Is RSS dead? Steve Gillmor has a nice eulogy for it in TechCrunchIT. For him Twitter, Facebook and other realtime content has taken over. Well good for him. I do agree that RSS as a mainstream technology has not really caught on with a general audience, and probably never will. I love it, rely on it, read newsfeeds on my mobile phone and computer on a daily basis. I sing the benefits every chance I get, but I haven’t found many converts. But it still has a place.
From a technical standpoint any data-driven web application should have the ability to generate a structured XML response to a user query — either RSS 2.0 or Atom format, preferably both. This allows data to be easily distributed in multiple locations, mashed up, and reused. For instance the RSS feed from this blog powers an update newletter that currently has 40 some-odd subscribers and feeds updates to both my Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Write once and distribute to multiple audiences. Maybe a few readers also have subscribed using an RSS feed reader — that’s great. But for flexibility of content distribution RSS is simple and works really well. So I am looking for more systems to offer these capabilities, and am not looking for its demise anytime soon.
It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.
Comments / 2 COMMENTS
Kevin Lee Allen added these pithy words on May 18 09 at 8:02 amWow, I live by my (many) RSS feeds. So how did you link your RSS to LinkedIn?
Randy added these pithy words on May 18 09 at 8:20 amI use the LinkedIN application WordPress: http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?_ch_panel_id=1&_applicationId=2200 . You just enter the RSS feed of your blog and your posts then are added to your LinkedIN profile page. Nice way to write in one place (your blog) and syndicate your content out to multiple channels.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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