What? RSS is dead? Again?

Steve Rubel wrote:

The decade is coming to an end. And with it, so has the era of feeds too faded - though you can argue it never got off the ground. Even with real-time technologies like pubsubhubbub, RSS today feels slow and it's clear its best days are behind it. Feed reading, like blogging, feels "very 2005." I wasn't convinced until recently, however.

You could say that I'm not convinced yet, either. Still I wouldn't know what I would do without RSS.

It seems a lot of out technologies are only useful for people who use a computer all the time. A person who isn't sitting behind his computer will have hard time writing tweets. Yes, you can use a fancy phone, that lets you write a tweet. But not everyone has that kind of phone.

The same problem happens with feeds. I read a lot of blogs, but most people I know will just go the website to read the stuff they care about. In that same place they can also interact with the community, by adding comments or liking and sharing posts. This is harder (or impossible) with RSS.

About a month ago people were talking about "pushing RSS down the stack". I would say that there is more of an opportunity in building applications and services on top of RSS. And again on top of those applications and services. RSS is and always was a protocol on top of HTTP.

There is room for creating applications that will help and you read your feeds. We need a better way of creating conversations outside of it. We need a protocol for writing and reading comments, liking and sharing posts inside RSS, that is about as simple as RSS itself is. Link to the comment form of the article and let applications post comments in a programmatic way using REST. The same could be done with liking.

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Twitter, I don't care anymore

I have had an account with Twitter now, for almost three years. According to When did you join twitter?, I joined twitter over two years and nine months ago. Lately I'm wondering if it's useful for anything. It's a lousy news reader, it's a terrible communication medium and the mechanics are all in one company.

There is no way for me to send messages to the people I would like to send messages. Let's say this is the same group of people that I would send SMS messages to. These aren't on Twitter and probably never will be. They tried it and left it, never to return. These are the kind of people that don't have fancy phones, with fancy apps, that allow them to use Twitter in a useful way.

Another thing is that Twitter is not private enough for these people. They don't care about sharing there personal life on a website, that can be read by anybody.

For many messages (or conversations) 140 characters is just not enough. I don't want to edit my messages until it fits, or split it over multiple messages. I want to write what I need and send it. I should be able to make the message as long as it needs to be.

It feels like such a waste to write posts like this, but it's how I feel about Twitter at the moment. I just don't care about it.

UPDATE: And as you can read, I also don't care about writing a good post.

RSS feeds are not a problem anymore

For the last few months I was using Plagger to read RSS feeds. These feeds would be downloaded and send as e-mail to my gmail account. There was not a lot wrong with this. But as always there was a better way.

A few days ago I changed Plagger to check twice a day. Once around 9:00 when I arrive at work and once at around 19:00, which is when I'm back home and sitting behind my computer.

This change leaves a lot a time for actual work and have at least a bit to read.

Plagger: a platform for feeds

While I was reading the Perl planet I found a link to a project called Plagger. It's system for creating, changing and publishing feeds.

To create a new 'program', you need to make a config file. The example directory includes a bloglines2gmail config and a config for a 'planet' aggregator. Both are less than twenty lines of configuration. It's really easy to create your own feeds with this.

Be sure to check out the presentations on the website, for an explaination of Plagger (the documentation is a bit light).

Problem with feeds

One of the problems with feeds (RSS, Atom, or something) is that most of the explaination is about XML and the technology behind it and not about the problem it solves.

I would be better if explanations about feeds wouldn't talk about XML or other technology parts, when explaining it to users.

This Delicous Tool is pretty cool

At lifehacker I came across this incredible tool for del.icio.us. It is called the del.icio.us Direc.tor. It a combination of webapp and del.icio.us API and Ajax.

This probably is one of the steps were going to see on the web, web applications that are written over webbased apis. Web based tools with nice user friendly clean interfaces that do something that's different enough from the actual data provider website.

Very impressive. We need more of this.

A Webmail To RSS tool

At my school we now have to use a webmail client. And I don't like it. Because it is a lot of work to open up the page, enter a password, look over the messages and find nothing new.

I use Liferea as my RSS Feed Reader and it now uses a program to get a feed of the messages. The program downloads the webpage with the messages and then generates a simple rss2.0 feed from that.

If I have cleaned up the sourcecode I will put it on my webpage as free software. This will solve some real problems some students have with the e-mail. It will at least solve some of the problems.

Bugfixing and rss feed

After some bugfixing, I now have the permalinks working right. I also added an RSS2.0 feed. I'm not yet sure if it's the way I like it, or that's correct. But it's a test so.