The Coming Decline of Rss and Atom

Ever since I discovered Bloglines some years ago, I’ve been hooked on RSS. I subscribed to a slew of feeds and treated it like a to do list, always trying to get it to zero. Subscribing to those feeds enabled me to see and learn about a lot of things I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Since that time, RSS feeds have been my primary source of what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. Along the way, the feeds I was subscribed to changed, as my interests changed, and I gave up Bloglines for Google Reader. But my appetite for feeds has only grown.

Lately, though, I’ve seen a shift. Most days, I skim the headlines in Google Reader, looking for specific sites, without ever getting the unread count down to zero. What I’ve started noticing is that even when I was keeping up on RSS feeds, I had already seen all of the interesting stuff. The primary reason for this is Twitter.

Twitter is my social network of choice. Yes, I’m on Facebook (though I succesfully avoided it for a long time), and I’m also on LinkedIn, but the place I spend most of my social networking time is Twitter. Most of the people whose blogs I’ve come to rely on for news and insight are people I follow now on Twitter. I get more frequent links and thoughts through that site than I ever would through a blog, and it’s much more real-time than RSS. There are a number of sites which even offer to send you notifications of new content through Twitter in addition to RSS, like RubyFlow.

Additionally, I think sites like Reddit and Hacker News are having a similar impact. Their voting functions help to filter through the haystack to find the best stuff and ensure that it rises to the top - at least in theory, I’m not convinced that it always works in practice.

Perhaps the future of RSS and Atom lie as protocols that enable applications to share information rather than as a consumer-facing application of it’s own. They’re the plumbing, not the faucet.

While I still use RSS, and won’t likely be shutting down Google Reader any time soon, I find that the interesting things seem to find me, rather than me having to wade through feed after feed to find them. This is a byproduct of me being connected to a group of people on Twitter with similar interests, who share things as they come across them. I’m questioning whether my use of RSS will decline as I consume more information this way.

I’m curious if anyone else is experiencing the same thing.