“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.”, says Steve Gillmor in his Techcrunch post titled “Rest in Peace, RSS“.
While most commenters see his rant as a sign of the old man slowly losing his mind, it is also a sign of another thing: filter failure. Filter failure is what causes information overload and was also the topic of Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote in NYC, which you can watch below:
So what’s happening here?
RSS readers are partially recreating the conditions which make reading email such a chore. They require you to check them every so often, read all the messages and make sure that the number of unread messages goes down to zero and stays there! But it never does. Every time you check your reader, there are new messages waiting and demanding your attention, even though they don’t really need it. Posts worth reading are lost among dozens which are not. After a while you start drowning in a flood of content you’re not interested in, you become overloaded and you don’t even bother unsubscribing from the feeds, you just stop checking your RSS reader altogether.
You switch over to twitter where all the links you see are already pre-filtered by other people. Think about it – in order for a link to end up in your Twitter stream, somebody must have already read the article and decided it was worth sharing. In addition to this, your previous experience tells you whose links are worth clicking and whose not. And yes, there is a new lump of messages waiting for you every time you log into Twitter and their number is very likely to be overwhelming, but Twitter has no “unread count” which would force you to check every single tweet and doesn’t have a “mark all as read” button which would make you feel like you were missing something every time you used it. It allows you to check as many messages as you want to and doesn’t demand anything from you.
Or as Stephen Baker puts it:
On Twitter, each of us can recommend a link. If you have 500 followers, maybe 50 of them see it. Maybe five of them take a look. Let’s say two appreciate it. The other three may be less likely to open your links in the future. Maybe one will “unfollow” you. But that’s ok. Each of us finds our own audience. But the key is that there’s little guilt or obligation associated with Twitter. It’s a managed pool of serendipity.
In some cases filters alone are no longer enough to avoid information overload. We also need a way of ignoring what can safely be ignored.
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I spent a lot of time a year and a half ago searching for a good RSS ”flow“ reader. Something that would let me mark some feeds as important (and then display a unread count), and let all other feeds in pools of “take a look at that if you fancy a read”. The only reader i found that met that description was an experiment by a lone developer, and it was left unmaintained. I finally used Google Reader, only to abandon it. At that time, i started using Twitter.
This summer, i finally pulled the plug on Google Reader. I don’t know if RSS is dead, but old RSS readers are.
One other thing that killed RSS readers for me: the awesomebar in Firefox 3. When i want to check out a webcomic such as Girls With Slingshots, Questionable Content, xkcd or Dinosaur Comics, i type Ctrl+L (focus the address bar), then “gws”, “ques”, “xk” or “dino”, Tab key, Enter. It’s quick. RSS reader relieved us of the hassle of checking each site. Except that sometimes checking a site is NOT an hassle, it’s a pleasure. And if the browser makes it awfully easy to get to that site, the advantages of RSS readers become thinner.
I guess RSS readers are still great for information junkies, journalists or researchers who need to monitor some RSS-enabled sources of information and publications.
I still use Google Reader, but only for lesser known blogs that publish quality content in long(ish) intervals. It just doesn’t make sense to subscribe to anything popular because those links get (re)twitted and submitted to reddit/hacker news so often, you come across them several times anyway. And for anything high volume it’s better to just let other people do the filtering for me. :)