Everything still needs RSS! There is no better way of getting notifications. I don't have to create an account, I don't have to give out my email and I don't have to re-search through everything I've already read or decided not to read. I canceled my YouTube account a while ago, realized I sort of missed a few channels and found myself just trying to remember to check their pages every now and then. Then I realized YouTube channels actually have hidden RSS feeds. The experience is better than what you get with a YouTube account. The number you see next to the channel actually indicates the number of videos uploaded to that channel that you haven't seen yet. I still have no clue what the numbers next to subscribed channels meant when I had an account.
Yes, I switched to YouTube RSS feeds a few weeks ago and it is so much better than YouTube's subscription notifications.
- The message subject has the video title
- You can subscribe to playlists
- Notifications aren't randomly lost (a new feature YouTube launched a few weeks ago)
It's amazing, so they'll probably deprecate the RSS feeds next week.
[As to the software, I'm trying out rss2email with patches to include media thumbnails]
I worked on both Atom and RSS Feeds for blogging engines. Frankly, Atom had for me no real advantage. RSS is easy to generate, and it is supported properly by so many clients that Atom can be comfortably ignored. Stuff like the guid not being a guid work in practice just fine.
But working on a blogging engine (producing feeds) or saying parsing libraries will handle it is just externalizing the problems with RSS to the consumers. That's where the real pain point is: understanding the content of an RSS feed, especially when thousands of feeds can have a multitude of different quirks.
Well they are both the same as a medium, that is apart from technical benefits to the producer and the consumer programmes, they are both easy, easy to implement, easy to publish, easy to (un)?subscribe and free of third-party involvement.
I've got to agree with this a lot. With email, the information is forcefully pushed to you, with RSS it's a lot easier to be anonymous and request the data only for the channels you want.
I'm rather tired of people calling it dead when there is no supporting body that is required to keep the protocol alive.
My controversial opinion is that UI designers favored the commercial implementations because of the persuasion of wealth. But, if I'm being rational, I believe Twitter and FB are teaching people what a feed is and how it is useful. Once these ideas are concretely in the minds of most people, the open source community will have an easier time providing solutions that cater to non-technical folk.
I'm so old, I actually used to use the RSS feed Facebook provided for their notifications (wall posts) with Google Reader. That's right - there was a point in time when you could consume your Facebook feed via RSS (all in one place, alongside your other feeds), actually provided by Facebook.
The chronology is the other way around. People knew what a feed was and how it was useful, and Facebook worked out how to monopolize it and put their ads into it.
They will only teach how superior their services are. If it was in their hand they will make this technology obsolete, if you have doubt look at what is happening to messaging platform. Masses don't know how to join IRC chat room or what it is. RSS word is not in lay man's vocabulary. For example, Flipboard and Feedly, don't teach any of RSS jargon to lay men.
I must agree with on this and add that it's these giants which are driven to make it obsolete. I don't want AI to decide news feeds for me, when I can set my own filters for specific news from my news sources in TinyRSS.
These giants are taking away control from my hands in name of making my life easier. I have given up, no more expectation from their corporate business. Leaving their platform for forever.
To be fair it's the new(old) fad of Static Site Generators that are at fault. They don't generate a feed file, or if they do the owners haven't bothered to (or don't know how to) surface it.
Google (and other search engines) have a standard for sitemaps: /sitemap.xml in the root of the site. It'd be nice if there was a similar standard for rss, i.e. /feed.xml - which means browsers and other clients can attempt to auto-discover it.
I know there's the 'link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"' meta-tag but again most users don't know to look for it now that browsers don't have the little icon on the toolbar, and a lot of self-coders/site-generators don't bother to implement it.
At the end of the day, RSS has fallen out of favour due to it's poor support for user-tracking and advert injection - the big sites don't use it for exactly that reason, and the rest of the internet sheep are following suit. It's another nail in the Internet open-standards coffin :(
I rely on RSS for podcasts (which I love) and also for both news and information.
I've found nothing better for having a single place where you choose the content and absorb the information at your own pace.
I'm in the minority preferring a desktop application though - so it an sit in the background and I can switch to it for short 5-minute burst every couple of hours rather than visiting a web site.
Sadly there seem to be no desktop apps that are maintained anymore. I'm currently using RSSOwl, but it's no longer being maintained and has started crashing regularly.
I've been using QuiteRSS. Active development, cross-platform, GPL, finds RSS feeds in html link tags automatically (how I found YouTube's feeds). I can't think of anything else I want from an RSS reader.
I use monboob (http://weboob.org/applications/monboob) on my little VPS to fetch rss feeds and send them to me by email. This way I don't need an extra application, and it is automatically synchronized on all my devices, thanks to yet another decade-old standard: IMAP
(I do need to set some filters on my Gmail so they don't appear in the INBOX, though)
I'm sure there must be others out there for Linux? There are several available for OS X (er, macOS); I use a commercial one called Reeder, but there's also NetNewsWire and the open source ViennaRSS (which appears to still be in active development).
For that matter, I think RSS is still needed for blog aggregation and reading... Since google killed reader and iGoogle, I find myself only reading a handful of sites regularly.
I agree! RSS is kind of a magical thing, that's only really happened a few times - the widespread implementation of a standard that provides a better user experience at the cost of somewhat less control for content owners.
My headline is in response to certain voices in the industry which seem to be rooting for the end of RSS in favor of proprietary APIs - essentially, the YouTube-ization of podcasts. There's lots to unpack there, and to a certain extent it seems likely that more things will move away from open standards, but I'd prefer to hold the line to the best of our ability.
If you haven't yet, give Newsblur a try. A very powerful and efficient interface, also integrates well with Newsrob, a free-as-in-freedom Android reader.
Seconded – Newsblur's training feature actually pulled it ahead of Google Reader for me since it allowed me to improve the interest/disinterest ratio for certain feeds.
Is newsblur close or similar to theoldreader.com? TOR is somewhat faithful clone of google reader but it's very heavy on the JS. Hardly usable on Firefox.\\
I see, it's very usable thanks to the online demo. Might switch to it.
Hmm, the only thing I can find realted to Newsrob is that the development stalled when Google Reader disappeared and this three year old repository: https://github.com/marianokamp/newsrob
Thanks! I'm currently implementing api access for my feedreader (https://github.com/onli/feedtragon) and having another client available would be very useful. Though I'm not sure yet whether it can access a custom url with the greader api (many clients sadly can't, they are hardwired to specific services).
GrazeRSS is somewhat hard wired, but it has support for at least a few feed managers (Newsblur is not the only one). Maybe it is possible to just change the URL.
I'm still sore about Google killing reader. I used to have a wide spectrum of stuff I used read via RSS (circa 50-60 blogs) and like yourself only read a handful of them now. I know there's Newsblur, but Reader just worked so well for me.
Yeah, I've tried and paid for a couple of the google reader alternatives... the nail in the coffin for me was iGoogle going away. The pair of them together was just such a great thing, since it was my homepage, the aggregates tracked in reader with other sources was so great. I miss them as a set.
I am using https://bazqux.com (paid). It is crazy fast (it is written in Haskell), has a very bare interface and it supports Fever for mobile app integration.
Agreed. RSS is an amazing technology, but I miss a real good feedreader. I loved FeedDemon, but since its development stopped it got so sluggish when handling my RSS feeds.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird. It doesn't synchronise between devices (as far as I know), but for work-related feeds I use my work computer 99% of the time anyway.
There is also elfeed for Emacs: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed As good as butter-on-toast. It has a big list of news items with good support for (multi-)tagging and can use curl to fetch quite fast (2.0 feature, set `url-queue-parallel-processes' as high as you can, I've it set to 20).
There's also newsticker.el but I never could get it to work.
I tried tt-rss but it was running pretty slow for me, and I wasn't ever sure if I just configured something wrong or if it wasn't designed to archive tens of thousands of old articles. I switched to FreshRSS [1] and it's been running much faster for me and also has the option of running on SQLite. The interface isn't as nice as tt-rss but it works better on smartphones.
I was worried about Reader's shutdown but my habits have not had to change at all. Been using Feedbin with Reeder on my phone for the past few years and it's been nothing but excellent!
That was one of the many I tried.. but it was really reader + igoogle that did it for me. I use the iChrome extension to get a lot of that, but it's not the same without the reader module, and the reader apps themselves aren't what I want for my start page... :-(
RSS is terrible for reading. If you're lucky the file actually contains some of the text. But multimedia, the full article, or formatting? Forget it. In the general case it functions as a link aggregator and little more, but it's fantastic at that. The reader doesn't matter at all if there isn't anything to read.
You can blame that on publishers for not including the full content of their articles in their RSS feeds. When they do, it works perfectly. Most RSS feeds these days just have a sentence and the URL, if you're lucky.
Isn't that how it's supposed to be? A short description in the <description> tag of the feed, with the full content not being downloaded until the user wants to go there?
Newsblur has a text mode which does that and can be enabled per-site or when you're viewing a story. On the website, you also have the option of the classic load-in-an-iframe mode which is good if you want the full site UI but don't want to have to manually poll for new stories.
Reeder (iOS) does that and it's great. When you open an item, it shows the feed content, with a prominent button that will snag the page content and run it through a mobilizer service. I think there's an option to make that the default functionality too, though I prefer to attempt reading the RSS data first for speed.
It works standalone or can sync with Feedly, Newsblur, or other services.
I think it's good netiquette to respect the site's RSS content choices. I've been using RSS for a long time now and it's no problem to click through to the actual article.
I'm using feedly.com for reading tech blogs. For long articles, I use getpocket.com to read it later instead of Feedly's 'Read it later' feature.
Both service give me the hints of popularity of the article. Pocket adds 'Best Of' label for popular articles. Feedly adds a number of 'Read it later'.
I'm currently using Feedly for subscribing podcasts. But it's not handy to use. If RadioPublic give me the same feature that feedly and pocket provide for the sake of podcast listening, I'll definitely use the service.
RSS/Atom are second to e-mail in being called obsolete every other day with a million contender technologies (Flipboard, Google Currents, whatever else came out this morning...) yet still surviving and indeed being as relevant as what you're gonna have for the dinner today. So logical it's natural.
I'm one of the thousand who run an RSS service (feeder.co), and we're still growing! From speaking with our users, it's evident that the uses for RSS and similar open standards are endless.
It can make you feel really small at times when the product you are creating is standing on the shoulder of not-so-benevolent giants. For example, Craigslist apparently hates when somebody actually uses their feeds. They IP ban anyone doing a pretty regular amount of requests per hour, and are completely impossible to get ahold of. (have you seen their forum?) When our spiders are blocked by Craigslist, our users suffer. And then they come to us asking why feeder doesn't work...
On a related note:
I find it sad that Mozilla hide the button for rss subscriptions in recent Firefox versions. You can restore it when you customize your toolbar (i.e. leftclick in the tab area -> customize ...) but that prevents people who don't use rss yet to "discover" it so to speak.
I'm making a podcast discovery app (info in profile). My plan is, if I (hopefully!) get enough critical mass to get podcast publishers' attention, to switch over to preferring Atom feeds. Just because Apple made a decision in 2005 doesn't mean we have to be stuck with it.
I hope, given the combined efforts of people in this space, we can break podcasts out of the grip of the iTunes store (e.g. Why do podcasts need reviews? Have you ever seen a Youtube video where someone urged you to leave a review? It's because reviews catch the attention of iTunes store curators, but Youtube does more automated personalization.)
I really wonder why Apple and iTunes still have so much influence in the podcast space. They have less than 40% market share in the US, their strongest market. In Europe, Android has greater than 75% market share. Is the podcasting audience so different than the mobile market in general? If not, why do so many publishers act as if iTunes is the only place that people find podcasts these days?
It's because Apple integrated podcasts really early and everyone else has still been ignoring them. I know someone who switched from a Windows Phone to an iPhone spurred in part by the desire to listen to podcasts. Google is slowly lumbering into the podcasts space but it's under their Google Play Music umbrella so it's hobbled by being part of that product (e.g. if Google Music hasn't launched in your country you can't listen to podcasts.)
>if Google Music hasn't launched in your country you can't listen to podcasts
This is such an Apple-centric way of thinking. Google launched their first podcasting app (Google Listen) in 2009. It was only discontinued in 2012 after there were a plethora of better apps in the Play Store. If you care about podcasts at all, you weren't waiting for them to be integrated into Google Play Music. You've been using one of the dozens of excellent 3rd party clients that have been available for years.
Actually it's worse - here we have available Google Play Music and podcasts aren't.
Meanwhile I can actually listen to them in any number of significantly better apps (e.g. PocketCasts) so having them available via RSS is pretty important to me.
Apple / iTunes actually supported Atom feeds last I checked. I don't think this is a matter of being beholden to Apple anymore, but the fact that this is what the publishers are doing. Given that it's unlikely that you will build an app that doesn't support RSS, it's not clear what a move to Atom would buy you.
Atom is just a more precise and accurate protocol. For example, timestamps in RSS feeds come in all shapes and sizes, whereas Atom has an unambiguous time format.
I would want to validate the product before I start messing around with this kinda tech thing, but the idea is, if I have enough users then want to add support for some extra elements like you've mentioned, I'd support those elements in Atom feeds, so if publishers want those extra elements to show up in my site/app they'd have an incentive to switch formats.
Reviews are iTunes' form of social proof and help enable some amount of discoverability. Youtube's social proof equivalent is likes, comments & subscriptions. Of which most youtubers request at the end of a video in the same way.
Fair enough. It's true that whatever metric a platform uses for either manual or automated curation, publishers will know about it and optimize for it.
Hey Chris! I run a podcast hosting/publishing service (https://zencast.fm) and am curious to hear more about what other metadata you'd like to include in a feed aside from greatest hits?
The short answer is, we're still figuring it out! Part of the approach we're taking is about letting us test things with real users against live feeds without bugging people every time we change our minds (about the content of the extensions or about the format of them), and we're still at the very early phases.
The somewhat longer answer is, we know we would like to get better promotional / onboarding data from the feeds - including things like a 140 character description for the feed that references similar content from other media (like tv), or the best gateway episodes to present new users with. Ordering is a big one, for shows that are e.g. serialized, or even for shows with short, strictly ordered series embedded (think 2 part specials in a daily news feed). The folks at https://syndicated.media (including me) have been keeping track of ideas on Github (https://github.com/syndicated-media/sn-spec/issues), and you would be most welcome in the slack group for syndicated media, where things are just starting to pick up. Shoot me an email if you would like an invite!
Hi Ben, that would be great! I am indeed familiar with Podlove and I think there is a little bit of overlap. I don't personally control syndicated.media but can forward an email to the person who does - can you reach out to me on a private channel? My email is in the post.
None of the good things you mention seem to require new investment in XML, I'm not sure what benefits you see in it.
Why not just maintain existing functionality in RSS, and at the same time design a new format than is modern, simple, and extensible? The modern format could be linked to or embedded within the legacy format as long as needed.
Newer clients could continue reading the legacy format while adding support for the modern format. Older clients would continue to work indefinitely.
This would allow a gentle transition and allow new investment in XML code to cease.
I'm not religiously against XML, but there are many practical benefits to not using it when possible.
It is an interesting thought. I think it's hard for me to imagine the benefits of moving on from XML overcoming the pain of supporting both formats for literally everyone involved (producers and apps), and RSS is, despite its shortcomings, quite mature. If you are proposing hanging additional data off of RSS with a link but continuing to fetch the RSS for basic episode data, I think it is self evident why that is fraught. And if you are suggesting having an alternative representation, I guess I worry about reliving the pain of the early days, with lots of format fighting and incomplete / incorrect implementations.
Chris, it's only intuition, i'd have to research RSS more to respond precisely.
However I'm impressed by the fact that you are thoughtfully considering the comments here and taking the time to reply to them. That's always a sign of a good architect, and I look forward to seeing the progress your team makes.
Really staggered to see work on Podcasting and not even mentioning or considering Podlove http://podlove.org/
They are already working for several years on improvements and standards for publishing and consuming podcasts. E.g. Podlove defined how to deliver chapter marks inside a feed and implemented it in their Wordpress based Podcast Publishing Software.
I am familiar with podlove, and the work on chapters in particular are interesting, but they face the exact problems I talked about in the post - they are mostly being designed in a vacuum. Apps are slow to add support for nonexistent data, and producers will never add data that will not be used (it's hard enough to correctly fill in the stuff that will be used!)
Last time I looked, RSS and Atom didn’t have pagination support and many RSS feeds only show the most recent N items. I'd say solving that issue to make feeds more browseable would be a significant improvement for the way that I want to use them.
So, in the RSS spec, the <guid> tag is used to identify individual posts. Without some sort of identifier, it's hard to know if a user has e.g. already heard something in a feed (because new things can be added and old things can be removed).
GUIDs, as defined in the RSS spec, are also not required to be globally unique - they're only supposed to be unique to the feed that includes them. This, combined with the fact that a feed that doesn't include them at all is still completely valid, is usually a pretty big stumbling block for developers looking to consume RSS. This is the biggest issue that got talked about during the Atom vs RSS discussion of a decade ago.
And if you're referring to the UUID I'm automatically adding to every feed, it's so that there is an unchanging canonical way to refer to a feed that follows it across URL changes etc. The sibling comments get it perfectly.
My experience with processing RSS feeds is that none of the uniqueness indicators in feeds really work. The only thing that works is hashing the content and discarding duplicates. Etags are especially useless. There are sites with a load balancer in front of multiple servers, each with its own etag.
As I've pointed out before, RSS feeds remain in widespread use for hard news. Almost all the hard news sites, including AP, NYT, Reuters, VOA, the BBC, etc. have useful RSS feeds. There are RSS feeds from NASA, feeds which tell you what Congress is doing right now, National Weather Service alerts, missing kid alerts, and California fire incidents. There's even a Donald Trump RSS feed. If it matters, it's on RSS.
Social has gone in a different direction, but that's just the social media industry.
I see. I had to review the spec, I was under the impression that item's source element and URL required and used to locate the item. But I see that is not the case.
Exactly, currently if a podcast feed changes URL they have to hope that the client on the other end notices a 301 redirect and caches/looks at the new feed url in the future.
This seems like an easy problem to resolve. Revive the standards body for this protocol. Create a new group that will define the spec and schema, convince others to use this and you're good to go. Unless you need to remove elements, it should be pretty simple to expand on what's already there.
To me it doesn't make any sense to bemoan that it is in XML.. so what. It includes a schema and can be validated. That's a good thing. Don't throw json into this.
I have to be honest, I find it a little frustrating that you would not spend the estimated 6 minutes it would take you to read a post I spent hours writing before you put me down in a comment.
I don't think he bemoans it. He describes how Apple themselves extended the protocol through XML itself towards the end of the article.
"Remember that the RSS spec is frozen, meaning that no improvements can be made to it, full stop. That said, RSS documents are written in XML, and XML has a feature called namespaces which can be leveraged to include data from multiple specifications in a single document. This allows one to create new specifications that could be used, not instead of, but in concert with RSS. iTunes did this when they initially added support for podcasts back in 2005, but little movement has happened in the intervening decade."
That's very naive given the specification in question. Atom was an effort to do this. The process created years of strife. And after all this drama, Facebook took over and RSS/Atom/et al became irrelevant.
