leisure?? I have found groups in tweetdeck or seesmic difficult to work with and unmanageable.
What I only recently found, is that you can RSS feed a twitter account and therefore group those users as you wish and follow them at your own pace. Not as much or as exciting as using twitter itself, but pretty useful. I would appreciate any other suggestions on how to group and follow users in a more effective manner, where I don't miss anything I want and can read at my own leisure.
I wish that I could figure out how to manage ALL twitter feeds in a similar manner so that I could follow everything that I want to read from twitter at my own leisure?? I have found groups in tweetdeck or seesmic difficult to work with and unmanageable.
What I only recently found, is that you can RSS feed a twitter account and therefore group those users as you wish and follow them at your own pace. Not as much or as exciting as using twitter itself, but pretty useful. I would appreciate any other suggestions on how to group and follow users in a more effective manner, where I don't miss anything I want and can read at my own leisure.
the only value i see in RSS feeds anymore is to hook them into twitter via a twitterfeed.
As long as blogs continue to be popular I don't think RSS is going to go anywhere.
also use mibbit at work for IRC and twitter
mIRC + NNS at home as a IRC client and rss reader
I don't use twitter to follow sites -- although, often I may happen to follow someone who has a blog that I also subscribe to via RSS. What I find happens: someone I follow on twitter posts a link to a site -- and I end up subscribing to the site via RSS.
If I had to give up one -- it would be twitter. A rich set of content fed to me via RSS is something I have grown addicted to.
I use google reader solely as a place on the net to store the "state" of my RSS feeds -- I never log into google to read my feeds. Instead -- I use native clients on Mac (EventBox) and iPhone (byLine) to read the content. This works great: if I read it on my iPhone using byLine, google reader marks it as "read "-- then when I get back to my Mac, EventBox shows only the unread feeds.
I browse it mostly, probably only read around 30-50 percent of the items I get, but it's a huge amount of information in a quick and efficient format. I get news from friends in Twitter as well, but I *post* links too. Prefer to get the news from the source in an organized fashion than hope I'm looking when someone tweets it.
i used to evangelize RSS feeds forwarded to Gmail for organization. Then came Google Reader and eventually, I settled on it for my mostly newsy blog type of subscriptions plus a some random blogs i follow. It's ideal as an organized repository that you can always go to and delve in when convenient without missing anything.... and nice built-in search and share features etc.
I prefer my twitter to be 99% real people with only a few exceptions of automated data streams. However, if Twitter would provide filtering and groups, I'd be open to getting more RSS feed headlines there and jumping to the web page to read. I often enjoy being on actual web page where content originated so thats cool with me.
I know some twitter clients help with filters/groups but I use tweetie and love it and grok why they expect twitter to provide this top-level functionality instead of bloating the client app with such tasks. So Twitter should be working on this- I hope.
I'd still use Google Reader even if I doubled up in Twitter with filtered RSS feed streams.
Of course RSS is also important for media publishers who take advantage of "attaching files" like video and audio as enclosures/media:content for iTunes, Miro and any other media aggregator software. So let's be careful not to suggest RSS as being dead when RSS is used to deliver more than just text headlines/articles.
Using the Social Graph to bring you the goods is fine but it's also likely to be most useful by introducing you to new sources of content that you may enjoy and inevitably add to your RSS Reader. So, the RSS Reader is just a Content Inbox.... Not too different as your Email Inbox. The desired content is sent and stored for you (Online/Offline) in both cases. And that's just logical use of common available tech. RSS is fundamental and not going away, even if people dont know what RSS is exactly. Its a means to an end.
@sull
Using a reader is liking watching a news programme on the tv - you get just news.
The good: you get just news, and you can choose the sources and topics.
The bad: you only get it at certain times (on tv, when it's broadcast; on a feed, when you get time to check it), which means it can be old news.
Using twitter, friendfeed, etc. is liking watching tv all day - a lot of fun, entertainment, chat, and news.
The good: you can get breaking news, as it happens.
The bad: you can't filter the news you get - it's all or nothing.
Personally, I much prefer to use a reader because I want just the news I'm interested in without all of the noise.
The trend is definitely there but it's not across the board. I don't think we'll be able to confirm the trend without measuring RSS adoption by industry, and how it affects email usage - especially in the workplace.
I think that B2C will continue to target the inbox, while IT and technology marketing lead the B2B marketing trend targeting RSS readers.
Extended PR and influencer relations via social media marketing will take on added importance.
Twitter also has a place in this. The news is immediate and recommended by people I have chosen to follow. I have discovered some new resources this way and I have added a few to my RSS subscriptions. Most of the time however, I read the article from a given tweet and move on to something else. Twitter has been a great resource for new (and I mean new to me) providers of current information, but I don't think it will or should replace RSS.
RSS feeds enable me to keep up-to-date with the latest article, tutorials, news blog posts...
Whereas, Twitter helps me keep up with the person behind the RSS feed. With Twitter you can learn more about the person, converse and share... and vice versa.
The worst is that it is computer specific. Like many Americans I have a desktop and a laptop. Like a large number of them, I also have a second home, also with a working desktop.
The result is that aggregation depends on where I am. Of course I can constanmtly bring my feeds up to date, and yes, it wouldn't involve either rocket science or an industrial strength effort. But I don't do it and I doubt whether many people do.
The other problem is that even with all of the organizing, too much stuff ends up in the RSS. As a result I would far prefer to use feedburner and get my feeds in my in-box. Some In look at, some I delete, some I push off until the weekend.
Other reasons why I prefer Google Reader: it keeps handy and groups information sources I regularly read anyway, makes massive headline skimming/skipping possible and fast, and improves readability by forcing a minimalist, virtually complete post layout that works well even for sites created by clueless designers who think they know better.
The problem is most people use feed readers that don't stream new stuff past your eyes, like Twitter does, so people are left to their own devices to find the new stuff, through hunt-and-peck, and yeah they miss a lot, and are constantly reminded how far behind they are. But that's not how news works -- when was the last time your newspaper told you that you hadn't read 8921 articles from the last 289 issues? You let it go. There's too much news for one person to read it all, and that's as it should be.
Basically, the news readers people use are obsolete. I think they were obsolete since day one, but people didn't believe me when I said it. Now, don't blame RSS because most RSS software is designed wrong.
Readers have the pleasure of not being time sensitive and being much more filtered. I personally would rather just browse, but since I work in social media and search I think I'm obligated to stay on top of things in a more thorough manner.
Twitter and Facebook are good for finding new blogs and information----but I am looking for a good RSS client on my computer to follow the blogs I want to read regularly. Any suggestions? I will probably look at Firefox add-ins next.
What will not happen with RSS? It will never become the information-consuming method of choice among casual web users. I'd always make the link to subscribe to the feedburner emails from my websites very obvious indeed - I don't think the casual user will ever bother to make the effort to find out about RSS. It's just not relevant unless you are dealing with a lot of info and need to gather it all in one place.
RSS will remain a niche - a very important one to bloggers, jornalists, etc, but it won't ever become a mass thing, IMO.
Amazing.
i think even more useful for anyone publishing content is feedinformer.com ....you give it a feed (s) and it allows you to publish it into any html page (similar to wordpress plugins that are all the rage now) ... i use them all over my website. rgranholm.com
Bueno ya vote y solo para contarles, que yo uso las 2 vías de noticias redes sociales, y los rss no tengo forma de sustituir el rss para podcast por ejemplo, y con twitter me entero de cosas que de otro modo no hubiera sabido, saludos.
And the talk about Twitter replacing RSS is also another narrow minded view of reality. If there's a new highway (Twitter), that doesn't make roads (RSS) obsolete. RSS (roads) are the on-ramp to such highway, and they are needed.
Furthermore, a lot of the new social media is available via RSS whether it's comments, twitter posts, on Disqus, Backtype, etc. so RSS is the easiest and most universal way to exchange content. What you do with it is another story.
If RSS Readers have failed us, don't blame it on RSS!
I also usually check the amount of new posts per week a feed has before subscribing. This way I make sure I'm going to be able to read it, if not I just bookmark-it.
http://johnfmoore.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/rss-...
John
http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore
I think that it's clear from your poll that RSS is certainly not dead. But that you and many other users are overloaded trying to keep up with their RSS feeds. I've written a detailed post on the Bscopes blog discussing our approach to supplementing your feed reader with a visual overview of the blogs you are interested in.
I'd be very interested in what you and the readers of Mashable think of this new technology. Does it help you cut through the clutter? You can see the Bscope of the Mashable blog at http://www.bscopes.com/viewbscope.html?feedid=564
Brad