RSS isn't Dead (Just Ask Executives)

Written by Steven Walling / September 3, 2009 1:20 PM / 23 Comments

It's become fashionable among a certain set to declare that RSS is no longer the foremost pipeline for news and information on the Web. Steve Gillmor and innumerable others have said they've abandoned their RSS readers in favor of Twitter. Twitter hiring Feedburner's CEO seemed to compound this trend towards dismissing RSS as old hat (though headlines shouldn't always be taken literally).

The usual suspects, such as Dave Winer and our own RSS geek, quickly jumped to the defense of really simple syndication. But where was the data to back them up? And what do businesses think about RSS? The McKinsey Global Survey on Web 2.0 in business came out yesterday, and out of the almost 1,700 executives they talked to, 42% said they see a measurable benefit from RSS. That's 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

A big part of the disillusionment techies are feeling with RSS may be misdirected. Gillmor and the boys over at ~~CNET~~ ZDnet both spent a lot of time talking about the failures of Google Reader to deliver news that matters in a timely fashion. Many of the complaints are problems with Google Reader, not with RSS. Entire businesses have been built on improving the creaky interface of Reader.

Gillmor isn't the only one to confuse RSS with the apps that deliver it. The definition McKinsey provided to execs was "RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an application that allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other online information."

As Winer puts it so well, RSS is how the news flows. But both the public Web and enterprises are using RSS, which is embedded in numerous applications, to do more than just news gathering on items that would be Twitter-worthy.

McKinsey Quarterly's survey was conducted online in June of this year, and garnered 1,695 responses from executives working in a wide range of regions and verticals. The aim of the survey was to ask "about the value they have realized from their Web 2.0 deployments in three main areas: within their organizations; externally, in their relations with customers; and in their dealings with suppliers, partners, and outside experts."

The specific technologies McKinsey asked about included everything from wikis to mashups and prediction markets. 69% of respondents said they're seeing measurable gains from these types of technologies both internally and externally.

RSS racked up quite a bit of support from the executives, coming in third after blogs and video sharing sites. While Steve Gillmor and others may have kicked RSS to the curb in favor of Twitter and other tools, people outside the sphere of early adopters are getting a lot of rewards from RSS still.

Comments

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Google Reader has the potential/opportunity to become an open platform and allow lots of interesting niche user experiences/applications to be built on it. Something like that and more widespread support for Pubsubhub could give a second life to RSS.

Posted by: Edwin | September 3, 2009 2:03 PM

Suppose Joe has a daughter named Sue.

Someone writes a blog post that says "Sue isn't dead."

Joe objects, what a horrible idea. I love my daughter, he says. But the poster says "I said she *isn't* dead." I don't think you'd have any trouble seeing how awful that is.

Please let's change the subject. You're allowing Gillmor and Arrington to frame the issue. I won't point to this post, even though I agree with it because it's too damaging to RSS.

We need RSS, an open format that prevents lock-in, to continue to thrive. By making this the issue, we're inevitably hurting it, even as you might claim to be helping it.

Come on, change the subject.

Posted by: Dave Winer | September 3, 2009 2:09 PM

Thanks Steven, for showing people a little common sense about RSS. It's not going anywhere.

Apparently some lack common sense though, as you briefly mentioned. Poor TechCrunch.

Posted by: Brant Tedeschi | September 3, 2009 2:11 PM

Thanks for the comment Dave.

I don't entirely understand your objection, considering your own response to Gillmor was titled "RSS is dead? My ass..."

I get that it's been a couple months since the issue was first brought up, and I mostly agree with your point about letting others frame the issue.

But this data was fresh and relevant to more than just a debate about RSS among bloggers, so I thought it appropriate to present it to our readers.

Posted by: stevenwalling.com | September 3, 2009 2:26 PM

You've hit on one very important point. While RSS seems old hat to some, mainly folk working in the online world, the majority of web users (such as the kind of execs Mckinsey interview) are still discovering it (and at an increasing rate right now).

It's a format at the end of the day (and a damn useful one), most of the comments about its impending doom seem to be about methods of consumption rather than the doctype itself.

I think RSS will be around for a long time just the methods we use to transport, transfer, consume and share will change and evolve.

Posted by: Steve Evans | September 3, 2009 2:26 PM

Come on. With all due respect to Dave W, it wouldn't be at all unusual or offensive to post an article that "Sue isn't dead", IF lots of people had been saying, writing, twittering about her demise.

Which is indeed the case for RSS. Let's distinguish carefully between architectural/systems use of RSS and its end-consumer usage. From a personal standpoint, I can affirm that I haven launched my iPhone's feed reader app on several months. RSS may indeed still power the industry as a standard, but that's not the point. From a consumer point of view, eyeballs seem to be going elsewhere that used to be glued to Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc. And that's worthy of commentary.

Posted by: Peter Kretzman | September 3, 2009 2:27 PM

Steven, I explained it as best as I could.

Maybe it would make more sense if someone started a thread that said ReadWriteWeb is dead, and you could watch people argue about whether it's dead or not.

My first piece was probably a mistake. In subsequent pieces I have found a way to explain its role in a more positive way. I wish you would go that route.

That's all I have to say on this subject. Peace.

Posted by: Dave Winer | September 3, 2009 2:42 PM

Word, word, and double-word. RSS is an awesome platform that will allow almost infinite possibilities for the future of syndicated content.

I don't know why it's all the sudden cool to say RSS is going out of style. I've been getting lots of news from Twitter for a long time now, but I also us reader pretty regularly as well.

They serve different purposes.

Posted by: Colin Clark | September 3, 2009 2:47 PM

I don't know if those who have proclaimed that RSS is... you know.. the D word... actually believe it to the core or if they just wanted to push buttons with tongue in cheek.
Or if they just irresponsibly use "RSS" as an umbrella term for labeling the opposition to the more, faster, smarter, better hype that is going on related to real-time web/push-button web etc. It's like so many other things where people feel the need to have a black&white issue to pound on. The notion that something must fall for something else to rise.
Childish, really.

Here are some perspectives...

Many people were not ready for adding RSS Readers to live along-side with their "Email". With the exception of joining mailing lists, a typical person does nto concern themselves with the idea of subscribing in order to get content. And despite the ease in which this subscribing process is done (auto-discovery, orange buttons, copy/paste a url, pre-populating feeds, one-click subscribe options in the software etc etc), these few extra steps and the fact that their is another interface for managing an "inbox" deterred many from full adopting content syndication via RSS. Email software that incorporated an RSS Reader (ie. Apple's mail.app) helps but it's still added complexity.
Many people just find it simpler to rely on a few webpages (which prob use RSS).

But RSS is more than this idea of Reader software.

RSS made it easy to let one website add content from another website. So it's usefulness was not solely for consumption by individual users but also to spread content across the web.

RSS is used by search engines for improved content discovery and therefor, improved SEO. The new breed of search engines heavily use RSS feeds to parse rich multimedia content and output to a users search results. That was some of the motivation behind new namespaces such as "Media RSS" driven by Yahoo! in 2004. And anyone adept in Search Engine Optimization knows that submitting a Media RSS feed to search engines is a standard and crucial step. After all, it's well-formed machine-readable content.

Media RSS also bleeds into the world of audio and video syndication/agregation (commonly referred to as podcasting). Take a look at the data inside my blip.tv RSS feed: http://sull.blip.tv/rss

That's some rich metadata.

Does twitter offer that? No and it was never intended to. But twitter will evolve and its feasible that it will eventually resemble RSS more as it becomes realized that metadata and machine-readable formats are fundamental requirements that add value.

RSS is also commonly used to run multimedia presentation software such as Flash audio and video players. Adobe's own AMP (Adobe Media Player) uses RSS and other XML flavors to load playlists, social connections, advertising, branding and UI elements. Their are other examples of RSS being in the mix for these types of uses as well.

RSS is often used as part of web application APIs. One service can make use of another service's RSS feed and include the content and important links or widgets into it's interface. These web service mashups thrive and are part of the web culture today. RSS is not the only format used but it is a common and simple format to allow for easy cross-domain content sharing.

RSS is also used for alerts, notifications, data backups, filesharing and short messaging.

RSS is so pervasive that many people don't see it or know its part of whatever it is that they are looking at. And that's the way it should be for most people.

So where is the failure, exactly? Mostly, you could blame software for aggregating RSS feeds. It was setup to mimic email. That made sense since you did not want to create an nusual experience for people to consume this content. The email experience is the most common of all. But that also allows for the vulnerability of feeling overwhelmed with "unread items" and managing all the content. So, more "view modes" are important.... especially the "river of news" mode that let's you casually skim headlines. There are other designs that work too. Inevitably, a user has unique preferences and they should be allowed to easily create those view modes that work for them.

Google Reader has evolved a lot this year. Though I still think it's a clunky bloated confusing experience... it is at least more interesting to me. I can see it continuing to evolve to the point where it becomes more inline as a direct competitor to Facebook. But they need a new UI or like I said, multiple view modes.

Even with Google Reader's shortcomings and attributing those to the whole RSS is .... you know... the D word.... it's foolish, it's rhetoric. it's getting drunk on the real-time buzz which is like... the new drug of choice.

So enough of this. If their is a concern about the image of RSS (very few of us geeks would really care), then just post intelligent articles mentioning RSS where applicable so people learn an understand it more. I don't think we need to grab hold of the drama headlining of this is dead that is dead this is the future and that is old news etc etc.
Stuff like RSS is not Fashion. It's cold hard tech.
This debate is a fabrication based on personalities who happen to have reach and some could argue... influence.

Once a Faster RSS is demonstrated (rssCloud, pubsubhubbub etc), everthing else will be moot, anyway.

Posted by: sull | September 3, 2009 3:17 PM

Favoring Twitter over RSS ? I get my tweeter updates through my RSS reader. Among a dozen other feeds, not available as tweets.

Posted by: joan | September 3, 2009 3:22 PM

I do not understand why people are framing the argument as either Twitter or RSS. They are different tools, to be used in different contexts.

Twitter seems to understand this, since they offer RSS feeds on twitters...

Posted by: alexfiles | September 3, 2009 3:49 PM

Sheesh. I can't believe all these articles about RSS vs Twitter. They're completely different fucking things. Anyone that is using Twitter like it is RSS has serious problems.

RSS is open, flexible, implementable in any software/application, consumable by any software/application, able to be deployed anywhere, able to be maintained internally, externally, etc.

Twitter is a closed third party service. Any business relying on that for their messaging and communication is crazy.

Can we stop talking about Twitter like it's even remotely a competitor to RSS in any way and just go back to thinking about it like a social networking tool? That'd be awesome.

Posted by: David Harrison | September 3, 2009 4:10 PM

Thanks to sull for great perspectives and further explanation of the value of RSS. Another place where RSS is set to be a real game changer is in academic research and publishing. Scholars have been slow on the uptake of new media (with some notable exceptions, of course), but once professors and researchers figure out the efficiency of piping and filtering their attention streams and syndicating their production streams, we'll see much better use being made of legacy scholarship and more innovations being done with digital scholarship (see my post on this at Academic Evolution - http://bit.ly/ISTB1) RSS is a necessary step in taking academic publishing fully into the digital age -- partly under the hood, worked into content management systems and academic services just as RSS has been operating in the enterprise space. But I also think it is something very much needed to be understood conceptually as a vital tool of contemporary communication. Ignorant of metadata or the virtues of format-agnostic communications, scholars won't be open to truly innovative ways of experiencing/researching knowledge and remixing / publishing / distributing their own intellectual work. RSS will go down in history as groundbreaking for the variety of ways it is advancing communications -- via APIs, new kinds of aggregators or readers, and more sophisticated search, filter, etc. I think it is barely warming up (at least in academia).

Posted by: Gideon Burton | September 3, 2009 4:15 PM

There's an error in your article.

You said CNET but you linked to ZDNet.

Posted by: Brian | September 3, 2009 4:19 PM

Thanks Brian, that's fixed now.

Posted by: stevenwalling.com | September 3, 2009 4:43 PM

RSS is definitely being marginalized by twitter. RSS never took off amongst mainstream non-geek people as a way to keep up on news and information. Twitter already enjoys much greater awareness and usage among ordinary people than RSS.

RSS will be relegated to being glue technology between blogs and some aggregators. For example, Google relies on it for their blog search.

Twitter will ultimately beat RSS because (1) discovery of new content is built into the system and (2) twitter is much more publisher-friendly than RSS because it drives readers back to the publisher's site.

Even if usage of Google reader never decreases from this point forward, twitter will be far more successful as a way to publish and subscribe to notifications of new content on the web.

Posted by: Andrew | September 3, 2009 11:58 PM

I still don't get how people can possibly compare RSS with Twitter.

One is asynchronous, the other is synchronous.

Debate ends here ! People who can afford to spend their time online, either because it's their job, or because they have nothing else better to do of course can replace one with the other. For people who have tight schedules, mettings, or are often out of office, RSS is always the better choice as it delivers data in a much more flexible way than anything synchronous can.

Posted by: Raph T | September 4, 2009 9:50 AM

I completely agree. There will always be need for RSS as a platform for content flow and distribution across the web. There is tremendous value for news/blog sites to distribute their content and for other sites to aggregate. However, RSS is still only used by 11-12% of web users. Unlike Twitter, there is no unifying RSS platform nor ability for social distribution for feeds like there is tweets.

Posted by: Tom Peterson | September 4, 2009 4:02 PM

I guess the right approach isn't RSS vs. Twitter but how do I syndicated my content no matter what the context.

Posted by: leo | September 7, 2009 11:06 AM

Twitter isn't the only reason why RSS might lose some users (albeit I think RSS, at least on a Mac, using Mac Mail, is excellent).

Other excellent tools being developed at the moment, like Ensembli, and Lazyfeed are doing things that RSS never did (RSS only brought you what you asked for, like a labrador ... Ensembli and Lazyfeed are like having an enthusiastic friend who shares the exact same interests as you, and stays up all night recommending you great articles that they found). I posted an article about Ensembli on my own blog:

http://matthewbenson.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/ensembli-a-solution-to-information-overload/

http://ensembli.com/
http://www.lazyfeed.com/

Matt

Posted by: Matt | September 7, 2009 12:07 PM

I've never understood the point of this "debate." RSS is the plumbing of the social web, and it's doing a fine job of it. Does it have some competitor that I'm missing that's fighting to replace it? This whole thing feels like technical semantics that most end users couldn't possibly care less about.

Twitter is enabled by RSS (for crying out loud). It's just another RSS reader: every person you subscribe to is just another feed, no? It takes RSS as input, and produces RSS as output.

And as far as Google Reader goes, it was pretty late to the stable of RSS readers. There's no shortage of alternatives for those seeking a different experience. Overall, I think readers in general have a ways to go to reach and enable a bigger swath of users.

Posted by: Jeremy Schultz | September 7, 2009 12:51 PM

I don't think RSS is dead, it just needs to evolve. RSS is already finding its way onto TVs and as the web becomes more personalised, these two will become closely aligned so that video, audio and text news that we are interested in will be delivered to directly in our living rooms. Maybe even further programming will be included effectively becoming a way of delivering our favourite (and recommended) TV programmes. That's when RSS will become mainstream. Of course it probably won't be called that then. it needs to be much more marketing friendly :)

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