Two Bit History:
There are two stories here. The first is a story about a vision of the web’s future that never quite came to fruition. The second is a story about how a collaborative effort to improve a popular standard devolved into one of the most contentious forks in the history of open-source software development.
The future once looked so bright for RSS. What happened? Was its downfall inevitable, or was it precipitated by the bitter infighting that thwarted the development of a single RSS standard?
I am still a big fan of RSS. I don’t know if it’s “dead” or not but it’s a shame it’s not more popular.
I thought the RSS implementation in Safari was pretty great. I don’t know why Apple removed it.
I don’t know, but my suspicion is that their usage data showed that basically nobody was using it.
(I would not be surprised if far more people accidentally clicked the RSS button and got confused/frustrated/annoyed than ever used it intentionally.
Remember, the fact that you’re here posting comments means you’re – just like me – way, way, way not the Average User.)
Used Reeder and Feedly to see this. I’ve been using RSS and aggregators since the first version of NetNewsWire from Ranchero/Brent. It’s the most important set of applications on my various devices.
Agreed. Although instead of eliminating it they might have hidden it like the developer’s menu.
Yeah, nobody uses 90% of the features in MS Word, but they keep adding new stuff nobody uses.
But there is good news, NetNewsWire is back in development and Brent Simmons says it will be freeware. Hey I think I first heard about that here on the Loop. I’m still using v4, which hasn’t been updated since the 14th Century.
Is RSS dead? I’m not sure what I’d do without Feedly. Probably read a LOT less articles.
I blame the Google and the way they handled Google Reader.
I loved the way Safari did RSS.
Given that I come here every time from my feedly pages, but, then I am an old fart, raised on blogs and web pages.
RSS Dead?
Considering it’s a key to the distribution of podcasts, not even close.
In handling news content? It’s a mixed bag.
It’s alive, and there’s enough demand that most blogs and news organizations provide RSS feeds. It may not be Facebook/Twitter levels of popularity, but alive.