10:36AM - Walled Garden
"Google Reader will be retired on July 1, 2013"
As a standard, RSS was designed by technical people, mainly for technical people. It provided a convenient way to digest huge amounts of information efficiently. However, RSS was not designed with the advertising industry in mind. Advertisers want tracking, which is why email lists have always been popular. RSS did not provide a way to segment traffic in a way which made sense to them.
RSS is a way to move content out of the walled garden, and they want you in their walled garden. It's not in their commercial interest to make information available in machine readable format without charging for it. For blogs that are seeking to make money out of advertising, it is difficult to justify why they should send out the content out as RSS feed. If you send full text, then user does not come to the site.
Some readers will migrate to other services, but many will inevitably abandon the idea of direct subscription to blogs entirely. In the next few months, tens of thousands of small blogs will lose direct contact with a large fraction of their readers.
Less and less content is actually available in RSS format. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality.
If in the early 2000s, Web 2.0 companies were building platforms that wanted to work with each other. We live in the world of silos now. Facebook is the Soviet Union of the modern web. The new systems don’t offer RSS or feeds. There is no common language of sharing.
http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/193
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/05/rest-i
http://camendesign.com/rss_is_dying
Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down