GeekNights Monday - RSS and Google Reader

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, in light of Google Reader's death, we discuss why we've been saying for years that RSS is, at best, dying a slow death. We further discuss whether or not it's best to call the police on an agitated, aggressive homeless man, or to let him remain agitated and aggressive on his own. In the news, CISPA's passing the house gave us a nice list of who to never vote for again, baseball coding software couldn't account for a crazy thing that happened in a game, and acetaminophen may affect the brain in ways you didn't realize.

Also, Futurama was re-canceled, and GeekNights is going to Australia!

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Daikun

Tonight on GeekNights, in light of Google Reader's death, we discuss why we've been saying for years that RSS is, at best, dying a slow death.

Well, you should probably get rid of this, then.

Churba

Okay, Rolling the dice here, but I'm going to suggest that everybody who disagrees with Scrym are being called "Kids" at least once. This also marks the second time that an argument on the forums has been turned into an episode(rather than vice versa) that I recall - The last one was about monitors. I'll probably only listen to this next week, so someone who gets in first, tell me if I'm two for two.

Matt

Listened on my drive in to work. Thoughts:

1) You did the right thing calling the cops on the homeless guy. Don't feel guilty. If I was in your shoes, I'm not sure what I personally would have done. On one hand, I have a pretty hard-line stance about minimizing all possible interaction with police, but on the other hand, it's easy to put yourself in the shoes of the guy who got punched. If I was that dude, I would desperately want someone to call the cops.

As Scott said, it's not like the cops went Rodney King on him, they just went a little rough on him. The fact that he had calmed down by the time the cops got there is making you feel guilty, but you do realize that scenario is probably going to keep repeating itself, right? No, he's not going to wind up getting the psych help he needs, but NYC (wisely) does a very good job of making itself extremely unwelcoming to homeless people. I would not be surprised if he was "relocated."

In an ideal world, we would have something like the cartoon dog catcher. They could come sweep up the crazy bums in a big net w/o injuring them.

2) Amen to your anecdote about the challenges in coding data. I deal with this on a daily basis. Military kids right out of high school in charge of repairing million dollar equipment. Yes, we care about every bit of data relating to why it broke and all the details of how you tested it. No, they are not very good communicators.

3) I feel like I am the only person in the world who uses iGoogle. It's the sister product to Google Reader, and it's death was announced months earlier with almost zero public outcry. iGoogle allows you to arrange RSS feeds in dashboard-style blocks, and only displays the last 3-10 entries on a feed (customizable). If you have a lot of feeds, you can group the blocks into tabs. Each feed entry has an expandable [+] box to read more than just the headline.

I never used Google Reader specifically b/c the content is generated faster than I can read it. If I want to keep up with a fast-moving blog, I set iGoogle to show me the most recent 10 posts. Beyond that, oh well I missed it. If it's a rarely-updated site, most recent 3 posts will do. Takes up very little real estate in my tab, and it's obvious when a new post appears.

Rym

TL;DL version of why RSS is slowly dying.

1. Outcry about Google Reader death is about as widespread as Scott's Daft Punk mania: the people mourning it are a very small and vocal minority.

2. Aggregators can't easily monetize it, and even if they do, the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it.

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

4. The use cases of an effective RSS reader are complex, and with almost zero industry backing (how come there was almost nothing competing with Google Reader even at its peak?), there are very few people on earth with both the skill, the will, and the time to build a better reader.


TL;DR version of the above:

1. RSS readers are far less popular or used than you think.
2. No one is willing to invest in a better one: there's no money in it.
3. The OSS movement won't make one: it's too complex a problem to be solved well or easily requiring a real UI.

Cremlian

My wife used igoogle a lot and was super pissed it was being taken away. I didn't care.

Churba

I'm not saying anything is right or wrong about what you say, Rym. I'm simply noting that you have a pattern, like Cory Doctorow and women screwing over his main characters, or me pointing that out. When people disagree with you, you tend to group them together and call them kids. You know people are going to disagree with you, so I'm almost willing to bet you called them kids at least once. The rest is just a note and a request.

Rym

I really only call forumites kids. I also use that term to refer to any group of people I know who don't live in the same area I do.

So, the FRC people in Albany are collectively "kids." ;^)

Churba

Ah, this I didn't know - I haven't noted you doing it outside of what I mentioned, though I don't doubt you do it, I'm just not noticing it and I don't know why. Which vexes me more than I care to admit, though it doesn't come with that slight moment of stark terror that forgetting a word holds. I'm not exactly hanging out in the background of any FRC Albany group photos, either.

Rym

I think the Google Reader/RSS issue hits too close to home for the vocal minority who care about it. They feel betrayed by Google, and can't understand why their "awesome thing" is being killed. When someone like me says the thing they cared about so much was unpopular and, in my opinion, not useful, they take it personally.

Look at how much people flipped out when my opinion on The Avengers was "it was pretty good: I mostly enjoyed it, but it was't the greatest human feat of cinema in modern history, and the fight went on too long." They had too much invested in the movie, and thus took any negative statement about the movie personally.

It's what these ratchet kids do.

Matt

It's time to bury the ratchet.

Apreche

It's time to bury the ratchet.

Churba

Eh, while I don't explicitly agree that RSS is dying just yet, I agree with that much. I'm at best slightly bothered, because I have to go find a new RSS reader to sort out my feeds. Most of the people vocal about that are just annoyed at the requirement to change, more than anything to do with RSS's status of dead or not. I don't think I'm stunning you with the news that most people don't like change very much.

You were right about the Avengers. I don't know if I agreed or not at the time, I might not have seen it at that point, it's decent enough, enjoyable, and the fight could have been cut down a bit.

Dragonmaster Lou

1. Outcry about Google Reader death is about as widespread as Scott's Daft Punk mania: the people mourning it are a very small and vocal minority.

Fair enough... although a lot of that minority is pretty technically savvy. You and Scott are probably the only technically savvy people I know of who are complaining about it. I even have buddies who work at Google who hate the idea of it shutting down (they don't work on the Reader team, though).

2. Aggregators can't easily monetize it, and even if they do, the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it.

It depends. I could see an ad-supported aggregator model maybe working, if they get enough critical mass. I think the problem with Google Reader is that they didn't have enough of a critical mass that even with ads it wasn't quite as profitable for them as they would like.

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

4. The use cases of an effective RSS reader are complex, and with almost zero industry backing (how come there was almost nothing competing with Google Reader even at its peak?), there are very few people on earth with both the skill, the will, and the time to build a better reader.

I heard that the argument over no one competing with Google Reader at its peak was that it wasn't worth it as Google Reader was already an excellent product and had the 800 lb. gorilla that is Google backing it up. Basically, unless you are named Apple, Microsoft, or maybe (and this is a stretch) Yahoo, you have no chance to compete with Google and even those three are having a devilish time pulling it off. If those guys can't do it, what chance does a little guy have?

3. The OSS movement won't make one: it's too complex a problem to be solved well or easily requiring a real UI.

The OSS movement has already made one: Tiny Tiny RSS. I've heard good things about it, though I haven't had a chance to set it up yet.

Rym

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

But that's exactly why people like me stopped using RSS. I don't want a post telling me Penny Arcade or Dr. McNinja updated. I want the actual content in my reader. I stopped subscribing to any feed that didn't post full content to reader, and when I realized that almost no feeds did so, I stopped using RSS.

Dragonmaster Lou

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

But that's exactly why people like me stopped using RSS. I don't want a post telling me Penny Arcade or Dr. McNinja updated. I want the actual content in my reader. I stopped subscribing to any feed that didn't post full content to reader, and when I realized that almost no feeds did so, I stopped using RSS.

I guess our use cases for RSS differ slightly. While I also prefer having the entire content in the RSS reader itself, I have no problem with it merely being a way to notify me of when a site has been updated. In fact, I mostly use it in order to find out when a site has been updated as I find it much less annoying to use than to manually poll a bookmark list (even with a browser that lets me open a group of bookmarks simultaneously at one go) or remember exactly when all of my favorite sites have been updated. If nothing else, a good RSS reader and RSS feed will at least automatically filter out repeats, whereas just manually polling bookmarks will always bring up repeats that I need to re-skim over every time I go to the site.

Ideally, if it doesn't have the entire contents of the article, it would have either a summary or the first few paragraphs of the article (Ars Technica does this very well, I think) so that I can tell at a glance whether or not I want to read the full article. For example, while I may want to read something on Nvidia's plans for its next generation GPU, I frankly couldn't give a rat's ass about Bitcoin, and Ars Technica is the kind of site (again, using it as an example) that will report on both.

Matt

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

But that's exactly why people like me stopped using RSS. I don't want a post telling me Penny Arcade or Dr. McNinja updated. I want the actual content in my reader. I stopped subscribing to any feed that didn't post full content to reader, and when I realized that almost no feeds did so, I stopped using RSS.

I have a different use case for RSS. My employer blocks almost any website that is worth reading. Seeing the headlines and top paragraphs for my favorite sites at least gives me a heads up if there is something must-read that I should check out on my phone.

Apreche

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

But that's exactly why people like me stopped using RSS. I don't want a post telling me Penny Arcade or Dr. McNinja updated. I want the actual content in my reader. I stopped subscribing to any feed that didn't post full content to reader, and when I realized that almost no feeds did so, I stopped using RSS.

I have a different use case for RSS. My employer blocks almost any website that is worth reading. Seeing the headlines and top paragraphs for my favorite sites at least gives me a heads up if there is something must-read that I should check out on my phone.

Quit.

Matt

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

But that's exactly why people like me stopped using RSS. I don't want a post telling me Penny Arcade or Dr. McNinja updated. I want the actual content in my reader. I stopped subscribing to any feed that didn't post full content to reader, and when I realized that almost no feeds did so, I stopped using RSS.

I have a different use case for RSS. My employer blocks almost any website that is worth reading. Seeing the headlines and top paragraphs for my favorite sites at least gives me a heads up if there is something must-read that I should check out on my phone.

Quit.

Pension.

Apreche

3. Content producers, especially ad-supported ones, have a business model contrary to what RSS is all about, and again the best case scenario is a break-even with their existing revenue sources: they have no incentive to invest in it and even a reason to actively hamper it.

Actually, this is easily worked around. Only put headlines and/or summaries in the RSS feed and use it purely as a way to notify people that new content has been posted instead of posting the actual content. Then when people follow up the links to the actual content -- boom, there's your ad revenue.

But that's exactly why people like me stopped using RSS. I don't want a post telling me Penny Arcade or Dr. McNinja updated. I want the actual content in my reader. I stopped subscribing to any feed that didn't post full content to reader, and when I realized that almost no feeds did so, I stopped using RSS.

I have a different use case for RSS. My employer blocks almost any website that is worth reading. Seeing the headlines and top paragraphs for my favorite sites at least gives me a heads up if there is something must-read that I should check out on my phone.

Quit.

Pension.

Trading the young years for the old years. Bad trade.

Apsup

I think I said most of this in the thread about Google Reader dying, but why not to repeat myself now that I have a chance.

Sure I think it's sad that Google Reader is going away as it does what it does really well, but I don't think that alone means that rss is totally dead. Sure it's "dying" and becoming more and more a thing for minority of people, but not dead as in totally gone for good. I know there will be and already are good replacements for Google Reader. And I believe that will be the case in the future too. Unless something drastic happens I probably will always have some rss reader that satisfies my needs and rss will not be truly dead. Just like podcasts, webcomics or hardcore platformers are not truly dead.

Rym

RSS dies if new things don't support it. Over time, fewer and fewer things will support it due to its small and shrinking userbase.

Matt

... My employer blocks almost any website that is worth reading. ...

Quit.

Pension.

Trading the young years for the old years. Bad trade.

Well it's more than just that. For all I know, we could be Greece by time 2040 rolls around the pension will go poof. It's more about stability. My wife's career is pure high risk/high reward, so I mitigate that risk by trading some small things away in return for guaranteed stable income and benefits.

If they ever block access to the FRCF, I'll hand in my notice.

Apsup

RSS dies if new things don't support it. Over time, fewer and fewer things will support it due to its small and shrinking userbase.

Situation is looking good so far. Evey web-comic I follow has rss feed. Every blog I follow has rss feed and every news site I follow has rss feed. And that's pretty much already more content than I even consume.

Apreche

... My employer blocks almost any website that is worth reading. ...

Quit.

Pension.

Trading the young years for the old years. Bad trade.

Well it's more than just that. For all I know, we could be Greece by time 2040 rolls around the pension will go poof. It's more about stability. My wife's career is pure high risk/high reward, so I mitigate that risk by trading some small things away in return for guaranteed stable income and benefits.

If they ever block access to the FRCF, I'll hand in my notice.

I avoid this problem by asking about Internet filtering before I take a job. Monitoring I accept. Not like I'm checking out porn at work. Not like I care if they see these totally public forum posts. Not like I don't use SSL on everything important.

ShadedSpriter

I appreciate this episode...I have been thinking about this since it first was announced and it is something which has made me think about how I consume information more than anything. I am currently subscribed to 728 RSS feeds.

Only 40 feeds in my News section of my RSS reader - half of these are news aggregators for my various interests. (Like you mention) Two of them are actual News Sources (BBC News and The Guardian newspaper.) but most of the rest are full article blogs.

The problem I have from switching from RSS feeds to just using just aggregator sites is I also have literally hundreds of artists (webcomic creators, musicians, video producers, podcasters, authors and game developers.) who I follow their blogs and sites for.

On the issue of webcomic RSS feeds - this is the main reason I started using google reader at the start of about 2006. The issue of if the full article/comic is available in RSS feeds is something which I don't mind since I most of my reading is while I am online outside of the news feeds mentioned above 38 out of my 90 webcomics with RSS feeds* have the full comic in their feeds so it is about 1/3 of them.

You also seem to under-estimate the practicality of title only RSS feeds for webcomics. I find that it is good to have when you have to catch up with a few weeks worth of comics at a time. since you can just click the link to the oldest unread comic and then click the next button until you get to the front page.



*This is the list of all of the comics which have updated in the last month excludes Artists blogs/comics hosted on tumblr or any comics I read using page2rss. (site that lets you create an RSS feed of any webpage and monitor it for changes it also does caching of the images so I get full comics via it.) which is another 200+ comics.

jlawson70

I was listening to this episode during lunch today, and the first part is something I wish to comment about. Working hospital security, I deal with people who come in that have either run out of their medications or stopped taking them because they "feel better". I have to wonder, when the homeless guy started flailing in front of the cops what/if anything was said to the police officers. I teach a class at the hospital about crisis intervention and we always talk about restraints/physical intervention as a last resort. Did the cop do everything he could before using the pepper spray? We don't know, but if he didn't then I worry about future interventions. A local cop once said to me that police "think for others when they are unable to think for themselves". Sorry for the rambling, just wanted to offer my thoughts.

Eryn

I had already surmised that the big reason RSS was dying was its lack of profitability, so the main reason I was curious to listen to this episode was to hear Scrym's specific personal reasons for not using RSS/Google Reader anymore. I got my answer (speed of content generation, duplicate entries, and lack of content included in feed entries), and thus am satisfied.

Personally, I can keep up with the amount of content my feeds generate just fine, and am quite happy to just skip over duplicates and to click on entries that require clicking. I mainly use Reader just to alert me to the fact that a thing has updated; I don't necessarily need it to display stuff for me inline every time. It's nice when it does, but I don't at all mind going through to a site when it doesn't.

I think Feedly will be okay as far as a replacement goes, and I will be using it. But yeah, it's still got a ways to go before it gets to Google Reader's current level. Wishing the Feedly people all the best and hope they don't get too discouraged. And if they and everyone else do get discouraged and RSS totally dies out... Well, that will be disappointing, and I will enjoy as much of RSS's functionality as I can up until the end.

okeefe

I guess our use cases for RSS differ slightly. While I also prefer having the entire content in the RSS reader itself, I have no problem with it merely being a way to notify me of when a site has been updated. In fact, I mostly use it in order to find out when a site has been updated as I find it much less annoying to use than to manually poll a bookmark list (even with a browser that lets me open a group of bookmarks simultaneously at one go) or remember exactly when all of my favorite sites have been updated.

RSS is my notification system. Individual articles are almost exclusively a headline cluing me into whether I want to hit the actual site or the announcement of an rare event. Examples: new Perry Bible Fellowship, new Project Donut facebook update, new Flickr photo comment, new GeekNightsRym/Egoraptor/SleepyNinjaToast YouTube video, new PA: The Series episodes. I have 93 feeds, some of them extraordinarily specific.

Google Reader was both a decent web-based RSS viewer but, as importantly for me, a database of read/unread articles that could be synced against by third-party RSS readers. Because GR was good enough and free, it eliminated the market for paid RSS readers. At this point, I am waiting to see what backend Reeder goes with, and I will move my feeds there. I'm happy to pay for such a service.

Rochelle

Rym,

Could you clarify what you meant on the healthcare system part and how to improve it?

For most part now, medical providers track their treatment through computerized systems or via audio recording. The audio recordings then get sent to a transcriptionist that documents it in the clinical note. Then it goes to coding then to billing.

As for the physician themselves, most know the basics of of ICD-9 DX codes along with CPT/HCPCS codes, in which they document what they believe they treated. They also annotate any other procedures done in their notes. If they do not know the exact CPT code, that's where coding catches it.

For most part, any healthcare facility worth it's salts KNOWS when it comes to medical reimbursement, they have to educate the providers to make sure they document anything and everything in their notes so the coders will code that encounter to the highest level of care there is.

Most providers loathe learning diagnosis/procedure codes, but if they want to get reimbursed for the top dollar it will be in their best interest to do so.

Also, I've expressed this before in the Google Reader thread, I use it mainly to keep track of things I haven't read that I plan on reading. I use it every day. I await for the new alternate version that will more than likely keep it the way I have been consuming those various feeds.

Rym

There are redundant codes, codes that are for similar procedures with vastly different payouts, incompatible coding systems, constant transcription errors with little data validation at that level, difficulty adding new codes, shit UIs for managing them, and shit for accessible data retention (to name a few issue I ran into).