First, I suppose a disclaimer is in order: I live in my RSS reader (currently NetNewsWire) and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Who wants to visit hundreds of websites a day when those websites’ freshest content can be delivered to you automatically.
Now, forget everything you’ve been reading about the death of RSS. RSS is as dead as the web and HTML. Oh, and by the way, this is at least the third time that I know of RSS being declared dead.
It’s amusing to see all the virtual handwringing about RSS being dead because Google’s Chrome browser doesn’t have an RSS reader and Firefox 4.0 won’t have an RSS button in its toolbar by default. Oh, please. I actually wish Apple’s Mail and Safari would lose the crappy RSS integration. It appears to exist only for the sake of a checkmark on some marketeer’s comparison PowerPoint slide.
TechCrunch, when looking at the referrer data for its website, seems to think that Google Reader is the only RSS reader people use. “Drilling down, Google Reader was actually the number 11 overall referrer to TechCrunch in 2010,” writes MG Siegler. “Further, it was way down from 2009—nearly 50 percent. In other words, yes, RSS is slowly dying. At least when it comes to the most popular feed reader sending traffic to TechCrunch.” But Siegler fails to account for the fact that TechCrunch provides a (mostly) full-content RSS feed. The TechCrunch audience segment that reads its content via its RSS feed has no need to click through to individual articles. This is something of which Siegler is clearly aware, when he writes, “Sure, people can read TechCrunch through Reader without clicking through, but why the huge drop unless fewer people were actually reading it that way?” Um, maybe more people are actually using their RSS readers without clicking through?
When Dave Winer, the author of the RSS 2.0 specification, got wind of this something of a Twitter war erupted. After a few, presumed, deep breaths Winer responded in the only way that matters: He set out to reinvent RSS yet again. His idea is to create a blogging tool that outputs only a set of RSS feeds. An archive of anything you write is maintained locally (answering the “where do my tweets go” question) but the content gets pushed out to whatever publishing platforms you choose, “whatever new corporate blogging silo is popular next year or the year after,” as Winer writes.
As Matthew Ingram, writing for GigaOm, notes, “Like plenty of other technologies, it is just becoming part of the plumbing of the real-time web.” Just as HTML has become part of the web’s plumbing.
If anything, RSS is more crucial today than it’s ever been. Not as an end-user content-discovery technology but as back-end content-delivery plumbing. How do you think all of that web content gets fed to Twitter and Facebook?
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