Posts about RSS (RSS, JSON)

7AM — Use an RSS reader to escape the noise of the Web and experience it more like reading a newspaper, says Molly White.

While the general notion resonates, there is still a major difference between an RSS reader and a newspaper. A paper has a beginning and an end. You get one in the morning and that’s what is being published that day. Once you’ve read everything, you’re done for the day. A newspaper doesn’t update during the day. You can’t add anything during the day either.

Phil Gyford’s Guardian uses the Guardian API to generate a digital version of the Guardian’s print issue. It’s generated once a day. No pieces are added or removed until the following day. It’s enough to stay up to date, but slow enough so you’re don’t get buried under a constant barrage of news. I want a RSS reader that works the same way, one that updates only once a day that presents the yesterday’s posts in a clean and easy to navigate way.

9AM — Feedland, a new type of feed reader, was released not too long ago by Dave Winer, the father of RSS. Feedland is different; it’s not just a simple reading tool but tries to integrate community features to discover new sources, like articles and share them using Radio3, a link-blogging tool also built by Winer. I’ve used Feedland for a couple of weeks and have mixed feelings overall. It doesn’t click with me.

Some excellent ideas are built into Feedland, which make for a wildly different experience compared to conventional feed readers:

• The news view, I believe Winer calls it the River, lists recent articles grouped by source in reverse-chronological order. It’s like a Twitter feed without the noise.
• There is no read/unread status for posts. Gone are the constant reminders that there’s another thing I need to read. If I don’t get to it today, I’ll probably never get to it. And that’s fine.
• I can see other people’s subscriptions. If I read something I like, I can see who subscribed to the same feed and what else they are reading. It’s a great way to explore new content without the algorithms of today’s silos, constantly shouting at you, “hey, look at this too.”
• It has an everyone’s-news page, listing all the items from all feeds that all Feedland users have subscribed to. Another way to find new content.

The positives are offset by a couple of awkward design decisions and an overall experience that feels unfinished.

• You need a Twitter account to sign up, which probably made Dave’s life much easier. Still, if you’re building a site focussing on openness and interoperability, you shouldn’t use one silo’s login mechanism that might even go out of business soon. (But then Winer was (is?) a Twitter shareholder, which shines a different light on the decision.)
• The user interface is clunky and slow, and most features are hidden away in drop-down menus on the top of the site, not where I’d expect them. I only learned that there are different views through one of Winer’s posts, but I needed a direct link at first to get to these views. Sometimes I would click on a link only to see an obscure error message like “Can’t display the Likes because the feed is not in the database.”
• Why is the feed list the default view, showing a list of all feeds you’ve subscribed to? You have to expand to a feed’s latest posts. Why is the default view not the “River,” listing all recent posts in reverse-chronological order?
• The special pages, everyone’s news and the hotlist, are mostly useless. While I like that I can explore what everyone on Feedland is reading, it’s mostly news sites and tidbits from Winer himself. The more interesting content that is from something other than the New York Times or the BBC, that content is hard to find.
• Feedland strips any markup from most feeds, including blockquotes, emphasis, and links. If want a link, I need to click through to the post on the website to get the whole experience. The only feeds in my timeline that aren’t affected are from Winer himself.

All in all, Feedland is not a useful product. I don’t need the likes, I won’t use Winer’s link-blogging tool, and the most valuable views are either littered with sources I want to see or require too much clicking around on the website to reach. I will stick with NewsNetWire to read the sources I follow and turn to blog directories to discover new stuff.

6PM — RSS used to be ubiquitous. Every blog had an RSS button somewhere. So did many news sites in the days before social media. RSS is making a comeback at the moment, but it’s nowhere as omnipresent on websites as it used to be.

What happened? Safari supported RSS in the past. Apple added some basic support to the browser in 2004 but removed the feature in 2012. Some connect RSS’ decline to the popular Google Reader, which was axed in 2013. I’ve never used Reader, and there have always been alternatives. I don’t think that the lack of feed-reader software led to the demise of RSS adoption.

What happened was monetisation. To make money on the Web today, you either charge users for your product or sell ads. Many news and social media sites offer content of varying quality, and they are rarely essential to people’s lives, so users usually won’t pay for their usage. So you sell ads. And to sell ads, you need page views. To get page views, you want visitors to linger on your site to open as many pages as possible.

RSS encourages usage patterns that oppose continued engagement. It notifies readers when a new story is posted; there is no incentive to constantly re-visit sites to check for updates. Likewise, the barebones nature of how feeds are presented doesn’t trick you into clicking elsewhere. You read what you’re interested in and move on to the next.

As a result, big sites removed or stopped advertising feeds on their pages:

• Twitter used to offer RSS feeds. Some argue they removed them because Google Reader didn’t display title-less feeds correctly. Yeah right. They removed it, so people sign up for Twitter because that would be the only way to follow someone.
• Medium offers RSS feeds but hides them. At least they’ve got instructions on how the subscribe in their docs.
• The New York Times offers a wide variety of feeds, but you have to Google to find them.
• So does The Guardian.
• The German weekly paper Die Zeit has an RSS feed but doesn’t advertise it, even though they ran a piece about RSS in 2020.
• Most indie blogs offer RSS, but there are still a surprising number of sites that don’t display a link to their feed. I have to view-source and sift through the page header to find the link.

What can we do to make RSS a format that isn’t just appreciated by a few nerds? Advertise RSS. The RSS icon that used to be universal, you could find it on many, many websites. We need to put RSS on every website that offers feeds. Unfamiliar users will get curious. And they might try using a feed reader, which will stick because it is convenient. They will demand better integration into browsers and ask big news websites to offer their feeds more prominently.