Is RSS Dead?

RSS aka Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication - the standard web format has been with us since 1999 when it was developed by Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha at Netscape - two engineers working at Netscape. The first version that went out to public was 0.9 and since then it's evolved a lot. The major drive to adoption of RSS came when Google decided to launch the Google Reader in 2005 - the service that would let you collect feeds from various sources and then read them at a single place. Today Google announced that they're killing the Google Reader because though the program has loyal audience, the usage has declined significantly over the past few months.

RSS solved one major problem for users - they no longer had to log on to each website to read the latest content. Google Reader, through RSS feeds offered a single place where people could get content delivered from their favorite sources at a single place - which provide to be a great time saver.

The news of Google shutting down their RSS reader service came as a shocker to the loyal followers of the service and I see debates mushrooming on the Internet whether the RSS format is dead? Technically, the RSS files are basically plain-text files with the XML formatting. The format even gave birth to a several small products called as 'feed readers' - on desktops, mobiles and tablets.

I'm aware that shutting down of Google Reader service cannot be equated with the death of RSS. However, it could just be the start of the doom for RSS. Would love to have your thoughts on whether RSS is dead?

Replies

Kaustubh Katdare

Am I the only one who's thinking about RSS? No comments on Google reader closing down either? 😔
durga ch

oh! there is an online petition already running w.r.t not to close google readers.
But I am not sure if RSS would die only because google reader is dying.
GOogle has been getting rid of their redundant services always, and its unfortunate they found reader to be so.
Abhishek Rawal

I don't understand why Google scrapped "Google reader".
There are many people I know were still using Google reader.If Google don't wanna engage in further development of Greader,then fine !
They should rather announce it as "Opensource" & let Opensource community handle the further development of it.
Kaustubh Katdare

..because Google says that the usage declined over the last few months. It's likely to happen. The world is moving to apps (which is basically smaller version of software we installed on desktop) and browsers and traditional services will soon become redundant. There are several options available to Google News.
babumoshaaye

You're right. News apps like Pulse, Flipboard have become quite popular among users in both Android and iOS devices. Though these apps integrate with RSS subscriptions, RSS probably won't die out. New innovative ways of providing news would come up layered upon RSS feeds.
Ankita Katdare
It’s time to say goodbye to your Google Reader account.

Here’s how to preserve your data from Reader: Follow this custom link to Google’s Takeout data export service. Alternatively, you can navigate to google.com/takeout, click the select services tab and then select Reader as the service you want to export. Your subscription data will be exported as an XML file and separate JSON files will be created with the following information:
- List of people that you follow
- List of people that follow you
- Items you have starred
- Items you have liked
- Items you have shared
- Items shared by people you follow
- Notes you have created
- Items with comments
Though the Reader service will shut down on July 1, you should have until July 15 to grab your data.

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Is RSS Dead?

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