Interesting follow-on to the discussion from last week about the impending demise of feeds.
Stay N Alive: Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely
I briefly tried the feeds on both Facebook and Twitter years ago, but neither really worked for me, too noisy and too many.
There’s an interesting nugget in this post though.
However, as more and more sites move away from RSS, quite literally, in favor of these proprietary APIs I fear RSS could in fact be dying, not only as a subscription interface, but as a protocol in general.
This makes a lot of sense to me, since if you find that apps like Flipboard and Feedly are banging on your feeds, why not bring them into your fold by forcing them to build to your API vs. using an open standard.
Maybe this is just more Chicken Little stuff, but there’s a lot of it going around as you watch the appization of the intertubes.
Thoughts?
Facebook and Twitter aren’t typical of other sites. Their bread and butter might be users retweeting content their friends have pushed their way, but somewhere there are ‘editors/promoters/talent scouts’ looking around the outer web to identify fresh content to put into the social ecosystem.
Bummer. RSS fits a consumption pattern for me that Twitter just doesn’t meet. Perhaps I’m just doin it rong. And FB feeds as a source for useful information? The mind recoils. I’m probably going to be one of those people who will hang on to Google Reader until they disable the service or until my last feed stops updating. Sad. Like the dwindling of UseNet. 🙁
I’m not suggesting that the loss of FB and Twitter feeds is anything other than symbolic. It would be a very sad day to see real content providers begin to move away from feeds to APIs for consuming their data though.
I’ll be hanging onto Reader too. We’ll be an army of two to the end.
Sure. It’s not a good sign though.