Wednesday, September 30, 2009

RSS is dead? ugh, enough already!

So I keep hearing this chatter about how RSS is dying. First time I heard it was back in May from Steve Gillmor over at TechCrunchIT. Then it was followed by Sam Diaz over at ZDNet. And finally a few days ago, Chris Dixon, blogged about the same thing. For some reason or another this picked at me.

RSS is not dying! Or at least not anytime soon. A lot of those authors are assuming that Twitter or social networks or some combination will kill RSS. Now, I've been using RSS for over three years now. My subscription list has grown from a few sites to maybe 60-70 now. Some update once an hour, once a day, or once a month at best. Because of this compilation this has become my daily news source. Its tailored by the interests that I have (venture capitalism, entrepreneurship, technology, cleantech, etc) and by the sources that I respect enough to get the information from. If I tried to somehow manage to use Twitter to get all this information, I probably could it. However, it would involve never getting offline or having to skip out on a lot of the information. The simple idea of trying to drink out of the fire hydrogen that is twitter would be unbearable! I can leave my computer for 30 minutes and come back with 50 new tweets (and I only follow 90-100 individuals with no publications). How could I possibly manage to understand what areas of interest to read first? Who/what is more relevant? I could not!

Now, twitter is planning on changing this up by adding groups, lists, etc. Its not enough, I cannot find enough ways to parse my interests to make it manageable and I'm a big nerd about it! I'm not exactly sure how the everyday manager, consultant, employee, or human being would feel about it, but I'm sure they already don't have the time in the day to deal with something like this. Its easier to come back into Google Reader and catch up with what you missed for the day. Your social networks definitely provide interesting additional content to read, but as it stands for me now, its not providing enough of my daily intake :)

Of course, I could be completely wrong, but hey, there's more than one way to skin a cat!