Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: May 6, 2009
Tags : fail, rss, steve gillmor
We normally wouldn’t link to something from the TechCrunch gossip empire, but for this we’ll make an exception. Steve Gillmor (a.k.a he of little coherency) has posted on TechCrunchIT that RSS is dead. The premise of Gillmor’s rant (and to be fair, it’s moderately coherent) is that Twitter is replacing RSS as a way to keep up with the latest news.
Lets start with where I agree. Yes, Twitter is becoming a great platform for breaking news. The Inquisitr’s Twitter feed, which consists only of our updates has 1,347 followers as I type this. That makes it our third largest feed after the main feed, and the tech only feed. But lets put that in context: it’s a service that only offers headlines and links, as does every other site that offers the same links in this way. However, I’m grateful for every follower, and given our growth trend I’d bet that within the next 12 months, there might well be a time that our Twitter account has more followers than our main feed, and that is impressive.
But that’s where the positives end. Lets not forget that for a lot of sites, the RSS feed is what is being used to make those Twitter updates to begin with, but that’s a side, yet relevant point.
The real difference is in the user experience. The difference is that in an RSS reader, you are offered a full read, vs Twitter with a headline and link. For anyone wanting to keep up with the latest news, or monitor various topics of interest, that’s a key difference. Headlines don’t tell the story, text does. Of a morning I read something like 300 sites, mostly in full (and where not in full, with an extract, which is more than Twitter.) There is zero way Twitter can replace that experience.
The question then becomes one of dead or mainstream. Gillmor makes the mistake of saying dead, and that’s his fatal flaw. RSS isn’t dead, but likewise I’ll accept that updates via Twitter could become more mainstream than RSS services. But besides Twitter, there is a still a vibrant, and active community using RSS. I don’t have hard numbers, and I recognize that it may never really, truly became mainstream, but likewise it’s still a significant number. I only need look at the often nearly 100 Google Reader shares I see every morning. I need look no further than FriendFeed and see the shared Google Reader items.
RSS may not be perfect, and it may never really become “mainstream,” but it most definitely is NOT dying.
May 6, 2009
I completely agree, to claim that a form of written communication limited to 140 characters will become the sole form in the future is highly unlikely and clearly made as a limiting statement to incite as much debate as possible, thereby allowing this whole issue to fall under the sensationalistic media headline and therefore be dismissed as insignificant.
May 6, 2009
New forms of communications rarely obliterate old ones. 70 years after television was invented we still have radio, although it has been repurposed. I didn't agree with the RSS is dead theme either. I don't see how Twitter is an effective replacement at all. What are you going to do — set up permanent search feeds for your 100 or so favorite posters? And then weed through their full set of Tweets to find the handful that point to something that you might want to read? You can't watch Twitter all day long. Twitter is more like the old fashioned appointment TV model while RSS is a DVR that holds onto themes that you've asked it to until you are ready to go through it and react to the items that interest you.
May 6, 2009
Let's also not forget that alot of the highly flaunted “applications” use RSS as a way to pull down the data FROM Twitter.
Besides, Twitter is a company/service, RSS is a format.
That's non-competition.
–Kyle
May 6, 2009
RSS is format, a web standard, a technology not some service offered by business…
These are completly differant topics that this guy seems to have some how thought were the same thing.
It really seems to me like this guy doesn't really know or understand what he's talking about.
May 7, 2009
Duncan,
The key thing that I think Steve Gilmore missed on his TechcrunchIT post is the fundamental underlying problem is that of Blog Overload. A typical text based feed reader isn't enough to keep up. Twitter doesn't solve this. In fact, over time, it will probably make it worse.
That's what drove us to create Bscopes (www. bscopes.com). It's a visual way to cut through the clutter of the Blogosphere.
We'd be interested in any feedback that you or the readers of Inquisitr would have on this visual supplement to existing feed readers.
Brad