I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS. While I do agree it's too complicated for the mainstream, for people who know what RSS is, I always though that it was clearly better than Twitter/Facebook. You have a lot more control with RSS feeds. I have over 100 feeds, there's some feeds where I truly care about the content and will always what to know when there's new content. There are other feeds where I might check them out in detail if I'm bored, but most likely I'll just skim through them. With twitter this kind of prioritization is simply not possible, there is only chronological order, and it's very likely that I would miss some of the stuff I care about.
Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content. With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as well.
For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.
[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative. Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]
I agree with the fact that RSS is not a good protocol. But as you said unfortunately there's no alternative. I guess what really surprised me is that people consider Twitter/Facebook an alternative to RSS.
the <cloud> element solves the problem of polling, it lets you subscribe to feed-updated notifications and read the feed only when it changes.
also, Atom has threading and RSS has some community efforts underway to make "replies" decentralized and aggregable (new word) http://xmlns.inreplyto.me/
Comments
I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS. While I do agree it's too complicated for the mainstream, for people who know what RSS is, I always though that it was clearly better than Twitter/Facebook. You have a lot more control with RSS feeds. I have over 100 feeds, there's some feeds where I truly care about the content and will always what to know when there's new content. There are other feeds where I might check them out in detail if I'm bored, but most likely I'll just skim through them. With twitter this kind of prioritization is simply not possible, there is only chronological order, and it's very likely that I would miss some of the stuff I care about.
I'm surprised that people here don't like RSS.
Actually I dislike RSS for purely technical reasons. As a protocol, it is a huge step back compared to the functionally somewhat comparable NNTP. All it gives you is a sliding window into the content provided by a publisher you have to poll in undefined intervals. If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic. If you poll too seldom, you are going to miss content. With NNTP, there was not only a push protocol, you could also easily request all new stuff since your last check. And you had a comment system built in as well.
For sure the inventors of Web 2.0 could have done better.
[edit]I am still using it, though, as there is no available alternative. Unfortunately, there are no real incentives to make something better.[/edit]
I agree with the fact that RSS is not a good protocol. But as you said unfortunately there's no alternative. I guess what really surprised me is that people consider Twitter/Facebook an alternative to RSS.
If you poll too often, you cause unnecessary traffic.
Conditional GET has been in WordPress for about eight years, and is supported by many of the other majors.
Ok, conditional GET mitigates the traffic problem, but the basic issue of using polling for what should be a push service in the first place remains.
the <cloud> element solves the problem of polling, it lets you subscribe to feed-updated notifications and read the feed only when it changes.
also, Atom has threading and RSS has some community efforts underway to make "replies" decentralized and aggregable (new word) http://xmlns.inreplyto.me/