I like this one:
Bonus: RSS faces death as filtered content recommendation systems on social services emerge. They, along with most real-time startups, struggle to find a revenue model (in 2010).
People almost get enjoyment out of claiming “RSS Is Dead”. The main problem with completely switching off RSS and on to Twitter is that there is a lot of noise – not to say that RSS isn’t noisy either, but it’s at least generally focused. The complete switch for me will occur when a service can leverage the vast amount of data collected by these social services and curate it in to a personalized feed just for me. Companies and investors are bullish on the real-time space, and I expect to see this service come to light this year. That being said, It is unclear to me that real-time content services have any significant revenue advantages over almost-real-time services. Accordingly, I don’t predict any services will figure out a way to monetize the added value of extreme recency in 2010.
I just don't get this. My RSS reader automatically receives articles from sites I like, or subsections of sites I like, and in most cases the entire article is fed through to my browser/phone in a nice readable format. Perfect.
I don't see why it's broken and why we need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I haven't subscribed to sufficiently noisy feeds. Can someone explain?
With RSS, you get a deep view at very narrow topics (a full feed by one blog). You can set up filters and whatnot, but it's still a very narrow model.
A more social system leveraging your interests, your peers, and all that other crap could surface good content you might otherwise have never seen, plus the best content you were already seeing. It's a pipe dream, but I imagine that a service will figure it out sooner rather than later. As I mention in the article, whether or not they actually manage to make money remains to be seen.
Right. For most of the things I follow I would want to get all the posts, but I wouldn't mind a sprinkling of content I would be unlikely to find.
However isn't there a fundamental problem with trying to create an automated system that delivers content interesting to you and doesn't simply amplify what's already popular (this one's called Google)? At some point humans with taste and judgement have to read content, so I take the skeptical view that an rss feed (or something functionally equivalent) from aggregated news site read by like minded people is as good as it gets.
For a recent example see the Left Fold weekly newsletter. Almost every article has had a good run on HN/Slashdot/similar.
Google Reader is already trying to do this with its social features. So far, not particularly well: I just use a combo of RSS and reddit to find things which interest me.
I use TweetDeck. I have found it to be an incredibly powerful application. At any given time I have about 5 columns up and I see trends and interesting content on the those subjects in real time. The noise is already reduced a lot by the more pertinent info getting retweeted more making it easy to spot.
For example, during PDC, I had a #PDC column up, and I almost completely effortlessly kept up with all the latest info. A #monotouch column is a more permanent member of my collection, it alone has me staying on top of that community, again, just about effortlessly.
I guess the other part of this is also that on Twitter I mostly only follow... well, my actual friends. The whole "follow 10,000 people and get a client app to sort what they're saying" workflow just doesn't appeal to me, and it seems that in order to do what you're doing you'd have to follow a huge number of people.
That's the beauty of TweetDeck. I only follow about 20 people. In TweetDeck you can set up additional search columns and it will show you tweets across all of Twitter (updated in real time) that match your search. IMO TweetDeck takes Twitter to another level (and actually makes Twitter useful :) )
RSS is infrastructure. It doesn't die. RSS readers as we know them might go away, but RSS readers are just a way to consume it, probably not even the best one.
RSS will likely stick around for quite a while, transparently powering features & products that's don't have "RSS" anywhere in their name.
Or "RSS" anywhere in their implementation! Dave Winer poisoned that well quite thoroughly: everyone else produces Atom by default (or exclusively), and his products (which only he uses) are the only ones that don't consume Atom. Feedburner automatically uses older formats for known-shitty clients all from one URL.
But I wouldn't go as far as saying Winer is the only RSS publisher - HN feed is RSS based, Google News is RSS, NYT uses some RSS/Atom hybrid, Flickr offers both and so on..
I don't understand why anyone expects RSS, the transport and encoding format, to contain filters, recommendations, and social aspects. Where do you think all those people who post (shortened) links on twitter get them from? Visiting all the websites by hand? How many of them are retweeted without actual having visited the site and read/consumed the content? Can sub-140 characters contain enough information to allow the next level of filtering, social or otherwise, to be really effective?
There are two rss readers
1) Feeds of slashdot and 500 other urls leading to 10,000 "news" items a day.
These stories are stuff you would like to read, not that you must read. This might die as it is just overwhelming and it will be replaced with filtered/recommended content.
2) Specific feeds of items that don't come up that often or don't have that much content where every post must be read.
This will never die. This is extremely valuable. Subscribing to a blog where the author posts every six months, subscribing to information about a bill going through congress, subscribing to a feed telling you whenever someone assigns a bug to you, a feed notifying you when someone posts a FooBar up on ebay (once every 8 years). Whenever you want to get notified about something and you will read every story rss is extremely good. The alternatives are you manually checking (time waste) or email (spam heaven).
