I’ve been deploying REST/RDF solutions since 2004 (and playing with it years earlier than that). Neither part was rocket science, but both required looking at typical engineering problems in a holistic way in which the impact of change over both time and space were accommodated up front. You get an amazing amount of stuff “for free” (as in beer) with such an architectural style, so I had no problem at all paying Winer’s “RDF tax”.

And beware profiles. LDBP is not a protocol, it’s a conformance statement on implementations and as such is meaningless to developers of client software.

I guess RSS should (must?) be replaced by something equally useful but PUSH style, XMPP is best candidate IMHO. Nowadays there are one or several XMPP libraries for each language and is really easy to code a piece of software that subscribes to a pub/sub account.

Let’s make this evolve ourselves before some 2.0 BigBangBoomBubble Company “invents” something to subscribe to “news feeds and site updates” and do it with their own propietary protocol.

// business concerns
IMO the Twitters and browser vendors et al. “downsized” their support for RSS as consuming feeds takes people away from the sites that make their money on advertising and analytics but they cannot afford to drop support for RSS altogether as it remains the de facto standard protocol for describing and transporting media across the Internet.

There is a rather recent blog article from the founder of WordPress and he explains they serve 7.5 million RSS feeds every week. And that’s just WordPress. If RSS goes away somebody has to reinvent blogging. Ain’t a gonna happen.

// usage concerns
IMO the perception that the general public rejected RSS is a matter of perception. What I observed from day one was there very few opportunities for the general public to write RSS. Most RSS generators were crippleware written by script kiddies that could and would only generate title, link and description, only a few even supported enclosures and fewer yet supported Media RSS.

Add the fact that NOBODY supported the entire specification or Media RSS and all anybody could get (in general) was lame title, link and description so branding suffered as did a lot of other usability concerns.

I have been developing an RSS CMS that supports the entire 2.0 specification including Media RSS.

RSS itself continues to be extensible and despite the emergence of JSON the use of RSS remains invaluable to web developers and publishers as JSON is not readable and JSON naming is not standardized. Hence, integration of services using JSON requires each developer to have a person-to-person conversation with one another to agree how their code should be written. JSON is therefor only useful on a 1:1 basis (loosely speaking that is as there are always exceptions to the norm) whereas RSS remains 1:x (many)

I have bet the farm believing the emerging era of connected TV will result in a resurgence of “channels” as RSS remains the perfect format for TV guides as well as serving video in real-time using cloud services. Code to parse RSS is everywhere and can be copied and pasted by the neophytes.

IMO HTML5 will also help bring a resurgence of RSS too as XSLT(ransformation) 2.0 to HTML5 is becoming supported by the modern browsers such as Chrome and others.

RSS may remain embedded into the stack and not all that visible on the UI but RSS itself is not going away anytime soon as there are too many valuable uses for RSS.

But Safari supposedly still has RSS support too. http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html – So I’d presume it’s really just a usability blunder in Firefox and Chrome.

(Nice tip on Twitter though. Could never be bothered, and gave up when I couldn’t find any RSS feed. To me it always seemed like walled garden or anti-open-web syndrome.)

But…

Two simple reasons why RSS is dying:

1. Civillians (that is people who use Facebook etc. and don’t really care about technology) never really used RSS. In all of my mass-market work over the years we never saw either demand nor, when offered, adoption of the RSS feed model by ordinary people. I know it’s hard to imagine that RSS is “too hard” when it’s not really that hard to set up a reader and feeds…but in a world where people don’t (and soon won’t need to) understand files vs. folders vs. programs, an RSS reader is just too nerdy.

2. Money. While various ads are sometimes stuffed awkwardly into my RSS feeds, on the professional side (as in my work that sometimes involves online advertising) they never really worked and the performance – as compared to other options like search or – heaven forbid – web site display – was just never even close. People who are consuming content via RSS are, perhaps, too focused on the content and perhaps unwilling to trade clicks or other advertiser-desirable behavior for access to free content. In short, in an industry that is highly dependent on ad revenue, any technology that shows no proclivity to increase that revenue is going to fade away. Even if it’s awesome.

It seems that there is little I can do as a user of a site that does drops RSS support. After all, I (usually) don’t pay (directly) for content and could get my information somewhere else. Any bright ideas on this?

Thank you for the article, I’m glad to see people writing about this.