Over the past months or maybe even years the debate on the death of RSS has sometimes been vivid. Everyone has an opinion and it's time for me to have my say, I may be biased as our Yabot service heavily rely on RSS feeds but I think I can add a new perspective to the debate.
In his blog
Kent Newsome says that RSS feeds are not updated quickly enough making them less relevant. They are also controlled by the publisher and not by the reader as the "new Internet order" would have it.
ZDNet blogger
Sam Diaz argues that RSS has become obsolete as there are much better news services today, such as Yahoo News and Google News.
Yes, I agree that the RSS-reader has never been accepted by the user public. Despite most browsers' natively supporting RSS today (even Internet Explorer) you do not really view RSS feeds that way. One reason being that services such as Google News and Yahoo News are filtering news and promoting the relevant stories making RSS feeds easier to consume. But most importantly we cannot expect users to find, subscribe to and filter the vast amount of RSS feeds available.
But, saying that RSS should be killed or at least die is going to far. RSS is a form of XML and XML is a structured format predominantly used for machine-to-machine transfer of information and for APIs (Application Programme Interfaces).
An RSS feed is a superior way for publishers to select what to share and when to share it. A way for publishers to make their content visible and available to others. As long as we agree that content should be free (as in Libra) and that a broad distribution of it is essential for success we shouldn't kill anything that extends the reach of content. That is why RSS will continue to be an essential part of content distribution and why it will continue to live.
