Steve Rubel posted late last month about his dissatisfaction with RSS (”RSS today feels slow and it’s clear its best days are behind it. Feed reading, like blogging, feels ‘very 2005′”) and his yearning for a hybrid between RSS and Twitter. Twitter lists have killed RSS for him, but he still wants some filtering of the unfettered information firehose.
What’s interesting about the post are the comments — virtually no one there has moved away from RSS. A lot are moving back to it. Many are, if not abandoning Twitter, increasingly cognizant of its deep limitations as a technology for comprehension, versus one for the provision of notification.
I run a group blog that includes a daily curated content feature, and I’m setting up another one on my own. I can’t imagine doing them without RSS. Whatever Twitter can be, it is fundamentally reflexive and reactive — to the news, to your thoughts and queries, to your lifestream. It does not facilitate publishing, as much as we want to save microblogging as a distinct genre.
Now, you can’t talk to RSS, you can’t build a career around witty brevity using it, and God knows Google Reader gets a D for usability. But it is far less subject to the relentless beating of time’s waves than Twitter or Facebook. You can use it for a deep dive as well as skimming. You can read something published a week ago; you can save in a meaningful way; you can use it at the speed and shape of your own life, which I always thought was the point of technology. I don’t want a Twitter feed of Andrew Sullivan, which just flattens his ideas and their variety and their browsability, by which I mean their publishedness — I want Andrew Sullivan’s blog. (I also want the Times in the morning in paper, spread out on my kitchen countertop; and then later as an iPod Touch app, telling me what happened later. Both are technologies, you know — but both are far less subject to the whims of brute chronology.) All this seems obvious; and yet we now live in an age in which very smart people like Rubel talk about abandoning perfectly good technologies just because they feel old.
In the end, we might be able to chalk this up to the peculiar affliction of the social media expert. What Rubel might be getting at is that it’s too much trouble at this point to curate content through RSS, and that he trusts his colleagues’ and friends’ recommendations more than he does a raw feed. That’s fine for social media, the discourse around which has turned into a bizarre festival of novelty, braying punditry, self-helpishness, hucksterism and echo chamber, with a dash of utility (Rubel being a notable, highly useful exception). It’s not suitable for ideas, or soccer, or just about anything else.
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
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