There are two user interfaces seen in RSS readers: (i) show headlines from multiple blogs in their own little windows, (ii) show headlines from all blogs in one big mess.
It's always seemed possible that you could have a better user interface, or that machine learning could be used to pick out stuff you're actually interested in -- but no, it's never happened. Every so often some organization would come out with a new RSS reader and it was always the same boring stuff.
(In fact, Andraz and the guys at Zemanta have a lot of experience with content analysis and they can't even find anything interesting to say about this subject... That's the point, nobody's even trying to make a better RSS reader)
Now, to be fair, most of the alternatives aren't much better. Twitter makes no attempt to be discriminative (and with the short stimulus, filtering Twitter might be tough.) Facebook seems to have some sense of priority over what it shows you, but it doesn't give you a lot of control.
What the world needs, I think, is a paid social media aggregator. If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription, couldn't you get people to pay for something that makes the web easier to follow?
There are already a number of these: different planet* aggregators for technologies, longreads for "longer pieces", etc...
A single aggregator? The world does not need it, because it's absolutely worthless and makes little to no sense. I probably don't want to read what you want to, and neither does the next guy.
> If people are going to pay for a newspaper subscription
There's a reason why newspaper are dying: by and large, people are not going to pay for a newspaper subscription.
That is the focus of our company - and why we feel RSS won't die - but its role will evolve as more info is consumed via Twitter/ etc/ etc - ignoring the social signs(data) readers/ users provide doesn't make much sense.
But personalization should always be an option - because the firehose is still very useful
Alternatively, use folders. Have a "quiet" folder with all the slow feeds you follow closely, and a "noisy" folder for all the feeds you just skim.
Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content. With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as well.
For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.
[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative. Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]
Conditional GET has been in WordPress for about eight years, and is supported by many of the other majors.
also, Atom has threading and RSS has some community efforts underway to make "replies" decentralized and aggregable (new word) http://xmlns.inreplyto.me/
RSS is an open protocol, free for everyone to implement either way, producing or consuming, filtering or aggregating. Twitter and Facebook offer access to their feeds via their API, which you can only use when you agree to their terms of service. And they retain the right to change the API any time or to restrict access at their own sole disgression.
RSS is free as in freedom, Twitter and Facebook are not. And that alone is a good reason to keep RSS around.
Yes, exactly! When I first heard someone suggest that Twitter was the replacement for RSS, I thought "oh really? so Twitter is now a protocol anyone can use?" And the answer is no - you have to register with Twitter. And no, I'm not going to sign up with Twitter or Facebook. There's a reason I run my own web and email server - I like my independence and not relying on some company that's trying to milk my personal info for all it's worth. I'm really surprised that these supposedly rugged individuals are so quick to toe the corporate line of Twitter and Facebook. But then again, it's always been the case that the market follows what it thinks is the cause of success, ergo we have everyone hawking closed protocols and walled gardens. They might be wise to remember that AOL was a walled garden with closed protocols too.
Edit to cleanup and followup: So RSS supposedly has problems; I can't tell, as I don't much care about UI (except CLI), and to be honest, Liferea+Firefox under Debian stable works pretty well for me. Who knows, maybe I'll be pissed at the changes come the next major upgrade, but this would lead me to think that RSS is not broken and not the problem; the client software is. And at least I have the source and a choice when it comes to RSS. Facebook and Twitter, not so much.
Now if that sounds like a monster waste of bandwidth, it should: the publishers get something from this deal, too. Plus they get readership, because I use RSS to remind me that there are articles on the web that I want to read.
But when I want the firehose of a select group of sites organized around a concept, and when I want to see EVERYTHING they have... there is no substitute for a good RSS reader and an organized feed list. And since I found Feeddler (http://www.chebinliu.com/projects/iphone/feeddler-rss-reader...) for my ipad/iphone and dumped the overhyped Reeder and "social magazine" formats like Feedly, I find that I can catch all the things that my social network, love them though I do, miss. And they miss a lot.
I still use reader.google, though I miss Bloglines, for my online reading. That is an area ripe for improvement (aggregating duplicate posts, Techmeme-like threading of topics across multiple blogs, per-feed filters to remove posts that are not on topic without forcing you to drop the entire feed, etc.) but I don't expect to see much coming. BTW, Google Reader has some great keyboard commands if you haven't discovered them yet that make flying through content much easier.
Am I an old fashioned stubborn old coot, hanging on to dead technology? Well sure, just like those of us still using email and sms. Oh, didn't you hear? Both of those were declared dead a few years ago as well. Come on, one and all, join my club of "using uncool tech but still enjoying it".
How much for an annual membership?
Honestly, for a lot of these things, I think news of their death has been greatly exaggerated. Though it would be nice to take this opportunity to fix some of the problems that pundits keep pointing to while shouting their demise from the rooftops.
I just smile when so called techie-minded folks declare a technology dead. It sort of puts their judgement on death in perspective ...
RSS is a great solution for many problems I've run into. I'm sure that there are many who won't let RSS die before it's time.
Wasn't email declared dead too? <smile>
Problem: too much good info to read(it's not the format but the tools for consuming it).
Solution: built an automatic summarizer: https://www.keenskim.com (works for webpages also). No more "read it later", but right now.
1. The slides on the main page aren't showing up for me in FF or Chrome.
2. You're targeting avid readers, and are trying to save them time, but you're pushing video how-to's? Text + screen shots, please! (Or maybe A/B testing will prove me wrong)
3. Why are all the images of articles tilted and in such small font? I want to see how well your service works for me, and what's better than reading an article it's analyzed?
4. Your how-to for RSS scares me a bit. It goes by so fast, and I have to copy-paste URLs? I have to find RSS URLs that as this article mentions, are getting increasingly hard to find? I'm already subscribed via Google Reader. I could copy the URL from the 'Details and Statistics' of a feed, but why can't you use their API to bulk import my feeds (competitors to Reader do this). I'm not sure if you could automagically rewrite Reader subscription URLs once scraped, but it seems like the easiest option to me (as long as you have an intermediate page where I can exempt certain feeds.
5. Is there any way I can see the results of your bookmarklet on a few actual articles before signing up? Even if it's just a mirror of some popular articles with the highlighting precomputed, as long as it's the whole article. I feel like you have a lot of work to do to convince someone that they're not going to miss some crucial bit of information by ignoring what you don't highlight.
7. Why do I need to remember another username? Is this a 'social' service? You already have my email!
8. It doesn't seem to work with Readability
9. Why do you need to track me with cookies? You already have me running javascript on every page I use the bookmarklet on...but I appreciate being told about them
10. How are you going to make money?
(just used the bookmarklet on this Wired article[1] currently on the front page of HN. Very surreal. And I'm not sure if I got the main point of the article or not...)
[1] http://m.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-...
Now for the answers:
1. my bad. I was doing some optimizations on the web server (via http://gtmetrix.com ). Now it should work
2. true! received same feedback yesterday. will change.
3. just thought it would look better. but that doesn't mean better experience. will change them (for bigger images just click them)
4. originally KeenSkim was built for RSS feeds. After starting the alpha testing we pivoted to the webpage bookmarklet. It works so well that we didn't improve the RSS part. To be fixed in the next weeks (opml support)
5. Not yet but great idea! we'll do that
7. It's not social (not built with this intention in mind, but could be). Social auth and simpler login are in the top 3 priorities after stabilizing the summarization algorithm
8. will look on that
9. the cookies are for the site, not the bookmarklet (cross-domain calls). It's mainly for login (standard Django). Does it bother you in any specific way?
10. mainly a freemium approach. the exact business model is not clear (we'll test it after we get an idea about usage, costs, growth, ...). Do you have anything in mind?
About the results: there are pages on which it work good, on some pages great and on some really bad. The problem on this article is that it has several story-lines and KeenSkim doesn't work well on that (interviews, lists, tutorials won't be properly summarized)
EDIT: There is still space for improving the service. That's priority no. 1
Where there other news that you read?
Thanks again!
> What is dead may never die.
Is an interesting thought experiment. In one stroke Google could wipe out a large tent pole for the RSS eco system. Wouldn't that effectively make RSS dead?
Not only do people use Google Reader as means to read RSS, way to many RSS Readers use Google Reader as the crawling infrastructure for there app.(Newsblur being a notable exception). So killing google reader would pwn a large number of apps.
After the main support is gone, why would you build RSS into your product at all? Can RSS, that is propped up by one tenuous pole, last forever?
Probably people who are using RSS will switch to some alternative client/reader and learn an important lesson about relying on "free" services.
why would you build RSS into your product at all?
The problem RSS is trying to solve, being informed about new articles (and remembering which ones you've already read), still needs some alternative solution. Neither twitter nor facebook are providing one.
I think as long as there is no superior way to keep up with different sources of information, RSS will stay alive.
It is more complicated than that. Google has a RSS history of blogs, this is not easily reproducible.
These days, even though my blog gets the same traffic in one day that my first sites got in one year, my referral logs look strangely empty. All the traffic comes from Twitter, Facebook, HN, and nobody manually links to anything from their blog anymore.
I think this shows a partial transfer of content from blogs and sites to social networks, and RSS has been hurt by this move.
Add to this the fact that the whole user experience about RSS has always been mediocre at best, and outright bad nowadays. It takes me something like 5 or 6 clicks to add a RSS feed to Google Reader, and that's after installing a Chrome extension.
So yeah, RSS will never die. But that's only because it's already a zombie.
Solutions die if the problems die.
I listen to podcasts all the time, and you sure can't find that type of information on twitter or anywhere else.
As long as podcasts live on, so will RSS.
> By the way, anything older than a week or two stops existing on Twitter.
Great point. One of the most annoying things about organizing articles based on a single timeline like Twitter is that old stuff gets pushed into oblivion too quickly. Most of these don't use pagination either, so I need to scroll like crazy and wait for AJAX to catch up if I want to go back more than a few days.
Sure, you could do search, but how do you search for something you don't even know exists? Like a blog post that appeared two weeks ago while I wasn't looking. With any half-decent RSS reader, each blog gets its own section, so articles don't get lost in the noise even if Blog A only publishes once a month and Blog B publishes twice a day. Even if Blog C only publishes once a year, the little "(1)" next to its name will stay there even if I miss it by several months.
Not all of us are always looking for the latest news from the last 30 minutes. I routinely read articles from several years ago, sometimes even from the previous millennium. Any method of finding and organizing articles that makes it difficult for me to figure out what happened last year is not welcome in my mind.