Sorry, but RSS isn’t going anywhere

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.