Friday, October 17, 2014

Blogging is definitively back - the NYT has redone their Zombie RSS page

My feeds (Feedbin/Reeder) have never gone quiet — but there’s no doubt it was getting harder to find links to feeds over the two years since Google tried to kill RSS to boost G+.

Then came signs of a turnaround. Apple very quietly added RSS reading back into Safari — after removing RSS from both Safari and Mail.app [2]. Google, fairly quietly, backed away from G+ — I don’t get any G+ social invites at all any more. More interestingly, Google blogs all became more active. Microsoft kept RSS features in IE 11. Facebook never removed RSS from Pages. Old blogs started lighting up in my feed reader. Rosenberg has started writing about a blog revival amidst disaffection with Twitter and Facebook [1]. 

All significant developments, but they pale next to the very biggest sign of them all — the New York Times has updated their RSS - Feed Page! It no longer recommends use of Google Reader! [3] The NYT has even added Topic Feeds:

Times Topics feeds collect news, reference, photos, graphics, audio and video on thousands of subjects, covering material published since 1981 … Search 10,000+ Times Topics Feeds

 Dave Winer should be a happy guy today.

[1] Not directly related, but fairly suddenly, and for no obvious reason, many of my friends and family have stopped posting on Facebook.

[2] Apple needs to update it’s RSS Feed page though — it doesn’t mention use of Safari.

[3] It does mention AOL Reader. I thought that was a bad sign, but, and this shocks me, AOL really does have a Feed Reader with its own spiffy web site: "Moving from another RSS reader? You can upload your subscriptions in standard OPML format and start reading right away!”. It even has its own friggin’ API. Turns out this was launched a year ago. It’s still in beta, but there’s an active development blog and they released an iOS app in August that has few ratings but seems well liked. Best of all, it supports OPML export as well as import. So this is a real contender.

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