Reading Continental drift by Jon Udell:
The web of the late 90s was a cornucopia of wonder, delight, and inspiration. So was the blogosophere (sic) of the early 2000s. I know a lot of us are nostalgic for those eras, and depressed about how things have turned out. The bad is really quite bad, and sometimes I feel like there’s no way forward.
Also recently on HN: Turn to RSS Feeds to Regain Control of the World Wide Web (too often Hacker News comments are even more interesting than the story).
There’s a good summary at the Wikipedia, with some notes on current usage (all negative, btw).
Summing up:
- RSS is not dead, but is not fashionable (and arguably, it has seen better times).
- Social media is hostile, and major sites such as Twitter and Facebook have removed (or reduced) their support; some of them never supported it.
- All major browsers have removed RSS support (IE still supports it out of the box; and Firefox, champion of the Open Web dropped support of RSS in Firefox 64).
- All the problems it had, are still there (probably for another post).
Although I like Udell post and his optimism because we still have the Internet, and despite how things are going and “we’ll figure it out”, I feel something must change if we want to get back to that cornucopia of wonder, delight, and inspiration (and I want the blogosphere back!).
As bonus: in defense of RSS by Seth Godin, written 10 years ago and updated just recently. Still as relevant now as it was back then, if not more.