Long live RSS! We last looked at open source RSS reader options in 2013, and it's time for an update.

And as a publisher, it's a simple format that most any publishing software I already use will support out of the box, letting me reach more people and easily distribute many types of documents. There is no other easy was for me as a consumer to read a wide variety of publications, formatted in a client of my choosing, where I am virtually guaranteed to see every item that is published, while simultaneously not being shown a bunch of articles I have already read. The truth is, RSS and related feed formats are just more versatile than anything in wide usage that has attempted to replace it.

(Is it any wonder that vinyl album sales just hit a 25-year peak last year?) One only has to look at the success of online feed reader site Feedly to understand that there's still definitely a market for RSS readers. The target audience for a technology might change a bit, and the tools people use to consume the technology might change, too.īut RSS is no more gone than email, JavaScript, SQL databases, the command line, or any number of other technologies that various people told me more than a decade ago had numbered days.

But old technologies never really die just because new technologies come along, particularly if the new technology does not perfectly replicate all of the use cases of the old one. When Google Reader was discontinued four years ago, many 'technology experts' called it the end of RSS feeds.Īnd it's true that for some people, social media and other aggregation tools are filling a need that feed readers for RSS, Atom, and other syndication formats once served.

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