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The topic of RSS is dead is dead enough I'm not blogging on it. Why give the guy who is so very very wrong even more page views? I love it when I see people abandon tools that I intend to improve using, so that I can separate from the pack. For those who can't hack blogging or RSS feed consumption, yes, please stop. Retreat to Twitter where things are easier and where being broken is accepted as a way of life.
I think Lazyfeed is a tool with great potential, and am eager to build something similar myself. But I think the power of a topic based real time search tool, is in connecting people by topical conversations happening NOW. Friendfeed is/was great for doing that when Robert interviews new startups or when you give us a great play by play at a live conference or meeting.
But there are scores of interesting real time conversations happening right now in areas I'm interested in, that I'm missing out on. I wanna join in some of those, and meet new trend setters and learn about what they're thinking.
Sure it shows up faster in Twitter, but the signal to noise ratio is also vastly worse. If you have all day to sit there and sort through thousands of people you follow on twitter... great. But most people have day jobs that involve something other than social media. They need to get information and get moving.
You're also relying on 1 single service to be up and running, which we all know isn't something you can rely on. This will never change as Twitter is a sole company not a network or standard. At least with RSS if Google Reader started to suck, you know another company will spring up and offer something to entice us all to switch. Nobody would skip a beat.
Twitter? Rebuild your network somewhere else.
Twitter only beats RSS if your time and effort are free.
I personally prefer to use Twitter and Friendfeed when I'm trying to follow an event that I was not able to attend, and stick to Feedly/Google Reader and my feeds for my daily dose of news and commentary.
You are right about Twitter news almost always leading somewhere else. You just need more than 140 characters to cover something - and that's almost always linking to a blog or news site, powered by RSS.
Marshall - It's awesome that you found it with Lazyfeed. I really agree with your last sentence :)
That having been said, I have to admit that I don't look at my Netvibes page as often as I used to. Twitter has partially replaced it. However, I find Twitter and other social networks a little time-consuming right now, so I am looking at ways to use these tools more effectively.
If I am in meetings for my job for hours, or even sleeping the Twitterverse is moving on. I can track back my list of followed tweeters, but only so far before I have to move on with the rest of my daily activities. If a blip of news is contained in that period of time I have consumed it, but if not I have lost it completely.
If you have time to live by the Twitter feed constantly it does have the freshness factor, but do most people really need to be news junkies to be first to know?
Compare this with Google Reader, where if I am away from the PC/Phone the articles pile up for me to be consumed at my own pace. GR also allows me to better organize content so that maybe I feel like reading about Technology/Local News, or Video games in that period. I can follow over 1000 different RSS feeds and choose when I consume or ignore their content depending on my interest at the time. If I don't want to read about Directory Services and would rather focus on Cell phone news I can do that.
With Twitter, I am really only exposed to what was posted within the last 200 or so tweets to catch my eye no matter what the topic.
My normal consumption is to look at Twitter on my phone for a few tweets or glance at trending topics and then switch to Google Reader if nothing of interest happened in that moment.
Twitter still has the problem of bubbling up the quality information for me to be consumed in a stream of noise.
Complimentary technologies, serving different needs with some overlap. "Real Time" is only good if you are consuming "real time". Of the internet population, what is the percentage that can afford to do that?
Jef
While RSS is not real time and FriendFeed and Twitter are real time, the latter two require much more effort not only on following what is happening (even if you follow only a few selected users) but also on filtering what should be really read and purging what is only a selfish blab published in a timeline.
I think the real important issue on Twitter and Friendfeed (I must confess I enjoy Friendfeed much more) is the conversation.
If we keep pursuing speed in news we will get to a point that journalists will no longer work as expected. No one will chase news, just replicate headlines (that is what's happening in Twitter). And the reader will not get in-depth stories. That is really sad.
On the other hand, when we talk about RSS we might not talk about something that is not as fast as Twitter, but is much more effective (because it's registered as a feed) and you will access it - no matter what happens - with your reader and will not get lost in a river of blabs.
To finish mi thoughts on this issue (for now) I must say that real time conversations are not the replacement for RSS. While RSS is for content, real time conversation tools stand for, well, conversations. Sometimes we do not want to have a dialog real time... Some other times we do. I endorse Scoble on the Twitter presence and Friend Feed aggregation as well as the recommendation to keep my eyes open and attention focused on Google Reader. But I recommend we use these different tools for different purposes.
Along the lines of what you said, different tools are used for and facilitate different purposes. RSS facilitates easily checking what is new on a site, with a link back to more info (basically). Twitter facilitates a more word of mouth style active human pushing of news and links. Other services may facilitate discussion better (Disqus?). And of course blogging facilitates a more formal publishing of information.
Robert, when you find out about a news story via Twitter/FF, isn't it a safe assumption that a fair amount of people posting those links found out about the news story from their RSS feeds?(or some other product that uses RSS)
If so, aren't you still using RSS for news, only you're letting others on Twitter/FF do the filtering?
RSS is interesting to me, not because I think it's a good end user "product"(it's not), but because it is the foundation for which to wrap great products around. RSS is fuel.
I'm so tired of all the Coke vs. Pepsi, Mc Donalds vs. Burger King, RSS vs. Twitter stuff.
Really, you prefer the Big Mac? I don't care when I'm enjoying my Whopper.
We should be thankful to have so many things to choose. And whatever may be your point: RSS and Twitter both are amazing tools which in my opinion made the web-experience "better".
I use them differently, so I love 'em both.
'Useful or not' would be easier to answer.
Subscribing to RSS feeds is useful for those who don't want to go check 50 different sources.
It's really useful for publishers who can push out their content in different locations: again, lowering the barriers to get the info out there.
For people who want to be on the bleeding edge of news, not so much.
It occurs to me that that even goes back to the name "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is about the widespread distribution, not the immediacy.
Oh, right, your actual question. Is it interesting or boring. I guess as a strategist, I don't expound the virtues of an RSS feed to a client. Yeah, it's kinda a given if you have a blog, twitter feed, etc. But I don't expect great returns just for having a feed: I'm more likely to want to DO something with the feed to really make it useful for users. Because nope, I don't even try to tackle Google reader anymore.
Guess what? I still think that is the best use for it, but Google Reader still doesn't support authenicated feed. Google did manage to kill RSS.
RSS isn't really exciting, but it does what its supposed to. It works. It allows syndication and extensions, which would allow for something really exciting ;)
In the end though, RSS itself is boring - but I use it, a lot. It may be boring, but its still important to me =p
In fact I unfollowed anyone / thing on Twitter that did nothing but post their RSS feeds. I follow people on twitter to connect with people/entities. Their feeds should go somewhere else.
That's not to say RSS readers don't need improving mind, but I can't see them going away.
I would have to say the most useful RSS reader I have ever used (Pop-up Cody), automatically shows me new posts from my favorite site within 15 seconds of the post being made. (my forum posts show up in that long before they show up in friendfeed).
Unfortunately it's only for that one site and the feed url is hard coded into it.
Since it is quite specialized to the site it was made for, it includes some features you won't find in other RSS readers, such as post count total of the person that made that post, link to their profile, link to send them a donation, their average number of posts per day, when they were last active, how long they have been a member, and current status. It also shows who was the topic starter and in which section the topic was started.
Btw, it was RSS that brought me here to comment on your blog. I was messing around in Newzie, one of the greatest desktop RSS readers ever made for Windows, designed for speed reading a large volume of feeds. I could not even begin to explain how many options you have with it and all the different ways you can view your feeds. It completely blows Google Reader away. The only reason for using Google Reader is if you are into the social stuff they added. (I just wish Newzie was still actively being developed, because there is so much more they could add to it)
RSS can be sexy too, but with a different purpose. I like Lazyfeed, because it suits lazy people like me. I sometimes just want to wander around the web to learn something new. Lazyfeed gives me a starting point by searching for some topics.
Facebook status updates / Twitter / Friendfeed are not used for the same thing - but I don't use them for news either. I use those to connect with my friends.
For news, I go to news sites. I have a folder of bookmarks that I open when I really have some downtime, and can afford to waste it on the crap that passes for news these days.
If you are wondering if you should to take an umbrella then 24 hours late is very late for weather news.
If you are interested in commentary on the latest novel released by Tom Wolfe then 24 hours is probably unnecessarily speedy.
Your (Scoble) need/enjoyment of knowing facts before others is unlike the needs of most others.
I would prefer another type of filter/button, one that allowed authors to rank their posts. Effectively saying if you only read 3 of my items this week - make it this 3.
You are spot on "I don’t need more feeds. I don’t need better readers...I need better filters". RSS is just a utility, like http. And I agree that- you, LG and a few others are not the norm in terms of what the market needs.
The trend I'm seeing is for more comprehensive aggregators that do a deep job at getting and presenting filtered content around macro or micro topics, so as to insulate the user from RSS management, which is nightmare. RSS management should be left to professional services/systems and combined by sophisticated people-based and text-based filters. Whereas some users will be content with news discovery via Twitter, others will want to sit back and read content that's already been aggregated, curated, organized and presented for them. And what if it came 20, 30 or 60 mins later than Twitter- that's not a big deal for the majority of users. Fact is most users will miss the first blip of a story, and might catch it at the 67th re-tweet, 67 minutes later.
Here are some examples of curated aggregators for some topics- and if you discount the 1 hr delay in most recent articles- it's a pretty comprehensive coverage of these topics (and includes some Twitter posts when applicable)
http://portal.eqentia.com/cloudcomputing
http://portal.eqentia.com/twitter
http://portal.eqentia.com/socialmedia
http://portal.eqentia.com/newsfuture
I'd like to build a business that specializes in real time filters of internet content, finding personalized matching and relevant information and categorizing it according to user needs (and even quality scoring the information). I want to wake up in the morning and by category and importance sift through all the info of "what's happening" on a high level, then drill down into the specifics of my favorite technical topics. I wrote a little bit about a proposed "Google earth like" UI for my favorite web content, using individual sharers as "locations". I want smart filters that know the types of topics I'm interested in, and who my influencers are.
Except for sites which only put an excerpt in their RSS feed, which completely defeat the purpose and infuriate me endlessly.
I'm an angry person, I know.
my6sense on the iPhone, Lazyfeed, parse.ly & feedly on my browser and FeedaFever on my server are tools that help me sort my RSS clutter.
In the end, juggling with both RSS -via all these tools- and Twitter is a source of frustration for one reason: I hate duplicates.
I would love to have a tool that would parse shortened and permalink URLs and mark them as read directly in my Google Reader. That would really help us all.
What is interesting is what this means for tech communicators. If I may, I invite comments to my take here http://tinyurl.com/m2s56c and you can get me pmaher@positivemarketing.org for a rant or @pmaher for seriously brief chat
I agree with Louis about Lazyfeed the search tool and especially live tracking is a hot feature but filtering by category only gets us a tenth of the way toward the kind of real time hyper personalized filtering we really want and need. Add to that the fact that searching and tracking tools first require the kernel of knowledge that Scoble is looking for to begin with make it a nonstarter. When it comes to relevance filtering My6sense (Scoble’s interview http://bit.ly/xr7y1 ) has the advantage with its personalized feed ranking. They track your usage and analyze the content to build a custom preference model that is then used to rank your feeds. RSS or twitter. It’s the best of both world and filtered by your personal interests not a community’s. Add to this a scalable system in which they can grow their vector models and you’ve got something pretty powerful and chalk full of potential.
For instance Google reader can’t take your present location into consideration when filtering or semantically indexing the page that the twitter post links to judge relevance. These are killer features that I am told are in the queue. In the end this is what we need, smart feeds and the My6sense app is just the beginning. As machine learning software comes into maturity these conversations will fade away and that’s exciting.
Twitter lets you share status and links, but it does not et you show expertise and it only allows for limited converstaion.
In FB and FF your utterances are to widespread to be read as 'your thing'. so those are good vor conversation, but not for reputation or for buildung audiences.
If follow U on Twitter, but U are just ONE voice in 2000+ I follow. The few dozen Blogs I follow have a far greater 'converstaion value'.
And yes; I also gave up RSS foor Twitter for some weeks, but Twitter, FF and FB hardly replace Blogging and RSS.
However, I put a few RSS feeds on my front page on Google. These are people like @ajkeen who blocks me on Twitter so I can't see his feed. But by searching for his name and then sticking an RSS feed on to the search results, I get a regular update not only from @ajkeen in my Google reader but people retweeting him, so it's mildly useful.
They have native support for photos, video, hyperlinks with descriptive URLs, full-length documents, geolocation, and a whole raft of other completely useful stuff that Twitter only supports crudely. Twitter is instant, brief, and woefully underpowered. Plus, it is centralized which makes it inherently prone to failure.
If you make blogs real-time and far more social they are going to kick Twitter's ass. People will learn to write punchier headlines and shorter articles, because that is what readers want, and then Twitter won't have anything else to offer.
Twitter may be to noisy for one person and great for another. Even if Twitter breaks news faster if getting the news 1st isn't my personal goal and google reader is easier for me to understad/use i'm going to stick with it. If Twitter is super easy for me to use and understand then i'm going to use it and find the right people to follow in order to see the news i want.
http://twitter.com/franswaa
It lets you read, filter, share and discuss all the news you receive from all the social services you use. It automatically tags each snippet of news that enters your feed and groups related snippets by person, place, company and topic.
Seems similar to Friendfeed, but the filtering and auto-tagging functionality makes it pretty powerful.