Is now the time to ditch your RSS feed? Possibly.

That’s what Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng suggests. “RSS was essentially created so that Internet users could stay up-to-date with every single posting made on a particular website,” she writes. “This was, of course, back in the day when every site on earth didn’t post 150 new stories per day, and your friend’s blog feed didn’t contain 60 cross-posted Twitter musings to crowd out the one real post per week.” We’re with her. Despite the fact that we follow a lot of news, keeping up with the grindy nature of an RSS feed is an exercise in force-feeding, and one a lot of people simply don’t have time for. In fact, just 6 percent of Internet users use RSS regularly, and somehow the other 94 percent don’t miss out on too much. We love our RSS readers, but if you choose to follow us on Twitter instead, we totally understand. Because we go months without actually checking into Google Reader, and days without checking into Pulse, because we already caught the important stuff on Twitter already. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

It wouldn’t make you smarter, happier, worth more, have more friends, get laid more often, go to heaven or become a saint. Reading every story is a meaningless concept.
RSS co-inventor Dave Winer • Discussing how the syndication technology has been interpreted all wrong by feed readers, specifically Google Reader. The programs are designed like e-mail programs, which has had the end effect of making it so you’re encouraged to read everything, like e-mail. Winer continues, saying that Twitter has essentially nailed down the news-reading model RSS was trying for. “Twitter found a way to put both the authoring tool and the reading tool on the home page. Had I cracked that nut in 2002,” he says, “Twitter might have happened a few years earlier.” source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 4 Comments • Permalink

As you might know about us at ShortFormBlog, we’re not against the occasional plug for something we really dig. And in this case, Feedly, which mashes up Google Reader into a very easy-to-read format, totally deserves it. Like other Web products we’ve liked in the past, such as Apture (who likes us back, apparently), it has this way of carrying itself like it the Internet should have always been this way. We like giving nods to cool things like this. Makes life easier – especially when it comes to tweeting links. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

04 Sep 2011 16:42