RSS Dead?
If you have been reading anywhere the last week or two you have probably heard some mention of RSS feeds and the useful technology that goes with it being dead. There has been just about as much, if not more debate claiming that it alive and well just in case you are wondering. So which is it? Well, as with so many things, I think it depends on your vantage point and your usage. But maybe I should first backup and explain a little bit of what RSS feeds are and how they are even used, because I suspect that a number of readers have never heard of them.
RSS usually stands for Really Simple Syndication and has a few formats that are supported. All the family basically allows someone to subscribe to a website’s RSS feed and get updates delivered pretty much as soon as they are made. That in itself is a nice feature. However, for people who are more geeky and tend to read a lot on the web, it gives the capability of pulling all the new stuff that you read (and even old stuff you have not read as of yet) into one location. Usually this location is a feed reader of some sort, of which Google has one as well as several other companies, though personally I have just used the function included with Thunderbird on my desktop.
Upsides are that everything is one place and it keeps track of what I have read and have not. Also, typical feeds only include a synopsis or brief, so less overhead. Even if they have the whole of the article or blog, it is stripped of images and all the overhead of the website surrounding it. Downsides could also be said to be the same. I am missing perhaps other things of interest that are new on the website that would not be included in the feed and maybe even missing some enhancement or context by loosing those things.
Okay, so my opinions on RSS. First, I do not think it ever really caught on with the masses like some folks seem to think it did. Instead, it is mostly a tool that is used by the more geeky or at least technological minded and what I will label power users/readers at the very least. I know a survey in my office would turn up only a few people who use it for instance out several. I think some of us geeky types are still using them – I know I do. But I also know, with tools like MyWeeklyBrowsing that give me the whole website on the schedule and that handle updating pages that are NOT a feed oriented webpage my own usage has really fallen off and even become secondary at best.
I also think that RSS feeds are very useful in those low band width situations, given the text stripped down nature of them. But lets face it, high-speed availability is pretty high to a higher percentage of people and continues to climb all the time. I know of only one person that lives in a location where no high-speed aside from satellite is available – and that is cost prohibitive to them. Of course I also know that person would not follow any RSS feeds anyway.
I also think that while folks doing blogs, newspapers, and such have realized that as exciting as it is to have subscribers to the web feed also realize, just as I do, that the sponsors and advertising is lost. I have had a couple of sponsors at various times here (none at current – let me know if you are interested), but those sponsors do not get seen in a RSS feed unless I specifically mention them in the post. That becomes a distraction to the core message I have the day. So, I tend to have not really promoted the RSS feed on my page, but rather have used it for purposes of syndicating the excerpt of the blog out to things such as Facebook and NetworkBlogs.
In summary, is RSS dead? No, but partially. I think though, like news feeds of old, they are very much on the decline, if ever accepted, especially outside of the geeky and those with dial-up access speeds. Just as new feeds of old are still around despite being really used by very many for more than several years, I think the RSS feeds will still be around for some small select group for years to come.
** – Image is common logo for RSS feeds. You can click on that icon to get the feed for Mephistos.
