There is little doubt that RSS is a disruptive, game-changing technology. The so called Really Simple Syndication (previously also called Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), has powered a fundamentally new way to deliver and consume web content. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. Today, news is delivered via RSS directly to web browsers, desktops and aggregators. With RSS, the dynamics of the web changed into an on-demand medium.
RSS usage has since spread beyond simple news delivery. Companies like de.licio.us, Flickr and YouTube added another dimension to RSS - i.e. they made it an integral part of the Social Web (social networking, photos, video, etc). Also Google built Google Base, its Craigslist competitor, entirely on RSS. Other companies too are beginning to extend RSS, sometimes with proprietary extensions.
In short, because of RSS ubiquity it is now a very attractive delivery medium for all kinds of content. However because the basic format is simple and primitive, there is no way to encode semantics without building an extension. So in this post, we look at RSS today and ask if RSS is evolving into a tool for delivering complex, semantically rich information.
RSS is an XML-based language and its early roots can be traced to back to 1995, to Apple Labs and then slightly later to Netscape, Userland Software and Microsoft. The first major use of RSS was in 1999 when it was integrated into the My Netscape portal. So RSS is not a new kid on the block, in fact it was around way before the new Social Web came about. So why did it not take off earlier? It appears to have been misunderstood and de-emphasized by AOL, and was downplayed after the Netscape acquisition.
RSS survived mainly because of one man's heavy-lifting - Dave Winer. Dave authored RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92 and then the widely used RSS 2.0 specification. Over the years he has drummed the beat of RSS on his blog and every corner of the web, until it got adopted by companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. [Ed: there were also heated format wars during this time, with RSS 1.0 and then ATOM, but we won't re-hash those here!]
RSS is rather simple language to describe the latest headlines (or the full content of articles). The following explanation of RSS is based on the RSS 2.0 format, but other formats are similar. Here is a sample of what it looks like:
Each RSS file consists of items delivered in a single channel. Each item has a title, a link and a description (attributes). The on-demand aspect of RSS is enabled by two timestamps - the lastBuildDate in the channel indicates the last time this channel changed, while the pubDate of the item indicates when the item was published. RSS aggregators (a.k.a. RSS readers) take advantage of these timestamps to decide when new content is available.
The old web was a pure pull medium, because users had to visit each web site in order to find out what (if anything) had changed. However, businesses and advertisers in particular love push technologies - where content is delivered to the user when it becomes available. RSS is an interesting mix between the two extremes, neither of which could actually work in our information-overloaded and advertising-saturated world. RSS is basically a filtered push - the user subscribes (pulls in) to channels that he/she likes, and after that content is delivered automatically.
So today RSS is a great distribution medium. Why? Because it has become ubiquitous. If you are an online business with customers and you do not utilize RSS, then you are simply missing out. Smart companies are leveraging blogs, photos, video, podcasts to stay in touch with customers daily. Other services, like del.icio.us (owned by Yahoo), allow users to publish and subscribe to feeds, enabling powerful social networks outside the website.
The ubiquity of RSS is so powerful that publishers want to deliver more and more content to users via RSS. But the problem is that basic RSS cannot be used to deliver structured information.
Lets look at a specific example. Suppose your bank wants to deliver you statements in RSS instead of email. However if you use RSS as it is today, then the bank statements would need to be encoded in HTML - meaning no financial application would be able to manipulate the data. When your Quicken software connects to the bank, the information gets downloaded in a structured format. But with RSS, it is simply not possible currently - because there is no way to describe bank transactions using standard RSS.
At first glance this might not make much sense. Why do we care about RSS having structure? Because structured RSS holds the promise of information portability. Going back to the bank statement example, it would be great if the statement also can be taken as an input by a financial application of your choice. Since we are moving our desktops online - e.g. the trend of Web Office suites - the formats that we used in the Windows age are not going to work well. We need something lighter and more portable to carry our information around - hence XML and RSS.
Note that businesses are probably the most interested party here, because to a business a loss of structure leads to loss of meaning, loss of trail and ultimately the loss of customers.
To extend RSS basically means to add a custom tag. For example, Google Base currently has 148 attributes that it recommends to add to RSS. Here are some examples starting with the letter 'a': age, actor, agent, apparel type, artist. These are everyday concepts that might come handy in classifieds and other aspects of life. All of these tags allow Google Base to make RSS structured, whilst preserving its basic capability.
Similarly, FeedBurner inserts proprietary attributes into their RSS feeds. This is done purely for house keeping purposes, because only FeedBurner's engine is meant to process these attributes.
The main problem with extending RSS is agreeing on what things mean. In the case of FeedBurner it is not critical, but in the case of Google Base it is much more important. In order for RSS extensions to work, the second piece of the old technology dilemma needs to be solved. There needs to be a common format for communicating data between applications:
Purists, myself included, would argue that using RSS for the delivery of complex content is a hack. After all, what does a news format have to do with semantics? But technologies do not evolve in a pure way. Some things catch on and succeed, and become widely adopted. The fact is that RSS is becoming a pervasive on-demand technology, which outweighs the fact that it was never meant to be the semantic agent of the web. But even from a purist's perspective, there may not be much to pick at - RSS is just another XML-language and in that respect it is as good as any other flavor of XML.
So will RSS become more than it is today? Will it be able to solve the second piece of the old technology industry puzzle - the common format? As usual, only time will tell. However RSS does look like a strong front runner at this point, as we do not have a lot of attractive, simple and widespread alternatives. But again, who knows, technology is not a predictable thing.
Do you think RSS will expand beyond what it is today? What real world things are you are seeing that hint at RSS being used in more ways?
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The Future of RSS.
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RSS was intended only for text in the begining. now I see its being extended with links, images etc.
but thats not the solution, in near future technologies will develop and will bring new format with all those rich extensions natively supported.
Posted by: ajaxus | April 3, 2007 10:54 PMHTML was only intended for text in the beginning as well. Now it has scripting in it and all sorts of nonsense. But.. it evolved to fit what the Web wanted, as any good format should. RSS should also, but it seems the people in charge of these various standards would rather bicker and throw their egos around rather than do anything productive (Atom partially excluded from this criticism).
Posted by: Peter Cooper | April 4, 2007 2:28 AMVery good article and in response to your last question of new feed applications:
1. Geo RSS, feeds based on geographical data. GEORSS.org seems to be leading the way on this.
2. ZapTxt.com, feeds on the go, sort of like alerts on the go
3. Feeds being converted to podcasts, excellent for disabled citizens
There are more, but I wanted to push these points.
Posted by: kaz | April 4, 2007 2:33 AMHELP !!!
Please... Do not extend RSS any more!
For god's sake (place any god here), RSS should NOT be extended anymore. The list of current formats (that in the end do the same thing) is HUGE and already really complicated with incompatible formats with one another:
RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.0.1
ATOM 1.0, 2.0
See a "very" old post on this subject [The myth of RSS compatibility] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss
RSS means many things... but lately the most common meaning for it is: really SIMPLE syndication. SIMPLE as in: NOT totally complicated as it already is now.
RSS is meant for people that use aggregators to get the content of internet sites. It is not meant to be used as mean for transferring data. This is also already solved! It is called XML and is used to carry data, even execute bank transactions... whatever.
RSS is a subset of XML... If you are asking for RSS expansion it is like you are asking for RSS to become XML... Why not just invent a new name for it like "TDML" (transfer data mark-up language) and use this. RSS was never meant for carrying data for bank transactions or anything like that.
Posted by: George S. | April 4, 2007 3:14 AMMy 2 cents and a huge cry for help, to make RSS Formats expansion stop here.
Compared to e-mail RSS is a great echnology that has a few advantages that are liktly to make it last.
Posted by: Alex | April 4, 2007 3:16 AMIt is not correct that "Really Simple Sindication" was previously called "RDF Site Summary". These are two different (but somewhat) similar standarts - Dave's RSS 2.0 (Really Simple ...) and RDF/XML based RSS 1.0 (RDF Site...).
Posted by: Kristaps Kaupe | April 4, 2007 3:25 AMMaybe we should add some layout elements to RSS, like italic and bold? ;)
Posted by: ben_ | April 4, 2007 4:29 AMEven without extending RSS (which I think is a good idea), there is still a lot of potential in "remixing" existing feeds to personal tastes.
Pipes is one way, SeekSift (my company's service) is another, but I don't think anyone's got it quite right yet.
Posted by: Denis Papathanasiou | April 4, 2007 5:17 AMThis really is silly. For domain-specific information, we've got XML and RDF. Why use a content syndication format to deliver domain-specific information when we have technologies like XML and RDF which are far better suited for that purpose? RSS can be extended for simple things, but there becomes a point where it becomes easier just to use the technologies specifically designed for the purpose of data interchange.
For instance, take the problem of data persistence. If you are using RSS, the data stays in place in the RSS feed only as long as it's fresh. Typical RSS behaviour is after fifteen entries, the information disappears from the feed. Podcast archives are a problem for this reason - if you want to go and get an old episode of a podcast, there's no structured information. With generic XML and with RDF, data persistence becomes a lot easier to deal with - because one can, for instance, use a URL to point to previous entries.
RSS solves a very distinct problem. Extending it can be useful in certain circumstances. For instance, for upcoming.org, they add extra data to their RSS feeds. This is tremendously useful as it allows one to reformat their data. I used an upcoming.org feed as a neat way to add event listings to a site. But the data is not persistent. It's not a problem in some situations (the 'forthcoming events' page on a website only needs a handful of forthcoming events). But the historical information is available through an API, and in HTML marked up with microformats.
RSS is only going to be one small part of the ecosystem. Well-specified APIs (both official and screen-scraping unofficial ones), XML, RDF, Microformats (with a capital M) and domain-specific semantic HTML markup ('microformats' with a lower-case 'm') all have their part to play.
"The main problem with extending RSS is agreeing on what things mean"
RDF has means of doing this through the creation of simple ontologies which declare equivalence. So, if I created an ontology of all English words (just to give a purely academic example that would never work in reality), I could specify that when I say "trousers" in my English namespace and someone writing in the American namespace uses the word "pants", we both mean the same thing.
The RDF/SemWeb people have been working on this for a long time. It is a tremendously simple way of merging large sets of data from disparate sources. But, as usual, everyone will write it off as being too complex and have all the usual naming conflicts even though URIs and namespaces can solve the problem...
Using RSS for anything but the most basic of data interchange seems to be a case of reinventing the wheel.
Posted by: Tom Morris | April 4, 2007 5:26 AM@ben: it's already there: HTML
Posted by: George S | April 4, 2007 5:35 AMThis article is complete wrong. Your RSS is invalid in several ways and you have lacking understanding of what RSS is for. I'll comment more specifically if I get time later today. Sorry to be negative.
Posted by: Randy Charles Morin | April 4, 2007 5:38 AMInteresting issue!
Posted by: seb | April 4, 2007 5:39 AMTo me, the first thing to improve is the name itself - RSS - too technical to unserstand for 'lamda' user.
Feel free to see my comments about RSS here :
http://www.internet-strategy.eu/?p=17
Cheers,
The name doesn't matter, seb. Joe Consumer understands VCRs, ABR brakes, TVs, SMS, WWW, DSL and DVD. The name isn't what is hindering the mass adoption of RSS - it's the fact that most users don't have a compelling use for it. Yes, it's cool to be able to read a whole mass of news in an aggregator in about the tenth of the time it would take to read it normally, but that's not useful for most people.
Posted by: Tom Morris | April 4, 2007 6:30 AMHi,
I have thought about one thing. Stats is important to many website holders and bloggers today. Most of them only count visits to their sites, not to the RSS. Can this lead to a lot of people not wanting visitors to use RSS, or even disable the RSS on the sites / blogs?
Just a thought.
Posted by: Micke | April 4, 2007 7:31 AMTom, I can confirm that for a "non english", all that technical slang words are very confusing!
Posted by: seb | April 4, 2007 8:08 AMI can see that each time I'm trying to explain RSS to my friends! They always forget the word 'RSS'.
:)
Rsspect the feeds, Rsspect the mash-ups!
REST-full information delivery is the future
Yes, Kids -- It blends, It blends well ;-)
Posted by: Spinchange | April 4, 2007 8:12 AMExtending RSS might seem like a practical way to address these very real problems, but as you say, RSS took off because it was Really Simple. The more complicated you make it, the further it strays from what made it attractive in the first place.
A big problem with all the 'structured' data integration approaches is that no one can ever agree on what the structure ought to be. Look back to all failed attempts to solve this problem, from EDI, cXML, x12, etc. Yuk.
I think its interesting that regardless of how complex you data schema might be, when you query it, you results are simple tabular record sets. Give me access to those record sets and I'll figure out the rest. Could I do this with RSS? Probably, but then I'm going to run smack into the next thing that I've got to figure out. Security, access control, etc.
IMHO, I don't think RSS is going to get very far in the enterprise for their real data.
Posted by: Chris Marino | April 4, 2007 8:26 AMI'm probably going against the grain here, but I think adding more attributes to RSS is a mistake. It's supposed to be about simple syndication. In the bank account example, rss simply isn't suitable and trying to make it suitable is a hack. How about using RSS to notify a customer of an event, but have the actual content of the event stored somewhere else?
In other words, use RSS as a notification service, and have the link attribute point to somewhere that contains the proprietary format. So, anyone can be notified of the event, if you want to get more details, use an adapter that's suitable for reading that particular format.
Posted by: John K | April 4, 2007 8:47 AMI'd prefer RSS to stay as pure as possible.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | April 4, 2007 8:48 AMfeedmashr.com may be part of this future as well, as well as other kinds of aggregators, and in addition to a robust use of api's.
Posted by: feedMashr | April 4, 2007 9:30 AMGood article, but I would replace "RSS" with "Syndication" all through it. RSS is deprecated. I can no longer see why we're still hanging on to it. Atom is currently the best (if not only) alternative.
Posted by: Henrik Lied | April 4, 2007 10:00 AMThis article IS WRONG. RSS is for TEXT. If we keep adding other content that is viewable via an RSS reader, then we are practically reproducing all the content that was viewable from the original website! Retarded.
RSS feeds focus on the QUALITY of the content.
Posted by: gm | April 4, 2007 10:13 AM@22 and all. I am not asserting that this is right, in fact I am saying that it is not pure myself. I am summarizing for you what is going on and what people are doing with RSS so that we can discuss this here.
One bit that gets overlooked a lot and the reason I wrote the article is delivery. Look at the diagrams in the article, there 2 questions: Delivery and Format.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 4, 2007 10:27 AMAlex,
Right. I think that RSS should be used as a delivery mechanism with a basic format. Anything special should be link to using the basic format. The people who come up with the special format should provide adaptors that your RSS reader can use.
RSS can't be both delivery and format without losing it's value.
Posted by: John K | April 4, 2007 10:58 AMa few things.
First, YouTube should not be mentioned in the same sentence as RSS unless its to point out how they did not and still do not promote the use of their RSS feeds. In particular, and to fit within their business model, they never were interested in distributing video as vodcasts by using the rss enclosure element. YouTube's idea of "subscriptions" is internalalized and not based on RSS. They do offer rss feeds... but go to their site and you'll see they do not promote them anywhere that is obvious. No little orange rss buttons in sight. So dont place them, just because they are a success story in viral video clip sharing, as an RSS evangelizing company. Instead, blip.tv would be appropriately pointed to.
Another point... I think somewhere in this article, a reference to the Yahoo MediaRSS spec is in high order.
Why is it missing? It is the largest effort to extend RSS for a wide adoption of users... focusing on media distribution. Google it. Or, Yahoo it ;)
The banking/invoice example makes me think that it isnt RSS that needs to be more structured, it is instead a need for smarter and more flexible XML readers. Note that I say XML, not RSS specifically. This is because what I feel is needed is focus on having a system to register custom XML DTDs that xml readers (web or client) can then understand (machine-readable compat). When I say register, there should be a way for X Bank to become associated/binded with a given XML DTD. The Reader software just needs to parse out the XML structure and present the data... Include rules and parameters to the system and things get even cleaner for the benefit of the user viewing the data.
So, it's not so much about RSS adoption as it is just making use of XML for a plethora of business needs. RSS serves well for a rather broad market, from headline news to video/audio/image distribution. But this doesnt mean that RSS is the right spec for everything. I dont find logic in that when a bigger picture approach using existing technologies and methods is their for us to think about instead.
Posted by: sull | April 4, 2007 11:19 AMI agree. I also don't see a need for extending RSS any further, when we have other tools at our disposal.
Posted by: Krish | April 4, 2007 11:35 AM#11 Randy, it's ok to be negative, but you need to tell us why...
Posted by: Richard MacManus | April 4, 2007 1:13 PMsince RSS is xml-based, cant the 'content' that it is delivering be xml as well? instead of delivering text, or html, or media in enclosures, cant it just deliver xml? then you get all of the structure you could ever ask for. the receiving application has to know what to do with it, but that would be the case with any kind of structured content. no extentions, nothing 'unpure' about it.
Posted by: brian | April 4, 2007 1:50 PMRandy's right about the example being flawed: there's no outer rss element, author should be an email address - maybe other things. Not sure about his negativity though ;-)
For simple content delivery, RSS 2.0 is ok-ish though it is broken in a few places (such as markup in titles), and it's not very well defined for extension. Atom can be seen as a bugfix version, and can be pushed a lot further.
As Tom suggests there are better defined approaches of representing and delivering arbitrary data, in particular RDF. But I don't think it's really an either/or situation. Atom is nicely defined for content syndication, and has some nice features in place such as entry versioning which could be used to benefit in delivery of broader data.
The Atom Publishing Protocol is going to open a lot of doors, very much allowing Read/Write Web using the standards as originally designed. The extension potential there is also pretty good. It remains to be seen where this will lead, but it's likely to be very good for the web. As a Semantic Web fan I like that - what's good for the web is good for the Semantic Web, and vice versa.
btw, did you see The Semantic Web of Data yet? 8 mins video of Tim Berners-Lee that could change your life! (heh - new style outreach)
Posted by: Danny | April 4, 2007 2:26 PMYes,
RSS was only intended for text, but i think that its good that you can have links and images. Hopefully videos soon!
Posted by: Andy | April 4, 2007 2:53 PMThis page is interesting. I'm now reasearching Rss for my sites.. I'm new to this stuff, seems straight foward...but i'll sit back read what the pro's gotta say..
Posted by: Richie | April 4, 2007 3:14 PMHi Alex,
Great article on RSS!
I recently developed and launched a new search service called fisssh! (http://www.fisssh.com) that is based entirely on RSS.
Posted by: Craig Hughes | April 4, 2007 3:15 PMAlex is right, RSS is conclusively solving the delivery problem. The high-level concept of a sequence of dated items is applicable to many problems and that is why RSS is attractive - there's no reason to invent anything different. RSS is a great wrapper for all sorts of dated information.
The format question is really about what lives inside the description element; there are two sides to this. Not all feeds have to be consumed by a conventional feed reader, the date wrapper that RSS provides is useful for machine-to-machine applications. On the other hand, XML (including RSS extensions) was always intended to be human-readable with the tags ignored so properly structured data should still render in some way.
So for a banking application for example, RSS would provide a convenient transport to get transactions or statments into your software and as a by-product lower the bar for other developers to do useful things with it. This is of benefit to users without them trying to consume the feed in the usual way, although if they did it should still make some kind of sense!
Posted by: Jeff | April 4, 2007 3:35 PMI don't see what is wrong with encapsulating XML content within the description element. Say we want to deliver a news item via RSS. We use the description element for the text of the news item. Similarly, if we want to deliver some other type of information, engine specs perhaps, what is wrong with placing XML based markup in the description element. This isn't extending RSS and there isn't any type limitations on the description element of RSS 2.0 as far as I am aware. In this way complex structured data could be delivered via RSS.
Posted by: Simon Dvorak | April 4, 2007 3:58 PMrss is not a push technology!
Posted by: matthew | April 4, 2007 4:09 PM@35 Mattew, effectively it is because as new content becomes available it is delivered to consumer.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | April 4, 2007 5:20 PMSorry Richard, had two big meetings today and just couldn't take the time this morning to tell you why. Here's the stuff...
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20070404173524
Posted by: Randy Charles Morin | April 4, 2007 5:37 PMRSS is an amazing thing. You can use sites like tumblr.com to pull your attention data from several sites into one spot. You can send RSS feeds to IM applications like Twitter. Yahoo Pipes is a good idea but not all the way there yet -- they need to incorporate a web scraper like Dapper and the ability to output to XMLRPC, delicious API, etc.
Posted by: engtech | April 4, 2007 9:31 PMRSS is for simple content syndication - the extensibility was pretty much tacked on at the end. Atom is designed as a general format for creating feeds of any type of data, and is thus much better suited to being extended. Google Base uses Atom, not RSS. You can't seriously discuss feed syndication while skipping Atom entirely - it's much more robustly specified than RSS and has been designed with other purposes (such as structured bank statements) in mind.
Posted by: Simon Willison | April 5, 2007 2:20 AMAbout two years ago we developed a rss-2-mms gateway. I use it to push posts from my favorite bloggers and newssites (only those with nice multi media feeds) to my mobile phone.
We have been experimenting with mobile blog auctions and other n:n crazy ideas. There must be a market for this!
Posted by: Ernst | April 5, 2007 5:57 AMAlex,I think matthew is right. RSS is not a push technology. It seems that the new content is push to the consumer. But actually, it is the client side of the technology doning the job to pull the new content from the web site serving the rss feed.
The difference between push and pull is just like the postman send you a newspaper everyday and you buy it youself.In fact,subscribing a RSS feed by giving your email to the website, that is a push technology, since the host of the website konw your email address and push the new content to you when they are avaiable, just like the postman know your address.
Posted by: Franky | April 5, 2007 10:08 AMme again;)
Posted by: huahua | April 5, 2007 10:07 PMtranslating again
here it goes
http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/huahua/699
It might be better to discuss more of the architecture design supporting a specific use-case.
But anyhow... one approach might be to use RSS simply as a messaging tool, passing a URI that a specialized client can do a GET on to get the real content in XML or whatever.
Kinda like the idea of RSS feeds only including summmary/intro content, not full content. That idea hasn't been popular for blogs, but might make a lot of sense for this very-different case.
Posted by: Bill Seitz | April 6, 2007 5:50 AMI see RSS as a broadcasting standard (no duh), a means to distribute content. In our physical world it's called TV and Radio. So now there is a standard, somewhat for anyone to broadcast. The cool part is the development of the "tv set" to listen, filter, alert, search..blah blah. Who cares about RSS...the users don't, but it sure does help solve some internet pain points for entrepreneurs. I look forward to the day that I can stop advertisements, select keyword filters, group, listen, watch, search, shop and broadcast to my friends. It's here I think.
Posted by: David Armstrong | April 10, 2007 9:13 AMOne just have to make RSS less RSS-isch. Take a look at this "visual feed reader":
http://www.gadgetfriends.com
Feed items from various feeds are presented in a chronological order and shown as a "regular" website. No one has to care about the "heavy lifting" RSS feed management...
Posted by: Ivo | April 17, 2007 1:15 AMAtom makes more sense but doesn't have the uniqueness of RSS as a name/acronymn. If someone said atom they might also mean the smallest component of a molecule.
Posted by: Motorcycle Guy | April 24, 2007 11:18 AM