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One paragraph on RSS, the rest not so much.

the masses? your kidding me right? if I have one more marketing, sales or customer service person whine to me when their favorite rss feed is down, or to write them some sort of processing script for it, and really, I'm gonna puke

just because YOUR grandma isn't using RSS, doesn't mean the masses grandmas don't.
My neighbor, a sweet 81 year old woman who has "AOL's internet" uses Yahoo's News RSS feeds in her Firefox bookmark toolbar. Did she learn it from me? or another developer, or some other IT geek? no, she learned it from yet another 80+ year old lady in her Bridge club who went to teach it to everyone there.

RSS is probably more substantially used than we will ever know, its just WHERE that's so much different than where software developers RSS feeds come from, it won't be the feed from Dzone, or the frontpage updates feed from some design/software/hardware/whatever company, but from Yahoo, CNN or Craigslist. you know, those funny places where "normal" people go for things.

Although I personally follow hundreds of RSS feeds, I'm not sure I would disagree with this author. It is altogether too easy to believe that the masses will one day realize the intrinsic value of the depth and breadth of information they can track with RSS. Instead, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the masses prefer to "follow" information sources which deliver the goods in packages of 140 characters or less. Depth and detail do not seem to be the major priorities.

The problem, I think, is end users have never been formally trained with RSS. I showed my Dad how it worked the other day and he was pretty impressed how much time I could save when using it. Us technical people usually don't care to train users with technology.

I think its inaccurate to say RSS is dead or dieing; the adoption rate may be low, but its far from being an unused feature...

I think the main 'problem' with RSS, is that it requires too much time & effort for your average user. It needs to be more natural, with recent browser features taking a good step in the right direction.

Concise but accurate analysis.

I think the author is missing the point that not all RSS has to be consumed by RSS reader desktop applications! For instance, I keep part of my family up to date by having their picture frames subscribe to my picture RSS feed. At work, we're also trying to innovate through using RSS in ways I can not talk about.

I found this article through Google Reader :)

Oops!

Irony confirmed! I got here though Google Reader as well. :)

Same!

I voted up on this article because I think its insight is valid, not because I'm happy about it. As a syndication and integration technology, RSS is going to continue to have a place in the world, but as a proxy for blogging, I fear it will decrease (at least among the technology cognoscenti) due to the use of Twitter. I say this with some self-loathing, but I know it has been much harder for me to keep up with my feed reader since becoming a Twitter user. The trajectory of book to blog to tweet is probably not something that will increase the quality of public discourse overall. I'm willing to ride it out and see where these technologies take us, but I sure hope the future reserves a little piece of its affections for difficult, sustained, linear discourse. It works pretty well in many cases.

What sensationalist bullpucky. Sure twitter serves it's purpose and fills a very specific timing of news - but for the full, detailed facts - one still needs RSS and blogs.

I'm going to subscribe to this page's RSS to await a response as I'm sure you're not going to tweet it to me.

PS - when trying to post a comment to that blog I get an server error. Professionalism at it's best:

Failed to query blacklist: ip - 160.79.53.130. Query: SELECT * FROM `sk2_blacklist` WHERE (`value` = '160.79.53.130' AND (`type` = 'ip_black' OR `type` = 'ip_white')) AND `score` > 30 ORDER BY `score` DESC
SQL error: Can't open file: 'sk2_blacklist.MYI'. (errno: 145)
Failed to query blacklist: domain - insecureweb.com. Query: SELECT * FROM `sk2_blacklist` WHERE (`value` = 'insecureweb.com' AND (`type` = 'domain_black' OR `type` = 'domain_white')) AND `score` > 30 ORDER BY `score` DESC
SQL error: Can't open file: 'sk2_blacklist.MYI'. (errno: 145)
Failed to query blacklist: regex_match - www.insecureweb.com. Query: SELECT * FROM `sk2_blacklist` WHERE `id` IN(-1) AND `score` > 30 ORDER BY `score` DESC
SQL error: Can't open file: 'sk2_blacklist.MYI'. (errno: 145)
Failed to query blacklist: regex_content_match - What sensationalist bullpucky. Sure twitter serves it's purpose and fills a very specific timing of news - but for the full, detailed facts - one still needs RSS and blogs. I'm going to subscribe to this page's RSS to await a response as I'm sure you're not going to tweet it to me.. Query: SELECT * FROM `sk2_blacklist` WHERE `id` IN(-1) AND `score` > 30 ORDER BY `score` DESC
SQL error: Can't open file: 'sk2_blacklist.MYI'. (errno: 145)
get_list: Failed to get blacklist entries of type: rbl_server. Query: SELECT * FROM `sk2_blacklist` WHERE `type` = 'rbl_server'
SQL error: Can't open file: 'sk2_blacklist.MYI'. (errno: 145)
get_list: Failed to get blacklist entries of type: rbl_server_uri. Query: SELECT * FROM `sk2_blacklist` WHERE `type` = 'rbl_server_uri'
SQL error: Can't open file: 'sk2_blacklist.MYI'. (errno: 145)

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Yeah, one Wordpress plugin being out of date is a sure sign of non-professionalism. Come on. As you should have seen in the response to your comment, which you have yet to respond to, is that I was not saying that RSS is without merit or not useful or that I do not like to use it, it is just that, like other posters have alluded to, it takes too much to setup and understand for the average user. And then for the younger generation, they think why would they use RSS? For that matter why would they come to a blog? Unfortunately things are being consumed in smaller and smaller chunks as we have little time, and even less attention to give things.

Awesome just love the information disclosure vulnerability on his site! Maybe code like this is why he believes RSS is doomed.