It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid. As a user though I also don't like it anymore and I'll share why...
This isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS and this is why at least one technical user no longer uses it.
"It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid."
But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for something that should really be a separate application.
Robert Scoble says he was told (ostensibly by someone at Google) that the Google Reader team has been largely disbanded, and that the project is no longer maintained. He's mentioned this a couple of times on Quora, on Buzz, and on his blog.
Well I'll go one step further then and point out that Google is the creator of PubSubHubbub (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/). My point is that I don't think Google hates users aggregating content and having it pushed to them rather than browsing for it.
Thanks for the info. Before posting my comment I did some quick Googling and couldn't find much about the history of PubSubHubbub. I did want to be sure that I wasn't wrong about Google's involvement. Using the word "creator" with respect to Google itself was probably a little strong.
They also employ 2 of the 3 creators of PubSubHubBub a technology specifically created to enhance feed syndication. It's also a project that was developed on company time (albeit 20% time) and is hosted on their GoogleCode website. AND Google Alerts was one of the first (if not THE first) to implement the technology.
I don't think aggregators obviate the need for rss. I don't really like the idea of the masses entirely determining what content I have awareness of. Furthermore, aggregators simply don't offer the sheer volume of content pumped by an rss feed with a good couple hundred subscriptions. And if you are into niche content like say arxiv's math.OA you pretty much need rss.
How much time does it take you to sort through it all? That's the tradeoff you make with aggegators vs. rss. Personally, I'm also subscribed to a few hundred feeds on Google Reader, and I usually go through them first by deleting everything older than a day, and then sorting by "magic". But that has major limitations: I lose occasional posts and older, but still interesting, content, and magic just skews the sort towards what I've read before (maybe through keywords?), and I lose out on new and interesting content.
RSS - you have high volume and high breadth, but it takes a long time to look through it and find the things that are interesting.
Aggregators - the "most interesting" posts are right there on the front page, but it has a very narrow focus and is filtered or skewed by the community.
I think what we're really looking for is the most interesting content that is customized for us, but it's a big problem to tackle. Newsblur (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869136) was an interesting idea; not sure where that's gone since November's post.
And where do the aggregators get the news item they aggregate?
They often get their news from blogs, news websites, word of mouth, and web searches. RSS is very useful for keeping up with some of these sources.
Sometimes aggregators do get their news from other aggregators, but at some point that incestuous chain has to be broken and someone has to read the original news somewhere and pass it on to an aggregator.
Finally, most aggregators themselves (including HN), publish their news via RSS (or Atom). I know that's how I read HN headlines, and virtually every other news source I regularly read.
RSS also has other, more technical uses than reading "What's new". Many systems and websites rely on it as an easy way to publish or consume information.
The aggregators might need the rss feeds to do their aggregating, though. Although I always felt making it "pull" is a bit crazy. PubSubHubBub to the rescue?
You just prefer socially aggregated feeds is all. I actually like a mix of both. Setting up intelligent RSS feeds that will come in handy just takes a little upfront work is all. But then you've got an algorithm that you can constantly tweak and refine, which I find very useful, especially as a research tool. Give Yahoo Pipes a whirl and see if it changes your mind. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Obviously, I'm not Alex. But I'll take a crack at it. Seems to me there's an echo-chamber quality inherent in any community of like-minded individuals.
For example, if I sourced my tech news solely from HN, I might imagine that large corporations consist solely of oblivious, slow-moving dinosaurs incapable of writing decent software. But if I had http://cacm.acm.org/ showing up in my RSS reader, I'd be exposed to a somewhat competing view.
To me, the value of RSS is the ability to subscribe to a few sites I wouldn't normally bother visiting. It's not hard to remember to check HN. Remembering to swing by corporate IT and Microsoft-focused publications is a bit tougher. RSS can help with that.
Reading the frontpage of social news aggregators is much less schema-expanding than reading larger bodies of work from individual authors. This is especially true since content written for news aggregators tends to be infused with the sorts of biases that these aggregators reward; in the same way that NYT articles tend to favor establishment interests and authoritarianism, content written for HN is often tinged with Internet-inspired scientism, masturbatory theses, topical gossip, and all other manner of nonsense and pseudointellectualism.
The worst part is that when you read HN you actually feel like you're learning, because you are. The problem is that you're not learning nearly as fast as you would be if you were reading books. It's the same reason why 2-5 year olds who watch TV are measurably learning, but at the same time end up dumber than kids who aren't watching TV because they're learning at a slower pace. The fact is that even reading a book about something as seemingly mundane as the history of American homeopathy will teach you more about life, the universe, and everything than six months of reading HN. (E.g. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/13/1590.extract )
I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying
But aggregators can publish RSS streams too. How is following someone on Twitter different from subscribing to his RSS feed?
I would agree that a site like HN isn't very attractive to read via RSS. When the ranking is dynamically determined by readers' interest, you lose something by freezing the list in the form of an RSS stream. But for a curated site like Slashdot, what difference does it make if the link stream comes in the form of RSS or as tweets?
Incidentally, I wouldn't call HN a curated site. Slashdot has editors/curators; HN doesn't.
RSS readers may be dying (I admit that I once was a Google Reader fanatic and now only log in time to time), but RSS/ATOM as a format for communicating between websites is still pretty decent. I often setup an ATOM feed for the data on whatever webapp I'm building, and usually end up using that feed to integrate with other webapps. (And as a bonus, I can hand it out to techie users).
I don't know, do you think that RSS readers dying will mean websites will stop producing RSS feeds? The output seems to be built in to many systems these days already.
RSS is not dying. It's just not based in the browser, and I'm fine with that. I use an RSS aggregation program, and if I really wanted to, there is open source software available to build and host my own RSS portal.
I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any more elegantly.
In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.
I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well).
The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.
Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction.
update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.
The irony is not lost on me, certainly. I think this is the first time I've ever called out a comment as inappropriate in my nearly two years of active HN participation. Usually I read comments like this, downvote and flag, and then move on.
My intention was not to start a discussion. My intention was to make people think before upvoting, and to make people think before they consider posting a similar comment in the future. Hopefully, despite derailing the larger thread a bit, I achieved that goal.
I'm happy to take this discussion offline though, in order to prevent further derailment. My email is in my profile.
Smoking is a little different in France and on the Continent than in the USA. It's possible that certain European smokers, going to a foreign country like the USA for the first time, would be ignorant of the written and unwritten rules of "smoker's etiquette" here in the U.S.A., where an adult can't light up within twenty yards of a kid without drawing down the passive-aggressive wrath of the nearest PTA mother.
RSS aggregators are used by the elite few. When websites start deciding to use Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS because it’s faster and gives them better features, and regular users understand it better, then there will be complaints.
I have -- without giving it much thought -- stopped using RSS. Many friends have done the same. Now browsers seem to be dropping support. Maybe this is proof that RSS/Atom wasn't the panacea we thought it was. Maybe it is actually time for RSS to die?
because the browser is supposed to provide the button.
Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile.
Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of RSS.
Your analogy doesn't work for me. A car is built to run when you turn it on. That is basic functionality. The reverse analogy to a browser would be "making an HTTP request shouldn't present you a diagram on how to do DNS resolution," and the browser doesn't.
If I copy the URL of your site/blog into my RSS reader's Add Subscription dialog, I don't know of any RSS readers that wouldn't scrape your site for the link tags I assume you put in and discover the feed for me.
You can take his concern seriously, RSS autodiscovery in FF is working fine on his page. And that's the feature the author would like to keep in the future.
I'm glad my browser doesn't support RSS natively when other apps offer a far greater experience. Have you tried the safari rss reader? It's awful.
As a chrome user I'm happy that it does one thing well and that's displaying web pages. Now I'm free to use any online RSS reader I want and be able to access my RSS feeds from anywhere.
Most of what I need to read shows up on HN or Reddit or Twitter. I know that sounds incredibly lazy, but I don't have time to mark 233 Lifehacker posts as read every week.
I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly already heard of RSS.
And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button.
The worse statement in this article (other than the french man smoking) is:
Mozilla’s mistake here is to associate low usage with user dis-interest.
Ummm... they're correct. He claims that, just because only 3-7% use it, it must be kept in because "what regular user wouldn’t want this feature!?" Clearly the answer to that question is "93-97% of regular users". Touché?
3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software to their friends (regular users).
Sure, you could make an argument that 3%-7% is enough people to justify keeping the feature. Or you could make the argument that while it isn't enough, because they are the online non-shopping version of Alpha Consumers, it's worth keeping it to help get the browser promoted.
However you cannot argue that it has to be kept because every regular user wants this feature - statistics don't lie, clearly the majority of users don't care.
That seems like it's the best option, actually. For power-users, a 3rd-party built extension is more likely to be updated / have the options you want than the button built into every version of the browser.
The argument is that more people would use the feature if the UI were better, and that hiding the feature because "nobody uses it (because it sucks)" is not the same statement as "nobody uses it (because nobody wants it)".
The worst statement in your comment (other than your use of "worse" in place of "worst") is:
anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button
What about those who use RSS and use that button (like myself)? Won't they be "put off" by the loss of the button?
I think you miss the author's main point which is that the usage of the button is low not because users don't want that feature but because the UI is crappy all around. Removing the button only makes the UI worse.
You're basically saying that it's ok to make any UI worse because users will either put up with it or stop using the feature entirely (which just means that they didn't care about the feature in the first place).
1.) Why is it ok to remove the button - because hardly anybody uses it.
2.) Why does Firefox removing the button not meant that "RSS is dying" - because people who currently use RSS will keep doing so, just without using the button.
Your second point is flawed. The button makes using RSS more convenient. Removing it makes it less convenient. Saying people would not be "put off" by making it less convenient is naive at best.
Your assumption is only true if the user experience stays the same. Some things (like web mail) take off even when the user experience sucks, but other things that people actually want can be held back by poor user experience. For an example that has spanned practically the entire history of the internet, consider online gaming. The first internet gamers (MUDers? my history is weak) were a small population of hardcore geeks, but as the user experiences got better, the number of people playing rose in a kind of slow-motion explosion. When each breakthrough game appeared, it attracted a new crowd of players who until then had not found online game slick and engaging enough.
In 1985, 1990, 1995, or 2000 you would not have extrapolated the current percentage of online users playing social games into the future, because it was obvious the experience was going to get better. It was easy to imagine better graphics, sound, responsiveness, and social interaction, and everyone assumed the better experience would attract a broader range of users.
With RSS it's not so easy to imagine how the user experience will improve. We're suffering a failure of imagination. We have the use case: Checking for recent updates on a web site is something people do all the time. They even do it on web sites they're visiting for the first time, and it can be really frustrating depending on the organization of the web site. We have the technology to serve this use case: RSS.
So the users want the information and the browser can get it. We can't yet imagine an effective way to present the information to the users, but proof by failure of imagination is no proof at all. Personally, I think it's likely that someone will find a graceful way to present RSS information to the user, and RSS will disappear from our sight and from our vocabularies into a heretofore-unenvisaged UI element.
RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most users. The article readily points this out.
And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader. But really, bookmarking is pretty good too. Yes there are clear benefits to RSS over naked bookmarks, but the discoverability problem is still paramount.
Anyway this is kind of inconsequential to the point of whether native RSS functionality should be included in a browser. Mozilla is right to kill this "feature." RSS is an application-level protocol on top of HTTP, itself an application-level protocol. Browsers are built to perform HTTP requests. In my opinion they shouldn't do much else. A feature that displays and helps you manage RSS content falls into the category of bloat.
> Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader
This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters.
My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several weeks later.
The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.
"It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance."
RSS would be a critical tool for anyone trying to solve that problem.
A lot of the complaints here are that RSS isn't what RSS isn't. OK, that's great, but those are more "entrepreneurial opportunities" than problems with RSS. Toss out RSS (and I assume by extension Atom and all similar friends) and those opportunities recede, they recede a lot, they don't get better. It is what it is and it has always been designed from day one to be a foundational infrastructure on top of which to build more things, not the Final Answer To All Problems.
The NYT front page, while changing day-to-day still has a layout that embodies importance. There needs to be some sort of semantic interpretation of how important something is other than h1’s. How do we replicate the 144pt super-important headings while removing presentation from content?
The web was built for rationalist minds and papers, and the separation of html elements furthers this goal, yet hampers any sort of human-ness of communication.
RSS is great for a blog, but bad for newspapers. Check out NYT’s RSS feed. Every article ticks in at an equal level of importance and requires the viewer’s mental acuity to discern what’s #1. Not so with their web-front or printed sheet.
Syndication, while essential, needs to be extended.
It also has to be some sort of project that uses RSS, not something built into an RSS-replacement. It requires some sort of third-party interaction with your input to determine "importance". Leave it to the New York Times and at best their decisions about importance merely won't match yours; at worse they'll simply label everything "important", sort of like the way my HR department seems to reflexively tick that box in Outlook regardless of whether open enrollment is about to close or somebody's parking job is a bit off and could they please correct it?
You bring up a good point, importance is a human attribution to information, and a lot of people are either stupid or self-important. Impartial judgement is important, but NPR's music segments demonstrate that trending topics are middling and not truly important.
If the curator is strictly online popularity, news sites invariably turn into people magazine. You need some high-and-mighty news nerd to determine what's truly important. Sure, the curator's occasionally wrong or late, but it's a lot better than pointless water-cooler talk.
To be clear I have no expectation for RSS to solve the discoverability problem either, and I think RSS/Atom/PubSubHubbub is very useful. I'm just noting why I believe they aren't heavily used by most people, and in particular, me.
The concept of RSS itself, like any other piece of technology, is not something users should understand directly. What RSS lacks is a simple, friendly concept to act as its public face. The ways people have explained RSS in the past have been daunting, unappealing, or inappropriate for the web.
"Subscription" is the most common term used, probably because it is a reference to the underlying technology (publish/subscribe) and to a vaguely similar concept in userland (subscribing to a publication.) But subscription is not a good metaphor. Subscriptions do not lessen your commitment; they increase it. Having a bunch of magazine subscriptions is a burden! They fill up your mailbox and clutter up your apartment. A "subscribe" button scares people away because it evokes a much more consequential decision; the user wonders if it is worthwhile to commit to this burden. And of course subscription is not the only way to use RSS.
What web sites and browsers need to do is simply SAY in their UI what the RSS features do, without saying "RSS" and without trying to train users to recognize the RSS symbol.
I am not a UI designer, but I think the word we're looking for is "updates." Buttons should say:
"Show me recent updates to this site"
"Show me future updates to this topic"
"I want to see future updates to this site"
The button to show your RSS feeds should say "Updates" and should have a tooltip saying "Updates to your web sites."
To help people discover this functionality, I think it would be great for browsers to check for RSS feeds on the sites a user goes to frequently and work that into the UI somehow. When you open Chrome and see thumbnails of your favorite sites, each thumbnail might have a button saying, "Recent updates...."
And there's one simple feature that people would easily figure out and would actually use. When you're on a site that has an RSS feed, there could be a little pop-over button in a corner (like the button added by Feedly's Firefox plugin) that you can click to see a list of recent updates to a site. It's a simple feature, some people would figure it out for themselves, and anyone could grasp how it worked after seeing it used once or twice. It would put pressure on websites to provide good RSS feeds, because they would know many users were checking them. Here's a tip: put the words "Recent updates" on the button.
tl;dr Don't say RSS, don't use a symbol, don't say "subscribe" or "subscription," just use the word "updates" and say what you mean.
Good ideas. Even though the article severely exaggerates, I agree that the browser is the ideal integration point for rss from a ux point of view, but the implementation needs to be totally reimagined for it to appeal to a mass audience.
That's one reason I've always thought bookmarklets were better for sharing, not the least of which is because you don't need to wait/hope the website operator adds support for the sharing site you are using.
I only indirectly depend on browser based RSS feeds as I use Google Reader. Which does precisely what I want it to and is available without regard to browser.
The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox.
In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours.
The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.
I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half in that NGO.
Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS' disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy" the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate revenue might be high.
I've always used the browser RSS button precisely in order to add feeds to Google Reader -- I feel like that's the button's main use case. It's an immediate, standard way to see whether a page offers a feed, and to quickly save the feed in your reader. I've found it incredibly useful.
It's been a while since I used Firefox's RSS button. I see it offers more options than I remember (like subscribing with a web-based reader). And it looks like the plan is to eliminate any standard in-browser indication of the presence of an RSS feed, something I didn't really catch from the blog post's talk about a "button on the toolbar."
That does seem pretty inconvenient. Many of the posts at bugzilla argue that the most important feature of the button is the fact that it indicates, in a standard way, that feeds were detected. And I agree.
On the other hand, since it's Firefox, there will probably be several feed-finder extensions available before 4.0 is final.
> A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list
Yep. I read all my RSS feeds in my mail client, claws mail. The feeds display on screen just like a mailing list. Plus you get the benefit that most email clients have such as deep searches, filtering, etc.
I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring this new kind of RSS to the masses.
Google Reader displays a comment link, which I always click and then click through to the article if the link is still alive from there. That's a problem with a bad RSS reader, not RSS, or HN, who would actually be at fault here.
"Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-down menu of links)."
Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the information they want. RSS can massively help with that.
Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.
There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!
Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.
That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.
I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad.
Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
i couldn't agree more. Breakfast, Coffee and Reeder is my morning routine.
And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS.
What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
Excerpts only in RSS annoy the hell out of me and here's why: I usually read my RSS feed in Reeder on my iPhone during my morning commute. There's still no mobile reception on the London Underground (I'll resist the temptation for now and save that rant for another time) meaning that all I can read is what have been cached by Reeder before I left home. Which means that I'm unable to read posts that only have excerpts in RSS. They should figure out some other way to monetize their RSS feeds; I particularly like Daring Fireball's approach of having sponsored RSS-only posts every now and then (that are actually interesting to read).
Email me (address is in my profile) and I'll send you a promo code for Printful. It extracts full articles from web pages, so you'll be able to read all your news from the underground.
Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.
Most of the time you can copy the site's URL into Google Reader and it will try to find the proper RSS feed. It works for blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress, at least; not sure how it does it.
You only have to read the HTML source if your browser doesn't show you the feed button next to the address bar. That was kind of the author's point.
In fact, I'd bet that part of the reason many people don't use the address bar feed button is because the practice of having links to feeds is so common, and anything on the page is automatically more obvious than something out in the browser chrome.
The thing annoying me about this (sensationalist) article is just that… nobody wants to use their web browser for RSS: they want to browse with it.
It also cites the lack of a reader in Chrome as a sign of RSS' impending doom, while ignoring the fact Google also run a (really good) RSS service for free called Google Reader, which is much more intuitively named than RSS and whose name is easier to understand than the RSS icon.
By the article's logic, one could also predict the imminent death of word processing, IM, (both of which Google also freely offer) and 99% of other programs, all due to the fact they don't have buttons on Firefox's already over-cluttered toolbar.
For me, the best solution is Opera's. It gives you a sort of summary of the feed when you click on it, and asks you where you want to add it (Opera RSS reader, Google Reader, etc). I click Google Reader and it's added automatically.
I don't use the browser's RSS feature either. I only use Google Reader's web app to subscribe to feeds. When I want to read the articles, I do so on the go, with NetNewsWire or Reeder on iPhone or iPad. Before this blog post, I hadn't even noticed that Chrome doesn't have RSS built-in, so I won't miss it in Firefox 4 either.
It would be nice if Mobile Safari had a button to add feeds to my Google Reader account, but I doubt that will ever happen, unless Apple chooses to implement a similar solution in MobileMe. I would settle for a bookmarklet, though (like Instapaper offers).
In any case, as long as all popular blogging services and CMSes have syndication turned on by default, I don't think we're in any danger of RSS dying off.
The link isn't always there, but it appears at times on the "home" page for Reader.
edit: it will, unfortunately, take you to Reader if it finds a feed, to give you the option of subscribing. So it's not quite Instapaper-like. But, better than nothing :) I get a lot of use out of it.
Same. I star articles from Newsrob (which syncs to Google Reader) and use a script to fire up articles / unstar while drinking my morning coffee. (Explanation and script bookmarklet here: http://bit.ly/hb0YMU )
I guess the reasons for RSS being killed are
1. Search engines do not want it.
2. Advertisers do not want it.
3. Its only use by people who are tech savvy.
There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds.
So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour.
As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything
(and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)
just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying. already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more compact format.
The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON.
Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.
I had a lot of TiVo conversations like this ten or eleven years ago. Lots of people who never used the technology would tell me why it didn't make sense to them.
RSS is not dying! One of the traditional applications for RSS (a browser-based RSS feed-reader) is becoming obsoleted because most browsers aren't particularly good at managing feeds.
I can understand why the benefits of RSS aren't more widely understood by the general public; the technology makes use of an abbreviation (an abbreviation that isn't actually much more comprehensible when its spelt out).
RSS is a service, used by applications to make content portable. It's not a final solution, it's a tool that can be integrated into a number of different applications. It's quite likely that many of the applications it could be used for haven't been created yet.
Curious why none of the comments, nor the original article, mentions Internet Explorer. They've continued to add new features in this area ever since IE7. The icon is hidden now in IE9 (as are most of the icons... less browser chrome is fashionable) but I believe they still consider this a first-class feature.
They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users are less technical, so presumably it's usage is less than what Mozilla reports, but it remains.
Because of their history. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is bundled with Windows. And look how quickly they've been falling in use. Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an incredible mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how far they've fallen from such complete domination.
The story is about RSS dying, and the author is upset that Mozilla is removing RSS features and Chrome never had any. Are you also arguing that IE is failing because they still have those features (possibly a bad design decision)?
In which case, what is it we're complaining about? Browsers that have RSS readers are bad and browsers that don't have RSS readers are bad?
For a bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla installation, that's high.
Of course all the high-vote bugs are special-interest-advocacy stuff like "bring back MNG support" and "bring back gopher support" and "bring back the RSS button"... So high vote count is actually a reliable indicator that the bug should be wontfixed, more often than not.
196 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadThis isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS and this is why at least one technical user no longer uses it.
But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for something that should really be a separate application.
http://www.quora.com/Is-Google-investing-in-Google-Reader-an...
RSS - you have high volume and high breadth, but it takes a long time to look through it and find the things that are interesting.
Aggregators - the "most interesting" posts are right there on the front page, but it has a very narrow focus and is filtered or skewed by the community.
I think what we're really looking for is the most interesting content that is customized for us, but it's a big problem to tackle. Newsblur (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869136) was an interesting idea; not sure where that's gone since November's post.
They often get their news from blogs, news websites, word of mouth, and web searches. RSS is very useful for keeping up with some of these sources.
Sometimes aggregators do get their news from other aggregators, but at some point that incestuous chain has to be broken and someone has to read the original news somewhere and pass it on to an aggregator.
Finally, most aggregators themselves (including HN), publish their news via RSS (or Atom). I know that's how I read HN headlines, and virtually every other news source I regularly read.
You just prefer socially aggregated feeds is all. I actually like a mix of both. Setting up intelligent RSS feeds that will come in handy just takes a little upfront work is all. But then you've got an algorithm that you can constantly tweak and refine, which I find very useful, especially as a research tool. Give Yahoo Pipes a whirl and see if it changes your mind. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
Vastly superior for looking well educated to others, less superior for actually understanding how the world works.
For example, if I sourced my tech news solely from HN, I might imagine that large corporations consist solely of oblivious, slow-moving dinosaurs incapable of writing decent software. But if I had http://cacm.acm.org/ showing up in my RSS reader, I'd be exposed to a somewhat competing view.
To me, the value of RSS is the ability to subscribe to a few sites I wouldn't normally bother visiting. It's not hard to remember to check HN. Remembering to swing by corporate IT and Microsoft-focused publications is a bit tougher. RSS can help with that.
The worst part is that when you read HN you actually feel like you're learning, because you are. The problem is that you're not learning nearly as fast as you would be if you were reading books. It's the same reason why 2-5 year olds who watch TV are measurably learning, but at the same time end up dumber than kids who aren't watching TV because they're learning at a slower pace. The fact is that even reading a book about something as seemingly mundane as the history of American homeopathy will teach you more about life, the universe, and everything than six months of reading HN. (E.g. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/13/1590.extract )
HN contributions don't just materialize - they're often posted by people who scan large amounts of material. Via RSS, usually.
Then again, those users are certainly savvy enough to use RSS without a browser button.
But aggregators can publish RSS streams too. How is following someone on Twitter different from subscribing to his RSS feed?
I would agree that a site like HN isn't very attractive to read via RSS. When the ranking is dynamically determined by readers' interest, you lose something by freezing the list in the form of an RSS stream. But for a curated site like Slashdot, what difference does it make if the link stream comes in the form of RSS or as tweets?
Incidentally, I wouldn't call HN a curated site. Slashdot has editors/curators; HN doesn't.
I don't know, do you think that RSS readers dying will mean websites will stop producing RSS feeds? The output seems to be built in to many systems these days already.
Um...what?
In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.
The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.
Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction.
update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.
My intention was not to start a discussion. My intention was to make people think before upvoting, and to make people think before they consider posting a similar comment in the future. Hopefully, despite derailing the larger thread a bit, I achieved that goal.
I'm happy to take this discussion offline though, in order to prevent further derailment. My email is in my profile.
Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile.
Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of RSS.
Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)
As a chrome user I'm happy that it does one thing well and that's displaying web pages. Now I'm free to use any online RSS reader I want and be able to access my RSS feeds from anywhere.
And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button.
The worse statement in this article (other than the french man smoking) is:
Ummm... they're correct. He claims that, just because only 3-7% use it, it must be kept in because "what regular user wouldn’t want this feature!?" Clearly the answer to that question is "93-97% of regular users". Touché?However you cannot argue that it has to be kept because every regular user wants this feature - statistics don't lie, clearly the majority of users don't care.
I think you miss the author's main point which is that the usage of the button is low not because users don't want that feature but because the UI is crappy all around. Removing the button only makes the UI worse.
1.) Why is it ok to remove the button - because hardly anybody uses it.
2.) Why does Firefox removing the button not meant that "RSS is dying" - because people who currently use RSS will keep doing so, just without using the button.
In 1985, 1990, 1995, or 2000 you would not have extrapolated the current percentage of online users playing social games into the future, because it was obvious the experience was going to get better. It was easy to imagine better graphics, sound, responsiveness, and social interaction, and everyone assumed the better experience would attract a broader range of users.
With RSS it's not so easy to imagine how the user experience will improve. We're suffering a failure of imagination. We have the use case: Checking for recent updates on a web site is something people do all the time. They even do it on web sites they're visiting for the first time, and it can be really frustrating depending on the organization of the web site. We have the technology to serve this use case: RSS.
So the users want the information and the browser can get it. We can't yet imagine an effective way to present the information to the users, but proof by failure of imagination is no proof at all. Personally, I think it's likely that someone will find a graceful way to present RSS information to the user, and RSS will disappear from our sight and from our vocabularies into a heretofore-unenvisaged UI element.
And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader. But really, bookmarking is pretty good too. Yes there are clear benefits to RSS over naked bookmarks, but the discoverability problem is still paramount.
Anyway this is kind of inconsequential to the point of whether native RSS functionality should be included in a browser. Mozilla is right to kill this "feature." RSS is an application-level protocol on top of HTTP, itself an application-level protocol. Browsers are built to perform HTTP requests. In my opinion they shouldn't do much else. A feature that displays and helps you manage RSS content falls into the category of bloat.
This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio’s is still a subset of what he twitters.
My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I’ll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several weeks later.
The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.
RSS would be a critical tool for anyone trying to solve that problem.
A lot of the complaints here are that RSS isn't what RSS isn't. OK, that's great, but those are more "entrepreneurial opportunities" than problems with RSS. Toss out RSS (and I assume by extension Atom and all similar friends) and those opportunities recede, they recede a lot, they don't get better. It is what it is and it has always been designed from day one to be a foundational infrastructure on top of which to build more things, not the Final Answer To All Problems.
The NYT front page, while changing day-to-day still has a layout that embodies importance. There needs to be some sort of semantic interpretation of how important something is other than h1’s. How do we replicate the 144pt super-important headings while removing presentation from content?
The web was built for rationalist minds and papers, and the separation of html elements furthers this goal, yet hampers any sort of human-ness of communication.
RSS is great for a blog, but bad for newspapers. Check out NYT’s RSS feed. Every article ticks in at an equal level of importance and requires the viewer’s mental acuity to discern what’s #1. Not so with their web-front or printed sheet.
Syndication, while essential, needs to be extended.
If the curator is strictly online popularity, news sites invariably turn into people magazine. You need some high-and-mighty news nerd to determine what's truly important. Sure, the curator's occasionally wrong or late, but it's a lot better than pointless water-cooler talk.
I have no expectation for it to solve that. It serves its purpose well. I'm thankful for widespread RSS and love using it.
"Subscription" is the most common term used, probably because it is a reference to the underlying technology (publish/subscribe) and to a vaguely similar concept in userland (subscribing to a publication.) But subscription is not a good metaphor. Subscriptions do not lessen your commitment; they increase it. Having a bunch of magazine subscriptions is a burden! They fill up your mailbox and clutter up your apartment. A "subscribe" button scares people away because it evokes a much more consequential decision; the user wonders if it is worthwhile to commit to this burden. And of course subscription is not the only way to use RSS.
What web sites and browsers need to do is simply SAY in their UI what the RSS features do, without saying "RSS" and without trying to train users to recognize the RSS symbol.
I am not a UI designer, but I think the word we're looking for is "updates." Buttons should say:
"Show me recent updates to this site"
"Show me future updates to this topic"
"I want to see future updates to this site"
The button to show your RSS feeds should say "Updates" and should have a tooltip saying "Updates to your web sites."
To help people discover this functionality, I think it would be great for browsers to check for RSS feeds on the sites a user goes to frequently and work that into the UI somehow. When you open Chrome and see thumbnails of your favorite sites, each thumbnail might have a button saying, "Recent updates...."
And there's one simple feature that people would easily figure out and would actually use. When you're on a site that has an RSS feed, there could be a little pop-over button in a corner (like the button added by Feedly's Firefox plugin) that you can click to see a list of recent updates to a site. It's a simple feature, some people would figure it out for themselves, and anyone could grasp how it worked after seeing it used once or twice. It would put pressure on websites to provide good RSS feeds, because they would know many users were checking them. Here's a tip: put the words "Recent updates" on the button.
tl;dr Don't say RSS, don't use a symbol, don't say "subscribe" or "subscription," just use the word "updates" and say what you mean.
In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours.
The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.
I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half in that NGO.
Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS' disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy" the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate revenue might be high.
That does seem pretty inconvenient. Many of the posts at bugzilla argue that the most important feature of the button is the fact that it indicates, in a standard way, that feeds were detected. And I agree.
On the other hand, since it's Firefox, there will probably be several feed-finder extensions available before 4.0 is final.
Yep. I read all my RSS feeds in my mail client, claws mail. The feeds display on screen just like a mailing list. Plus you get the benefit that most email clients have such as deep searches, filtering, etc.
http://www.newsbeuter.org
You might also be interested in trying these alternate HN feeds:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed"Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-down menu of links)."
Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.
There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!
That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.
Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
And a browser's RSS features are indeed too limited - third-party web- and mobile apps are much more sophisticated when it comes to RSS.
What I'm more worried about is the trend to only show an excerpt or introduction of an increasing number of articles. Given the fact that most of those sites rely on ads, it's fair to do that though.
The same way that some browsers do it. There is a meta-tag in the page, which describes which feed formats are available, and where to find them.
For one thing, it shows you the whole history of the feed -- even when the XML itself contains just the few most recent items.
And then the author complains that it's hard to use and people aren't taking advantage of it. Jerk.
In fact, I'd bet that part of the reason many people don't use the address bar feed button is because the practice of having links to feeds is so common, and anything on the page is automatically more obvious than something out in the browser chrome.
It also cites the lack of a reader in Chrome as a sign of RSS' impending doom, while ignoring the fact Google also run a (really good) RSS service for free called Google Reader, which is much more intuitively named than RSS and whose name is easier to understand than the RSS icon. By the article's logic, one could also predict the imminent death of word processing, IM, (both of which Google also freely offer) and 99% of other programs, all due to the fact they don't have buttons on Firefox's already over-cluttered toolbar.
Actually, just about everything he mentions could be done using a Chrome extension (modifying the new tab page, for example).
It would be nice if Mobile Safari had a button to add feeds to my Google Reader account, but I doubt that will ever happen, unless Apple chooses to implement a similar solution in MobileMe. I would settle for a bookmarklet, though (like Instapaper offers).
In any case, as long as all popular blogging services and CMSes have syndication turned on by default, I don't think we're in any danger of RSS dying off.
edit: it will, unfortunately, take you to Reader if it finds a feed, to give you the option of subscribing. So it's not quite Instapaper-like. But, better than nothing :) I get a lot of use out of it.
There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds.
So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour.
As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything
(and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)
The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON.
Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.
I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was, but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.
I can understand why the benefits of RSS aren't more widely understood by the general public; the technology makes use of an abbreviation (an abbreviation that isn't actually much more comprehensible when its spelt out).
RSS is a service, used by applications to make content portable. It's not a final solution, it's a tool that can be integrated into a number of different applications. It's quite likely that many of the applications it could be used for haven't been created yet.
A slightly ridiculous article.
moreover.com has many precompiled rss feeds for various subjects.
They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users are less technical, so presumably it's usage is less than what Mozilla reports, but it remains.
Because of their history. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is bundled with Windows. And look how quickly they've been falling in use. Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an incredible mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how far they've fallen from such complete domination.
In which case, what is it we're complaining about? Browsers that have RSS readers are bad and browsers that don't have RSS readers are bad?
Wow, 33 votes. They're really ignoring the masses on that one.
Of course all the high-vote bugs are special-interest-advocacy stuff like "bring back MNG support" and "bring back gopher support" and "bring back the RSS button"... So high vote count is actually a reliable indicator that the bug should be wontfixed, more often than not.