I have to say it, RSS is not dead.
By Alex Kessinger on
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When I read about the death of RSS, I laugh, but I think the point is we need a new platform to consume RSS. It needs to cater to curators and hubs of influential people.
To some degree, Facebook has become a kind of RSS reader, but the king of RSS readers is Google Reader, and we need a new version. It’s hard to think of a way to make it better. It’s even harder for me to see its value to the non-initiated. It took me well over a year of using it every day for my wife to start using it. It was like I had to infest her with the idea of constantly checking something like Google Reader.
When the big elephants of tech start talking about RSS, I wonder if they themselves know what they are talking about. We need a new feed reader, though, if Google Reader were to open itself up and become a fully fledged platform. We could see a new wave of reader experiments. Now, to some degree, they have become alive, which is insane because Google Reader has no public API – none. There were promises made years ago, but it hasn’t developed.
You know what Google Reader does have, though: a team of rabid hackers that have reverse-engineered it. So many people love Google Reader that some of them dedicate time to document a private API. That has to say something about RSS. Over time, we have seen GUI’s, Net Newswire syncs with Google Reader, and both the iPhone and the Android have a couple of readers that sync with Google Reader. They aren’t that good, though. Oh, Google Reader is awesome, but if you are a power user, you will crash it. Google Reader is a special level of hell, because it’s beautiful, and I love to use it, but seriously, it is the only app to have crashed my iPhone. No kidding—it crashed the phone. How is that possible?
New feed readers need to be social. When Google Reader went social, it was awesome, and probably increased the traffic a lot. New feed readers need to be extendable, and an API is a must. Curation tools are missing. I want to have my discovery chain encoded and transmitted every time I share something. I want to know if I am making an impact. A new feed reader with these features could be almost like a gamification of feed reading. I don’t share because I know people are reading what I say, it just makes it more fun. If such a tool existed, I am sure it would have a huge uptake with RSS addicts, which could have a large network effect, because the people who consume RSS are also the people most likely to transmit cool, new things.