RSS: A Powerful Tool for Filtering Content

A few new media types, chief among them Steve Gillmor, have decided that RSS is dead. The argument is that they can just use social media like Facebook and Twitter as the sources of their content. Twitter is indeed a great place to find links to things, and Facebook has pretty aggressively moved towards a more Twitter-like experience lately.

But to think that links put up by people you connect with on social networks can replace RSS is simply absurd, and I'm glad to see that more and more people are saying so.

To begin with, most websites with continually updating content--like blogs--have RSS feeds but do not have equivalent Twitter accounts to tweet links to their latest updates. This is changing of course, but at the very least it means that one of the functions of RSS--to alert the user when there's a new update--cannot entirely be replaced just yet.

Moreover, what RSS does is different, and useful in ways that social media is not. Take a blog that does have a Twitter account. If I am not paying attention to my Twitter stream when a link to the latest update is tweeted, then I could easily miss it (especially if you follow hundreds of other people on Twitter, as I do). If you go to their Twitter account directly to check, then you've saved no more effort than it would have taken to go to the blog directly and see if there are any updates.

RSS brings updates to you. If you are not there the moment that the feed updates, it does not matter; it will remain unread to alert you of its existence until you become aware of it. Moreover, most feeds will bring the content to you in its entirety; you won't even have to leave your reader account to see it.

I have embraced Twitter, Facebook, and many other social media for finding content. But Google Reader remains my window to the web. I currently have 263 subscriptions--that's 263 sources of content that I don't have to waste any time checking on when they haven't updated; their updates come to me. Moreover, when there are people on Twitter whose tweets I want to be sure not to miss, I subscribe to their RSS feed!

It is fashionable among a certain crowd to declare things dead once they are no longer shiny and new to early adopters. Links are dead, blogs are dead, and now RSS is dead.

Yet the fact remains that links are as widespread as ever (perhaps more so if you count the shortened URLs on Twitter), social media feeds often are pointing to blog posts, and people are still using RSS to be able to consume more content in a lot less time. Just because the tools aren't as new as they once were doesn't make them any less useful. If anything, their uses are increasing as the ecosystem expands and evolves.