I am not making predictions or highly exaggerating reports of the demise of RSS, just “planting seeds” as the hilarious (and unfortunately deceased) comedian Bill Hicks might say.
I fell in love with RSS years ago because it provides a way to get updates directly from websites without waiting for a search engine to index fresh content. OPML gave me a way to easily load tons of RSS channels into my news reader, and my news reader let me filter the flood of information.
However these days it seems like my newsreader gets gummed up with so many feeds. The search engines are doing a pretty effective job of indexing content and provide a variety of alerts. They inevitably cast a much wider net, and make the practice of searching and loading individual RSS channels now seem slow and backwards. Loading channels in bulk does not remove the need to do some selection and quality control, so you still need to comb through lists of feeds.
Social news sites help you scan lists of stories and sources and identify the hot topics.
I am starting to think that RSS is not adding much value these days. It just creates a redundant set of content that needs to be indexed, content which in many cases is just a snapshot of what can be found by visiting the the actual Web page.
I realize that RSS is part of the larger Web 2.0 ecosystem, and some things might “break” without it. Just thought I’d put this thought out there and see if anyone agrees, and (if so) get dialog going about what can or should be done to remedy the situation.
