twitter or facebook can't offer that stability...!

What I think may happen in the next few years is that folks will start to pull in more of their content in a diversified way to networks such as Facebook, and its possible that Facebook could be as dominant in discovering RSS as Reader is today. And... why not build a Google Reader facebook app? Just an idea about web promotion.

I've tried to use Twitter and some of the apps that go along with it instead of RSS, but it does not work very well for me at all.

RSS is much more organized and precise. Getting news via Twitter offers no control and you end up reading duplicate content over and over again. You also have no previews, the headlines are ugly and I hate reading all the bad grammar that people use to fit within the text limits of Twitter.

I use Reeder on my iPhone and Socialite on my mac, with both apps connected to my Google Reader. Those interfaces offer a superior experience than anything I've ever been able to find and try for Twitter.

IMHO: RSS will never die! But in my experience most people haven't even heard about RSS, and that's the reason why only a few of them use RSS-feed-reader.

If you consider Twitter and Facebook to be news sources, then you're confusing rumor and gossip with news. But then, many people do. That would explain any decline in newsfeed usage: all the dittoheads and wingnuts have migrated from the blogosphere to social networking.

BTW, guess how I happened upon this article. Yet, through your RSS feed!

I still swear by RSS as a valuable tool.

What you'll probably see is news aggregators being used mainly by heavy readers, and more dispersed sources for people who just casually follow blogs and such.

I revisited some of the previous readers I have used -- Google (hate it), Bloglines (derelict) -- tried out a few new ones, and found a lot of shut-down carcasses. I finally settled on FeedDemon because it has the best UI (similar to NewsGator), but I really would rather have something web-based.

I would think the core mission of a reader is to bring feed items to you, in order, in the most convenient possible way. Most readers had trouble with even this. Beyond that, I can see some possibilities for guidance in sipping from the fire hose that is the internet, but I really want control over those parameters -- I don't want to be led around, sheep-like, to whatever is in the interest of a gate keeper. Where is this tool going to come from if RSS readers go extinct?

RSS has many merits, even if numbers show a declining usage.It musnt undermine the fact that its a great way of being updated with quality carefully written content on the internet. No wonder every twitter page has an RSS icon as well.

As to the problem of being 'real time' feed readers such as netvibes have tried to solve it with instant updates via RSS with better tools. Similar work has been done by Google and Wordpress in this regard.

RSS is ubiquitous so are twitter and facebook. I doubt RSS would be dead instead a integral part of a new media mix developing on how we consume and publish content.

Twitter+Facebook+Blogs+ RSS + Newsreaders+ Live Streaming+p2p among many more. The future is just beginning =]

Twitter has its place by creating search columns in TweetDeck or Seesmic on various words/phrases you're interested in tracking. You can also create column of your twitter lists which is extremely useful.

I'm using Google Reader's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet regularly.

My two 25+ year old daughters don't use RSS at all, they use facebook and jump around from site to site for their news.

Just like in 2007 you almost need to include a link on your blog, assuming you're a blogger that says, "What is RSS?" People still don't know what the hell it is for the most part.

I continue to use Netvibes when I need to catch up with published articles, blogs etc. To save me going round different sites. The ordering of articles on tabs (topics) and by site (source) is handy. And there are lots of options on how to format and lay out your material as you like.

Twitter is rapid reaction but a constant stream that can wash important things by you unnoticed.

Twitter is not a bad source for breaking news. But it's probably "too" breaking. 140 characters and some of that lost to a shortened URL does not do much to entice me to read things.

I find the digerati get more obsessive about the instantaneous"ness" of Twitter than many others. This may shock some, but not everything is all the interesting or important the moment it happens. Worse yet, I frequently don't care who got out the news first. Websites freak out because the early eyes that visit their webpage mean money to them. I understand this. But it doesn't influence me. Most early news stories are garbage. "Tiger Woods crashes his SUV outside him home". Ok. Not huge. But one week later and the full story comes out... now that's a bigger story.

Me? I check my Google Reader account several times a day. I check my twitter account once every several DAYS. I think the bigger issue is the lack of relevant stats on RSS feeds and the lack of new development. But RSS is sure to stay for quite some time. I'm not wasting my time checking all these sites. I would not have looked at this article were it not for my Techmeme feed on Google Reader account. It's that simple.

Google Reader has the best mobile experience for rich browsers in smartphones. For the average person, most feedreading will rather happen in mobile context.

Just because of lack of the read-unread tracking feature, most Twitter clients are a pain.

OTOH, the anti-killer feature of Twitter clients is the massive redundancy.

What the world needs is the four-way marriage of Google Reader, PostRank, My6Sense, and Readtwit.

The process of reviewing information from many sources in one single location, with article preview, delayed reading, tagging, saving, sharing and republishing is not yet matched in the twitter universe.

Twitter publishes RSS-feeds for searches, which is how I mash tweets and RSS based news in Reader. Tweetmeme publishes RSS-feeds for searches in its channels. It should be an easy feature to add for the real-time search engines, but it may be hard to find the economic motivation for them.

But the team at Google Reader should be able to add support for the Twitter API, so the user can treat tweets as just another news source that can be subscribed to. Imagine that, the tweets and previews of the articles they link to, all in one place.

Google, are you listening?

So it makes perfect sense to me that standalone RSS readers will disappear at a category.

So I switched to Firefox and feedly which integrates with both GoogleReader and Twitter. Feedly offers various formats which are much easier to read and scan, categorizing by topic and can be customized to emphasize whatever one wants it to. It also can have a short Twitter feed along the side to offer another avenue of topic interaction, and a very easy tweet or other share options feature.

I use Twitter to see what other interesting people think is important enough to tweet - it's a trend spotting device at its best. I sorted some of my favorite writers that just tweet too much for my taste into rss feeds where I can scan the titles and first lines, and left the less frequent tweeters on Twitter where the randomness and serendipity of interesting posts is a delight to discover. It's all in who you follow, and the tweeters your posts attract.

Perhaps rss is not so much in disarray as it is in evolution as users use it and change it to suit their needs and writers/posters learn how readers differentiate between and use both Twitter and rss feeds. I imagine by the time rss is mainstream it will have changed form radically.

It could be that all our real time knowledge needs will be satisfied by the stream and the real time web, or it could be that rss readers in total are seeing less attention. The total number of internet users of RSS readers would be an interesting stat to see and how those correlate to what the top blogs are in general...

Besides that I think for certain that we all won't be using readers like Google Reader is as of now the same way in a few years time, maybe we'll develop better systems or different habits, sort of in the same vane that the OLPC itself was not a huge success but lead the road to the massively popular Netbook revolution. RSS could be poised for a similar revival.

When you take a look at services like Facebook, Posterous, and Tumblr, what's the point of having tools like Google Reader when each service builds a big part of it's social foundation on the action of subscription to news streams? In any case this blog post though informative can only really paint one angle of what's happening in the greater subcription/rss trend.

What I "do" do is going straight to blogs by typing their addresses. Twitter, everyday! Links in Twitter (mainly re-tweeted tweets), open 'em all!

Well.. my point of view

Our "reader" is actually a 2-way system that lets you stream feeds and also create public or private content around those feeds. Check out Tick-it at www.balaya.com With Tick-it, you can make a feed a member of your group and debate, argue, endorse the feed content as the group wishes. Put RM's twitter feed (using RSS) into your tech group and have at it. And the tool can be used as a desktop app (in adobe air).

As content and content generation apps multiply, there will be an expanding market for tools that elegantly aggregate and simplify. RSS is a sound conduit for making that possible.

I use Bloglines, and it's a time-saver: instead of checking 50+ blogs, comics, and infrequent posters, they all come to me instead of the other way around. Of course, I doubt the "average" reader keeps up with even five sites at any given time, let alone 50 -- i.e. the ones who are using readers were already in need of them because they're following more sites than they can handle, and the ones who aren't don't realize they want them (so they can follow even MORE stuff).

Once you recognize that the primary folks using RSS readers are the hardcore audiences to begin with, things get easier. There's no reason for a site to stop posting an RSS feed, after all -- and an RSS reader is just one way of using and abusing the feed.

The rapid growth in "subscribable information" ("followable" in the case of Twitter) and options for users to consume it are very positive overall. The popularity of any particular tool will fluctuate and the best approach will depend on the objective of the user. What Twitter has demonstrated is that subscribing and the experience of consuming subscription based information can be very simple and powerful. I would argue that we are in the early stages of sorting out how our personal and business lives are impacted by a world of networked and frequently changing information. The success of Twitter is very important in the this process and as each of you have suggested it should be embraced as opportunity for "RSS" readers.

I do not necessarily see these trends sustaining the either/or view of how information is consumed. For example, I can "subscribe" to any of 70 RSS feeds or "follow" 13 or so Twitter accounts on Forbes.com. You can follow Attensa on twitter or you can subscribe to http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12375152.rss with an RSS tool. Perhaps someone will argue there is more "Real timeness" in the Twitter stream but add in PubSubHubBub or RSS Cloud and that distinction goes away. And then of course there is the whole debate over centralized or distributed..... and which is better for the web in general.

This is all good. Twitter has once again driven home the virtues of simplicity. But as I write this there are organizations working to overcome limitations to the utility of Twitter that result from its simplicity.

As things evolve along the "browse" > "search" > "subscribe/follow" use model the tools we embrace change, become, obsolete and hopefully contribute to future innovation. The promise of these tools to simplify our information lives personally and professionally is huge but different approaches are required for different environments. For example, in the business context where information awareness means, innovation, execution and dollars the ability to quickly connect and subscribe to information has enormous utility that is just beginning to be explored and resized. While the notion of "subscribe" and the concept of "activity stream" have great value and form the basis for real business solutions - security policies, manageability and other factors require different tools. It is an interesting journey.

I see this as the new way to market a web site and since google is interested in realtimeweb to increase my future realtimeweb page ranking (which it won't be called then).

As these posts will include 'time' info I guess the future google ranking system may like my site in the brave new world of 'time based posting'.

So RSS may be useful after all.

Google is starting to do this with search results, as inference engines and matching algorithms mature further it will become common place very quickly. "RSS readers" will become far more valuable to the crowd and will be everywhere and in everything.

The problem with RSS Readers is they don't offer a very compelling user experience (although Google Reader is trying hard to work on that, as well as Feedly who does a super job at the user experience). And there are major additional problems with RSS readers:
1- Feed management is very time-consuming to manage, especially when you're into the hundreds of feeds.
2- They have very poor filtering and curation capabilities (although GR has social filtering now).
3- They have even more mediocre ways to search or archive.
4- You cannot re-publish / social share (except for GR & Feedly)

That said, the future of RSS is still bright because it's becoming part of the plumbing everywhere. What matters is 'what you do with RSS' from a processing point of view, not just as a collection exercise.

Will one day Twitter-published content totally usurp RSS-published content is a difficult question to answer, although we are seeing publishing platforms directly push content to Twitter while bypassing RSS, e.g. WordPress recently.

What's replacing RSS Readers today is 1) Twitter to some extent, 2) topic-centered applications where content is streamed and/or curated along a variety of ready-made topics for ready-made and management-free user consumption.

To see a good example of #2, here's one on "The Future of RSS" http://bit.ly/7F8rkk , where you can consume daily news on that topic, search an archive of 2,000 related articles and social share,- all done via RSS processing, but without letting the user lift a finger on RSS.

It ties into my regular flow of information: Consume via RSS, redistribute via Twitter/Posterous/Reader Share, bookmark in Delicious.

It's great to see that everyone has their own way of consuming information, though.

I think you should also read http://thenextweb.com/2009/12/21/google-reader-wrong/ I think Dave has it right in that RSS Readers aren't evolving to meet user needs, so that is why we have a decline. I know I don't use it as much. Dave talks about Readers being more like News and not Mail which Google Reader feels like.

I think getting a list of top stories to read just based on the sources you read is very important. There is always too much information in my reader I waste my time on. I'm also annoyed seeing the same story from 10 of my sources, it should be grouped together. Then provide me a way to dive deeper on stories I care about.

I have to admit, I am biased because my startup, BuzzBox.com, is doing what I said. We are doing a Minimum Viable Product right now, so it’s only focusing on top technology sources and UI is a work in progress. Would like to get your thoughts on BuzzBox the idea of consuming news this way.

Checkout our video http://www.vimeo.com/8265907 and http://www.buzzbox.com.

Thanks
Anu

In short order:

1. Duplication of content in several different feeds.
2. Lack of content discovery mechanism.
3. Inflexible content controls.

Shameless plug for the article: http://ideas.biblekin.com/post/283172074/idea-rss-feed-combiner

I love RSS, but some of the problems are really difficult for me to overcome.

I feel that Twitter helps with this but you still have to follow a lot of people which once again leads to the old info overload thing. Twitter just supplement for me at this stage.

I have purchased Fever a few days ago (http://feedafever.com) in the hope that this will help with discovery. So far it looks promising!

I am also looking at one or two other alternatives to help with making my time reading feeds more productive.

I can not foresee a situation where I will stop reading feeds at all -- my feeds have been curated over the past 4-5 years and are to valuable in my day to day information discovery.

There are no standards for what a site's RSS feed includes RSS readers were billed as a way to aggregate content from multiple sites in one place saving the end user the trouble of going to those multiple sites but when a feed may include the whole article or simply be a list of titles that you then have to click through to the site to get the full article for, it's not delivering what was promised.

RSS, like every other tool, is only as valuable as the content it provides and if content providers continue to short RSS feeds in favor of pushing people to their web site so they can look at ads, RSS will die the death it deserves.

As news reader I use the Brief plugin for Firefox. Previously I used Sage and Sage-too, but Brief is really the best. Only problem is that Firefox takes long to start up if you follow a lot of RSS-feeds (currently I follow 98 RSS-feeds).

Oh, yeah. I check Google Reader 10-15 times a day.

There are a few discovery tools you can use such as my6sense and fever but those are few and far between.

An added bonus is that you can also use it to read from social streams. This includes Facebook, Friendfeed, Linkedin and Twitter.

My6sense also give you the ability to stream articles you find interesting to Twitter and Facebook. Chances are that if you find it interesting, your social tribe will too.

Granted, Google Reader Mobile is the worst online product ever, but the full web version allows me to read what I want from one place depending on how much time I have available.

It's still highly useful to keep up with posts that I may want to see.

Twitter will continue to evolve and I suspect lists maybe something that I will be able to differentiate the chaff from the good stuff.

I use feedly on the desktop and NewsRob on the mobile (synced with Google Reader), and I check it about 8 times a day.

The market is stagnating because it is dominated by one product, and that product has the wrong view of RSS.

http://realtimerss.org/post/293254708/google-reader-is-wrong

Dave

I use Feedburner to syndicate my blog and have only recently started to use Google Reader to follow news and blogs. I use a WP plugin to integrate my blog posts and extra comments with Twitter, but haven't yet integrated everything in an all-in-one way.

Actually, Keith's post (# 29) very useful and I will be exploring those plugins and apps to see if I can bring the sites I follow on RSS, Twitter, and my own blog posts together in a more coherent way.

I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC).

You read multiple blogs by going to their individual web pages? Why? In what way is that preferable to bringing them together in a single RSS reader?

Whenever I've used Twitter all I see is a flood of random soundbites that are mostly meaningless because they're out of any context.

Although Twitter is great for keeping up with the latest industry news, the ability to read the latest posts within Google Reader makes it a much faster experience for me.

On the iPhone I use Bylines or Reeder to keep up-to-date with RSS feeds, which I tend to do early morning and late evening.

Check it out on www.collected.info.

Tools like Google Reader, Feedly, NewsGator are just dedicated tools for the job of reading RSS. We all consume RSS without knowing that we do - many web apps rely on RSS to talk to each other. So the argument about RSS (or Atom) being dead is redundant and misguided.

The decline in market share for some products, and dedicated readers in general, is more to do with the finite amount of time people have each day to consume inbound content. Media consumption, and production, across the web has evolved, and so dedicated tools focussed on only one task will be favoured less than tools that cover multiple types of media engagement.

I'm surprised that you didn't mention the growth in Netvibes during that past two years.

i still find that i can share a trend in twitter from the search rss results with non twitter users, especially twitter sceptics in corporate environments precisely because of the RSS reader.

without pipes, simple pie and google reader my intel gathering abilities, productivity and info absorption capabilities would be seriously hampered.

Twitter does not represent and great competition as the source of most of my daily news. It's only purpose is up to date information on real time events.

Still, for a lot of people Twitter, Facebook etc. are their first feed readers ever. In my opinion they did some kind of a technology jump: using social media's conversational tools for reading and writing. Some (few) will find their way to dedicated feed readers and blogs later on. Most will stick with those multiple purpose tools for (alleged) simplification.

Providers of RSS feeds will have to adopt and offer their feeds on Twitter, Facebook etc. as well as they did (and still) offer eMail newsletters.

I have been very thorough categorizing my feeds which makes it easy to scan also for specific content areas.

me wants live rss updates, instant news ...

Regards,
Daina Thomas

"One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to."

I have no idea where this "trend" came from and how he knows that "many of us still use them, but less." Reminds of the axiom: "Know thy customer for he is not thee..."

I actually read this story from one of the latest desktop communication devices called eLert Gadget which also doubles as an easy to use, straight forward RSS reader.

Unlike Google reader and feed demon its a lot easier to use:
http://www.elertgadget.com/downloadbookmark.php

I use NewsRob on Android to pull the most recent 250 articles from Google Reader via my home wifi. Then I walk out the door and head for the commuter train, where I will read my feeds while other poor souls are stuck with the newspaper. Same on the way home and late at night when I'm rocking the baby to sleep.

Feeds on laptops: maybe kinda lame. Feeds on mobile: awesome.

I depend on feeds for news and information, and for keeping up-to-date with several blogs I read.
Being able to organise feeds into categories and having a good search function make readers invaluable tools for me.

Even so, it has been Twitter that has increased my use of feeds. Time zone differences mean a lot of good information can be missed in a tweet stream. Pulling the important streams into a reader means the information is readily available.

I can't afford to miss any post on some sites, and Google Reader is still the best way for me to make this happen. Twitter lists of sites could work, I just like the feed-reader experience more because I can see more of the article without having to click.

Also, interestingly, I told my college-age sister about Google Reader and now she's hooked.

But even Google Reader isn't that amazing. I find the search function pretty bad given that this is a Google product. Maybe we just need better RSS readers? Maybe more people will want to start using them as they use the web for work, school research, etc.?

I'm not holding my breath on those last points, I just think/hope RSS readers still have a place.

I haven't found anything else that's faster and more configurable than Google Reader. My guess as to why RSS is going down is that there's way more distractions today, such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are fine for entertainment, but nothing beats good information than using Google Reader to read good RSS streams.

After twitter launched its lists feature ,I am slowing moving to seesmic on web , 3 tabs which are always open in my browser are gmail,google reader and seesmic.

So I can browse, read and share to 4 places all within Google Reader. I can also email items to specific people if I want to. What couldn't be simpler?

But I'll bite. Google Reader, couple times per day, read through Feedly. There are times when I go days without checking the feeds, but usually scroll back to any missed articles. Something twitter cannot do, the info just flys to fast to use twitter as a news reader/gatherer.

Rarely go directly to blogs anymore. I jump from feedly to blogs, instead.

For what I do, a lot of the info I consume is visual, so I still rely on flickr, youtube and tumblr for most of that.

RSS is far from dead. While many geeks may have moved on, my sisters just discovered it in recent years. They have no idea what twitter is, what to do with it, or why they should care.

Why should i? I bookmark the RSS on my firefox toolbar and as and when required check the subject lines. If something appeals me i go to the actual website and read it,

I dunno, I get that there are other sources - but I just haven't totally moved on. I use Twitter in addition, but don't necessarily find anything outside of the people I follow on a daily basis.

...

If you haven't used Reader's social features then I can understand why you're still thinking it's just a serialized feed.

I honestly can't understand why Twitter can be considered a news source other than as an alert that something is happening so I should go look elsewhere for details. I like it for neighbourhood gossip ("Oh, a new store opened around the corner."), but beyond that there's so much noise.

The difference to me is that there's an article behind the RSS headline in Google Reader. Not just 140 chars of fluff surrounded by a cloud of self-importance. Plus, with PubSubHub I do see breaking news in Reader.

I read several dozen blogs and they are delivered through my reader (Google Reader).

My rule is: If the author didn't spend 10x longer writing the article than it would take for me to read, then it's not worth my time to read.

Great article, we've been tracking RSS (As in having a feed meta tag in a site's homepage) at BuiltWith and it looks like it has started to decline around August 2009 -

http://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS

Whilst Atom has been on the steady incline -

http://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/Atom

Been interested to know why that is.

Gary

So RSS is unknown by most of the pack, left behind by the earliest adopters, and the few middle-grounders like us are in its sweet spot.

And besides, why do we all have to like the same thing, Digerati? What is this, middle school? God forbid a bunch of you like something and just shut up and use it, and stop whining about what you've left behind... Oh, I'm sorry, do we all need to go to the bathroom now?

I don't like twitter and those clients requiring adobe air to be installed. Almost never bother to check twitter via browser cause it's slow and clumsy.

In my own experience most people are too lazy to even try a feed reader (after explaining them what it is about), but majority of those who do will stay and keep using it over anything else.

Quite often they mistake greader (eg) with aggregator pages like techmeme, amppari.com etc.

I for one couldn't go back to the ages of checking web pages one by one for new stories/news/tidbits to see.
Also the disorder and messy layout of the pages is a big reason to avoid them.

To answer your odd question "Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them?" I'd say HELL YES, they just need much more publicity to become known instead of vanishing into niche.

How do people keep up with a bunch of blogs and news without a feed reader?

As for me, I maintain four Twitter accounts that I check every day, some more frequently than others. And I go to Google Reader in the morning and in the evening. Twitter is definitely my source for breaking news, but Google Reader is my way of aggregating all things I want to read but would otherwise space out