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This is my feeling as well. RSS is alive and kicking as a technology, I still use it as a core technology for a product I'm building. But, consuming raw feeds in a reader is what's dead or at least endangered. That experience has now moved to Twitter and Facebook where we rely on our influencers to feed the news consumption and which has been cut off from outside development opportunities.


What bugs many of us feed reader users, though, is that Twitter and Facebook (as well as most other wall or stream based content aggregations) are very bad at information management.

One thing is the singal-to-noise ratio, but another is the issue of infrequently updated content. Anybody that posts only once a month will get buried on any normal Twitter or Facebook feed. With RSS you can easily keep track of infrequent posters even if you have high-volume feeds in your reader.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Facebook had an optional "power user" mode where you get a view that is not unlike a file browser, allowing you to conditionally hide/remove/manage parts of the information flow. Maybe I could be tempted by that.

But then again, I'm no usability expert. Maybe I'm just using reality wrong.


I think reality means that the Facebook business is based on stuffing as much near-relevant garbage at you as possible, which is much harder over RSS.


I can understand that, I've spent many hours of my life getting that unread count down, or on the positive side seeing a new item for a favorite feed. Twitter liberated the guilt part, but has not filled the hole of knowing when something important is new.


I found it quite funny that I read your comment after finding the HN stories in my RSS feed on Feedly.




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