My Problem with RSS

I found myself shak­ing my head in agree­ment quite often with this Techcrunch post about the “death of RSS.”

If RSS does­n’t make it, I’ll lay the blame at Google’s dig­i­tal feet. They came so close to so many good, plat­form-wor­thy ideas with Google Read­er. Shared items with com­ments? Tum­blr, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I’ve felt all along that Google just has no idea how to make their prod­ucts social. You can’t even plug Google Read­er into Tum­blr and get it to ren­der prop­er­ly. I went from shar­ing and com­ment­ing on things in my read­er to bare­ly both­er­ing to favorite any­thing in the last year or so.

RSS may have its short­com­ings, but it’s far more effi­cient for some­one like me who’s con­stant­ly read­ing the web. It offers bet­ter orga­ni­za­tion than either Twit­ter or Face­book. It makes it eas­i­er to eval­u­ate the val­ue of the infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed. I don’t need to click through to read any­thing on most blogs, which is a tremen­dous help. Sure, that does­n’t help the pub­lish­ers and con­tent cre­ators hit their goals, but if you’re cre­at­ing good con­tent, peo­ple will engage it. RSS, for my mon­ey, is still the best way to deliv­er it to an audi­ence that’s con­sum­ing the most content.

I’d be sad to see it go. It’s dif­fi­cult enough to dis­cov­er reli­able sources as it stands now. If you watch Rick Sanchez I think you’ll agree that Face­book and Twit­ter aren’t improv­ing the way we con­sume news by any stretch.