Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Ron S. Doyle, a Denver-based freelance writer and creative director at Waterday Media. — Michelle R.
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On July 1, Google Reader will shut down, releasing several million users into the wilds of the Interwebs, all of whom are expected to go searching for a suitable replacement to their beloved RSS reader. Scrappy startups like Feedly and NewsBlur, well-established companies like NetVibes, Flipboard, and Reddit, and even members of the web gentry like Digg, AOL, and Facebook are scrambling to make sure their refugee camps, er, RSS reader apps, are prepared for the massive influx of new users. Oh golly gee whiz, what an exciting day!
Or not. You see, millions of those users weren’t using Google Reader anyway. I think they’re never coming back. [Cue the crickets!]
More importantly, perhaps they shouldn’t come back, because modern RSS is broken. And maybe it’s time for bloggers to realize the same and ditch “Really Simple Syndication” once and for all.
Who Killed Google Reader?
Officially, Google decided to axe Google Reader due to declining use and a company-wide focus on its essential core products. You know, like self-driving cars, superfluous social media sites, magic glasses, and a string of wifi balloons that encircles the southern hemisphere. Only the essentials!
There are countless other hypotheses behind Reader’s demise, from blaming Google+ to saying that it was murdered in self defense.
But really, you killed Reader. In the conservatory, with the candlestick. And I think I have a clue why! (See what I did there?)
Google Reader worked like a firehose spraying into a filing cabinet. For example, perhaps you enthusiastically subscribed to every 2013 Blogathon participant. So easy, thanks RSS! Thanks Google Reader! But then you skipped reading for one long weekend — curse you, Flag Day— and woke up on Monday morning with almost 900 unread articles in your inbox. Soon, the “999+ unread” indicator made you feel poisoned, unproductive and insane, so you just stopped visiting.
You retreated to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and even Tumblr, where folks already filtered and vetted the best stuff for you. And you even clicked about aimlessly, because dammit, that’s part of what makes the web so much fun. When you found things that interested you, you saved them with Evernote or Pocket or Paper.li for reading later. Before long, you didn’t miss Google Reader at all.
But there’s another big reason why you gave Reader the boot, er, candlestick:
Bloggers Have Ruined the RSS Feed
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) emulates the newspaper business model of column syndication. Syndication allowed great articles and columns to be read around the world in different newspapers. Similarly, the RSS reader is intended as a digital newspaper, a compilation of articles from around the web. But, unlike the newspaper model, RSS is completely free—and bloggers have, over time, discovered its many flaws:
- RSS feeds hurt your total pageviews because subscribers don’t need to visit your site
- RSS feeds hinder pay-per-click ad revenue, which is correlated to pageviews
- RSS feeds make content theft (“scraping”) extremely easy
- RSS subscribers are hard to count
- RSS subscribers are even harder to track—it’s almost impossible to know who read what when
Don’t believe me? Likely due to the reasons above, Facebook and Twitter killed their RSS feeds this summer.
Meanwhile, many bloggers have tried to compensate for RSS’s shortcomings by displaying only article excerpts in their RSS feeds, which forces subscribers to visit their sites. As a web developer I have recommended this method to countless clients and as a blogger I’ve done it myself—but it totally contradicts the intended nature of RSS. Imagine opening up a copy of the Sunday Chicago Tribune, reading the first paragraph of an article, then finding a note that says “To read the rest of this article, please buy a copy of the Sunday New York Times.” Ack!
So, there you have it: Google Reader died of neglect and RSS is dying from abuse. [Cue the sorrowful violin music!]
RSS is dead. Long live RSS!
Yikes, that last section was a bummer. Let’s turn that frown into lemonade! Despite bloviations to the contrary, RSS probably isn’t going anywhere for a while. So, what should we do to fix it?
I’ll start:
- Podcasts are thriving and rely heavily on RSS. Perhaps RSS feeds should focus on packaged content like podcasts.
- RSS subscribers should be shifted to email newsletters, where content curation can soothe the firehose blues.
- Filters can limit what content adds to the RSS feed; bloggers could syndicate only certain parts of their content.
What else could improve the way RSS works? How does your RSS feed help or hurt your blog right now? And are you going to miss Google Reader?
Ron S. Doyle is a freelance writer and the creative director of Waterday Media, a boutique media strategy, web design & development company in Denver. For more about Ron, find him on Twitter.
[This is post is written by a sponsor of WordCount: Freelancing in the Digital Age. The sponsor provides products or services to this blog.]
You mention folks wandering aimlessly on social media sites and saving items they want to read later. Yet there seems to be no explanation here as to how someone is to read a blog regularly and not miss content. I am not going to subscribe to every blog I read by email. I don’t want that many emails and I’m not sure who would.
RSS feeds are an improvement over what we were doing… bookmarking a site and going to it daily to see if something new appeared.
Side Note: If someone asks me to click over from the RSS feed I stop reading them. I know a lot of other bloggers who feel the same.
One option is to use an app like Flipboard – you can add a blog to your Flipboard account so when you use Flipboard it’s there for you to read or skip depending on what you feel like reading that day.
Michelle
Aye, there’s the rub!
As Michelle suggested, Flipboard is a good start. If you prefer to scroll through one blog’s content all at once (versus a mosaic of articles from many sources) Pulse or Google Currents are pretty great.
Personally, I like visiting actual websites instead of digging through plain text articles. The latter feels like reading email, which I spent far too much time doing already.
For many years—when I’m in the mood to keep up—I’ve used this method:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2009/05/kill_your_rss_reader.html
Basically, the blog post above suggests you create folders of your favorite blogs, then open them up simultaneously in browser tabs. It takes a long time to load—I start the process, leave to eat breakfast, and come back when it’s done. But, once loaded, it’s super easy to tab through all of your favorite blogs.
Ron
Maybe this all depends on how many you read. I have 166 subscriptions right now in Reader. I think if I loaded that many tabs on internet explorer it might explode. 🙂
I will look into Flipboard. Right now my first backup was to hop over to Feedly.
If I loaded that may tabs onto Chrome my head would explode too!
Michelle
Ron: I wonder if Evernote’s come up with an add-on that does something like that.
Michelle
The reason for killing Google Reader makes more sense to me now, so thanks for provoking my brain….Er, … for the thought-provoking article.
Such a great post! I’m using Feedly simply to read blog posts – because I’m a blogger, and because if they’re in my inbox I delete them because I have so many emails. With Feedly I can just go in when I have a spare hour to read, so I find it convenient. But the population at large probably never would use it – far more useful for them to have only the option to subscribe to emails. Shall definitely scrub my RSS icon off the blog!
It’s such a hard decision, isn’t it? All the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) removed their handy-dandy “Subscribe to RSS” icon a few years ago. That’s a clear sign that most folks don’t use it.
Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it, I’m enjoying feedly. I would never put all those blogs and alerts in my email! That would be completely overwhelming. It’s not clear to me what advantage a Google Currents or Pulse would give me.
I also don’t have time to explore and set up lots of cutting edge technology.
Maybe it’s because I have somewhat of a “niche” blog, but based on feedburner statistics it appears about 1/3 of my readership is using feeds. Since I’m not trying to make money off of ads, I don’t need to drive people to my blog by only putting half the post in the feed. I am just happy that people are reading what I write! And they know how to find me if they have questions…
Yes! If the primary goal is spreading your message—and a stats-obsessed ego or ad revenue goals don’t get in the way—RSS is still fantastic.
Your article made my heart sink lower than the day I got the notice that Google Reader was going bye-bye.
I don’t know that I could live without RSS. I’m on Feedly now and I love it. I personally think it’s genius. I’m subscribed to over 200 feeds and there is absolutely no way I would ever dream of going to each of those sites individually every day. It would be a time consuming nightmare! Likewise, I refuse to subscribe to anything via email because that’s reserved for correspondence and it get’s messy enough with only that.
I like having everything aggregated into one place so I can get to it quickly and easily. With feeds I can skim through an entire day or weeks worth of new content, skip the boring stuff and get straight to reading what I think is interesting. I can devour an insane amount of content that way- fast! Not to mention RSS keeps everything neatly organized by topic.
I’m no wuss to be scared off by a high unread thread count. I can defeat it with a single click when I’ve read my fill. I also don’t need someone else to screen my content and tell me what’s interesting. I’m no sheep.
It’s crazy to me that people are still clicking around aimlessly, waiting for pages to load and all that crap. It’s so inefficient! No thanks! If a page doesn’t have RSS, I’m not reading it.
I agree that from the bloggers side it’s not so great, missing pageviews and all that. With pageviews being the currency of the internet, you got me there, it’s bad. But maybe we should work on fixing that problem rather than scrapping the whole RSS idea entirely.