Has RSS saved the world yet?
posted by DL Byron on July 25, 2004
It’s been weeks since I’ve read how RSS was saving the world. Have we all been evangelized yet? According to the attendees in our blogging session, they were like, “what the?” Not only does RSS have the worst-name ever (should’ve been named PointCast or something), the attendees didn’t quite get it until Steve demonstrated it live. He showed how to subscribe to a feed and how fast a DDW blog post showed up in a feed reader. Oh yeah!
Now think about getting customized news posts from iTunes, virus protection software, or the corporate office, on your intranet. This will all happen when RSS is built into OS X and Windows. That’s coming. Until then, it’s our job to continue to evangelize. We’re not quite there yet.
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Comments
Aug 16 | Fireater said:
/me puts on devils advocate hat. Why is it some of the blogging world is so fasinated with rss/atom etc. RSS basically makes screenscraping easy.
I have never understood the fasination with it. Havent you people ever heard of csv files. Now without knowing a great deal about the formats I can do and probable have do exactly the same stuff with csv files, and god how long have they been around. Where I work we use csv files for a great deal of complicated data interchange between our corporate applications. Want some data from some corporate data stor, run an sql query, view it in a data grid etc. In fact excel has great data tools.
I personally think soap has far more potential than plain boring rss. Imagine having a desktop client with a nice interface for ummm ebay bookshops etc. An rss reader that is interactive rather than just a dumb client reading what its feed.
Maybe rss just needs to be more interactive, read a blog entry, and add a comment to it, search for similar articles etc all in the client.
Aug 19 | -b- said:
Agreed. After the rss newness wore off, I found it took me more time to read the news because I had so many damn feeds - I’m a designer, so I also like pretty pictures and not just text-only. I’d like my rss application to expire feeds after a set time. Maybe some do that?