RSS feeds are an easy way to stay up-to-date on your favorite websites, blogs, podcasts and other online content. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is a standardized format that allows content creators to output their work in a standard way that applications and users can easily access. RSS feeds allow you to stay updated on your favorite content without ever having to visit that site.
Let’s take a look at the origins of RSS feeds. The story begins with early attempts at web syndication. They didn’t really gain much traction until the development of the Meta Content Framework in 1995 by Ramanathan V. Guha at Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. This framework laid the groundwork for what would eventually become RSS. The first version of RSS, known as RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9), was created by Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha at Netscape and launched in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal.
Just a few months later, Dan Libby released a simplified version, RSS 0.91, which removed many RDF elements and included aspects of Dave Winer’s syndication format, renaming it RSS Rich Site Summary. After AOL acquired Netscape (boo!), support for RSS was discontinued in April 2001. This left the format with no official backing. RSS development continued independently through efforts by Dave Winer and the RSS-DEV Working Group. Winer’s company, UserLand Software, was a significant influence in furthering RSS by publishing a modified version of RSS 0.91 and introducing subsequent versions that added new features, including the support for media enclosures. Media enclosures meant that you could include media files, like MP3s, which made podcasting a whole lot easier.
Because the internet is the internet, there was controversy because people wanted to reintroduce RDF and expand namespace support with RSS 1.0. Because there were varying development paths, there was ongoing controversy and debate within the syndication community regarding the true stewardship of RSS. This led to the creation of the Atom syndication format in 2003 as an alternative. In 2003, Winer assigned the copyright for RSS 2.0 to Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and also established the RSS Advisory Board to maintain the specification. By 2005, the now-iconic orange square with white radio waves symbol became the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, further solidified by its adoption by major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. The ongoing evolution of RSS has been marked by efforts to clarify ambiguities and adapt to new web standards, underlining its enduring relevance in web syndication.
In March of 2013, fourteen years after the creation of the RSS format, a big bad thing happened for RSS. Google Reader launched in Octover of 2005. Google continued to innovate and add features to the product. It was growing rapidly and in September 2007 Google announced that Google Reader had graduated out of Google Labs and into the world as it’s own product. Incidentally, the product marketing manager who made that announcement (Kevin Systrom) went on to create an application you’ve likely heard of, Instagram. Google Reader was probably the application most responsible for the ubiquity of RSS feeds because everyone had a Google account and could spin up their Google Reader. Everything in RSS land was chuggin along just fine until March 13, 2013 when Google announced it was discontinuing Google Reader. Many cite this as end of the open web.
So why would you want to use RSS feeds? First, it gives you a convenient place for you to aggregate all of the content you’re interested in. Another thing that’s great is the content comes to you. You don’t have to go to a site to see if there is new content available. When something new is published, it shows up in the RSS feed, and you can see it. You also have the ability to add multiple feeds to your feed reader. For example, let’s say you’re a baseball fan. You can add an RSS feed from ESPN, CBS Sports, The Athletic, and any other news source that has an RSS feed, and the content will come to you.
That all sounds great, right? Yes and it is, however, RSS feeds, especially feeds from high volume publishers are kind of like a firehose. For example, the ESPN RSS feed has everything in it. One article may be about the current golf tournament, the next about the upcoming UFC match, and then after 10 more articles, you finally get to the article about the Chicago Cubs that you actually care about. That’s a lot of noise.
RSS feeds are a great tool to bring a lot of content together. It’s a tried and true technology that has a rock solid specification and can be used in so many different ways. There are sites an applications that are RSS replacements that give a bit more of a curated experience that help filter out some of that noise, and really deliver the content that you want.
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