RSS

» go to rssboard.org now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

every podcast app on earth is a thin skin over a pile of rss feeds doing the actual work. an rss feed is a small xml file a website publishes, listing what is new, newest first. a reader program checks the file on a schedule and shows you the items. no account, no follow graph, no ranking. the site says what it published, your reader shows it in order, and that is the entire transaction.

i have run a feed reader continuously since the mid 2000s, through the death of at least three of them. the feeds themselves never needed migrating. the list of urls just moves to the next reader, like furniture to a new flat.

~ the messy birth ~

rss came out of netscape on march 15, 1999, built by dan libby and colleagues as rdf site summary, a way to fill the my.netscape portal with headlines. libby simplified it into rss 0.91 that summer, folding in ideas from dave winer's syndication work at userland. then netscape, in full decline, walked away from the format entirely in 2001, and the orphan was fought over. one camp published rss 1.0, rebuilt on rdf, with a teenage aaron swartz among the authors. winer pushed the simple branch forward instead, and his rss 0.92 added the enclosure element, a way to attach a media file to a feed item. remember that element.

winer's rss 2.0 landed in september 2002, renamed really simple syndication, and in july 2003 he handed the copyright to harvard's berkman center and set up the rss advisory board to keep the spec stable. stable is the word. the format has barely changed in twenty years, which for a format is not stagnation, it is the job description.

~ the obituary years ~

google reader shut down on july 1, 2013, and took the casual audience with it. bloglines was already gone in spirit, feeddemon announced its end the same season, and the platforms were delighted to explain that following would now happen inside their algorithms instead. browsers stripped their feed features. firefox removed live bookmarks, chrome never really tried. the tech press ran the funeral coverage, and this site's graveyard holds a whole row of the casualties.

what nobody shut down was the supply side. wordpress kept generating a feed for every site by default. so did nearly every cms, every news outlet, every code forge, every government publication system. the feeds kept being written whether or not anyone subscribed, like lighthouses running on automatic.

~ the enclosure element wins ~

that media attachment from rss 0.92 became podcasting. a podcast is, technically, nothing but an rss feed with audio enclosures, and this is still true today, through the entire boom, the celebrity shows, the acquisition sprees. apple podcasts is at its core a directory of other people's rss urls. when spotify spent hundreds of millions trying to take podcasting proprietary, the open feed ecosystem simply continued underneath, and spotify eventually softened. an entire industry runs on a format element added in december 2000 by a man arguing with a standards committee.

~ why it still matters ~

rss is the last mainstream piece of the web where you choose what you see. your feed list is yours, portable in a single opml file, readable by dozens of clients, invisible to advertising systems. nothing decides for you, nothing withholds a post because engagement was predicted to be low. the format asks websites one question, what is new, and passes the answer along untouched.

the readers keep dying and the format keeps not dying, and after twenty five years the pattern is safe to call. products die. formats, if they are simple enough and owned by nobody, just wait.

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