The author had staved off from writing this article until this point where he was finally too sick and tired to hold it back.
I owe it to myself to put forward some good suggestions and will make it my aim to do so in due time
RSS Is
DyingBeing Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried
RSS makes it possible for me to check 100s of sites a day. I only actually implicitly go
and read two, everything else goes through the RSS reader. If I didn’t have RSS then I wouldn’t bother keeping
an eye on that many sites in the first place. Because me and you—dear technical readers—don’t have to suffer
that routine anymore, it’s not reason that everybody else should. Bringing all the news updates straight to the
user every day is a great killer feature that vendors should be waving from the fronts of their home pages! Browser
vendors talk about their software helping users get the most out of the great ’Web; right next to “browsing”,
RSS should be the second most important feature of browsers!
This symbol gives absolutely zero clue as to why it is present, what functionality it represents and how the user is
supposed to use it.
The browser RSS button is the worst piece of UI since 2004.
If RSS isn’t saved now, if browser vendors don’t realise the potential of RSS to save users a whole bunch of
time and make the web better for them, then the alternative is that I will have to have a Facebook account,
or a Twitter account, or some such corporate-controlled identity, where I have to “Like” or
“Follow” every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then have to deal with the privacy
violations and problems related with corporate-owned identity owning a list of every website I’m interested in
(and wanting to monetise that list), and they, and every website I’m interested in, knowing every other website
I’m interested in following, and then I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity every day
in order to find out what’s new on other websites, whilst I’m advertised to, because they are only interested in
making the biggest and the best walled garden that I can’t leave.
If RSS dies, we lose the ability to read in private
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