ReadWriteWeb

5 years ago I wrote a prediction about RSS here on ReadWriteWeb. I proclaimed that "in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people."

I think it's fair to say that I was totally wrong on that prediction. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, in particular, many more people 'subscribe' to people than topics (subscribe a.k.a. 'follow' or 'friend'). And I'm glad my prediction didn't pan out, because the social graph of people is much more interesting to follow than a bunch of keywords. But it begs the question: what happened to all the promise of tracking topics using RSS?

We recently told you about 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice, and now we wanted to remind you about a resource that can get you advice straight from the horse's mouth: Larry Cheng's extensive list of 131 top blogs from venture capitalists and firms - a priceless tool for any entrepreneur looking for free advice.

The blogs are ranked by their number of Google Reader subscriptions, though Cheng, himself ranked 33rd, says, "there are many great blogs with fewer subscribers as the number of subscribers doesn't necessarily correlate to the quality of content."

Nevertheless, resources like this are a great tool for keeping up with what the VC's are talking about, but how can one possibly manage a blogroll so large? Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions for managing RSS feeds so you can stay on top of it all.

Every now and then, we come across cool apps that allow geeks to conveniently manage their musical tastes in a way that encourages more real-world fun.

Last year, we met up with Livekick's founders in New York to talk about their very thorough site for helping web geeks get out to more shows and concerts. Today, we've discovered Roadie, a much simpler app that focuses on album releases. Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user's Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly.

Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments.

What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers.

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 for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me.

Frankly I'm more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts. So what's happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them?

Feedly, the magazine style feed reader we first covered back in August of last year, is now available for the Google Chrome web browser. As with the Firefox implementation of the service, the Chrome version also uses a browser plugin to offer an alternative user interface to Google Reader. This early version of the Feedly for Chrome release offers most of the features found in the original Firefox version of the service, but requires the installation of a dev build of Chrome in order to work.

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.

Could a more eye-catching approach to syndication make RSS more accesible to mainstream users outside the geekosphere? Two new websites have just launched that rely on such a strategy gaining traction.

Spectives and Readfresh are the sites in question, and both offer thumbnail images and a limited amount of text. Readfresh monitors sites and brings the most recently updated sites to the top of a user's page, allowing users to see what's new at a glance. Spectives, on the other hand, gives users "one page, a lot of pictures, updating constantly" from RSS feeds and websites. Read on for a side-by-side comparison and our assessment.

The New York Times just released an interesting new tool that allows users to filter articles from the newspaper's website by tags and keywords and turn them into custom feeds. While developers could already build similar tools on top of the paper's Article Search API and TimesTags API, the new Custom Times Feeds give everybody the ability to create persistent searches based on their personal preferences.

In an email today, Lazyfeed cofounder and CEO Ethan Gahng informed us that the RSS reader is now supporting both RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub protocols, allowing for real-time integration of Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, and Feedburner content.

"Our internal tests show that the service has actually become significantly faster," Gahng wrote. "Now some content from as recent as several seconds ago is being notified through Lazyfeed."