The Rise and Demise of RSS
Metadata
Highlights
- At the root of this disagreement about namespaces was a deeper disagreement about what RSS was even for. Winer had invented his Scripting News format to syndicate the posts he wrote for his blog. Netscape had released RSS as “RDF Site Summary” because it was a way of recreating a site in miniature within the My Netscape online portal. Some people felt that Netscape’s original vision should be honored. Writing to the Syndication mailing list, Davis explained his view that RSS was “originally conceived as a way of building mini sitemaps,” and that now he and others wanted to expand RSS “to encompass more types of information than simple news headlines and to cater for the new uses of RSS that have emerged over the last 12 months.”
- Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was. Lots of people have offered explanations for why RSS lost its broad appeal. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation is exactly the one offered by Gillmor in 2009. Social networks, just like RSS, provide a feed featuring all the latest news on the internet. Social networks took over from RSS because they were simply better feeds. They also provide more benefits to the companies that own them. Some people have accused Google, for example, of shutting down Google Reader in order to encourage people to use Google+
- RSS might have been able to overcome some of these limitations if it had been further developed. Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other. Maybe browser support could have been improved. But whereas a company like Facebook was able to “move fast and break things,” the RSS developer community was stuck trying to achieve consensus. When they failed to agree on a single standard, effort that could have gone into improving RSS was instead squandered on duplicating work that had already been done.
- He told me that RSS, on one level, was clearly a failure, because it isn’t now “a technology that is really the core of the whole blogging world or content world or world of assembling different elements of things into sites.” But, on another level, “the whole social media revolution is partly about the ability to aggregate different content and resources” in a manner reminiscent of RSS and his original vision for a syndicated web. To Werbach, “it’s the legacy of RSS, even if it’s not built on RSS.”
The Rise and Demise of RSS
Metadata
Highlights
- At the root of this disagreement about namespaces was a deeper disagreement about what RSS was even for. Winer had invented his Scripting News format to syndicate the posts he wrote for his blog. Netscape had released RSS as “RDF Site Summary” because it was a way of recreating a site in miniature within the My Netscape online portal. Some people felt that Netscape’s original vision should be honored. Writing to the Syndication mailing list, Davis explained his view that RSS was “originally conceived as a way of building mini sitemaps,” and that now he and others wanted to expand RSS “to encompass more types of information than simple news headlines and to cater for the new uses of RSS that have emerged over the last 12 months.”
- Today, RSS is not dead. But neither is it anywhere near as popular as it once was. Lots of people have offered explanations for why RSS lost its broad appeal. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation is exactly the one offered by Gillmor in 2009. Social networks, just like RSS, provide a feed featuring all the latest news on the internet. Social networks took over from RSS because they were simply better feeds. They also provide more benefits to the companies that own them. Some people have accused Google, for example, of shutting down Google Reader in order to encourage people to use Google+
- RSS might have been able to overcome some of these limitations if it had been further developed. Maybe RSS could have been extended somehow so that friends subscribed to the same channel could syndicate their thoughts about an article to each other. Maybe browser support could have been improved. But whereas a company like Facebook was able to “move fast and break things,” the RSS developer community was stuck trying to achieve consensus. When they failed to agree on a single standard, effort that could have gone into improving RSS was instead squandered on duplicating work that had already been done.
- He told me that RSS, on one level, was clearly a failure, because it isn’t now “a technology that is really the core of the whole blogging world or content world or world of assembling different elements of things into sites.” But, on another level, “the whole social media revolution is partly about the ability to aggregate different content and resources” in a manner reminiscent of RSS and his original vision for a syndicated web. To Werbach, “it’s the legacy of RSS, even if it’s not built on RSS.”