How I restarted using RSS, and actually noticed!

Recently, I tripped over a headline for an article I wrote for Six Colors in 2015: “How I stopped using RSS and didn’t even notice.”

I could hardly remember writing it. But write it I did, at a time when we were deep in a news-aggregation desert. It seemed like RSS had experienced a conceptual death, through neglect and intent. Google first hijacked usage by creating Google Reader during RSS’s heyday in 2005, which sank the market for paid RSS apps and led to near hegemony for Google.

Then, typical of fickle Google, the company killed off Google Reader in 2013. Because Google Reader was web-based, its loss revealed a barren marketplace. Small developers tried to fill the gap, but the pattern of usage for many people had ended.

Couple that with the emergence, by that time, of the expectation of very low prices for single-purpose apps, and little chance yet of convincing people to pay for a recurring subscription. RSS readers persisted, but it seemed like their time had come and gone.

But I was too pessimistic! Today, I’m back to daily—or multiple-times-per-day—use of a newsreader, the same one that got me addicted back in the early 2000s. Hurray, I’m an RSS news junkie again!?

NetNewsWire remains true to RSS and its identity, as you can see from this version 2 screenshot.

Rather straightforward standard, when you think about it

For those of you too young to remember RSS (Really Simple Syndication), or who have buried the memory of what we lost, it’s an open syndication standard.1 Any Web-reachable resource, whether a website or a service endpoint that could deliver a file in the RSS format over a web connection, could publish items that RSS newsreaders could parse and display, like articles or entries. RSS became—and remains—the basis for podcast distribution.

RSS embodies what was once the primary ethos of the Internet. No, not “information wants to be free.”2 Rather, wherever possible, produce protocols that allow decentralized use of the same kind of thing: HTML, web servers, email, and so forth. Nobody owned RSS; no central RSS system dispensed RSS; nobody could get tired of running RSS and turn it off for everyone.

The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more. Back then, I even offered an RSS feed for any book by its ISBN through my price-comparison service, isbn.nu.3 Yahoo’s Pipes service, of the mid-oughties, let you combine and filter webpages, RSS feeds, and other sources, and then output the results as another RSS feed.

Yahoo Pipes lasted briefly, but was a superb example of the unrealized power of RSS as a way to gather, filter, and output information from multiple sources.

For some people, a second inbox was a nightmare: more unread things that piled up like the unblinking eye of unwatched Netflix DVDs sitting on their red envelopes! I, however, liked to scan through the latest headlines or results, and then mark everything as read. Using RSS like this gave me a snapshot of what was happening. When I was actively writing regular columns and pitching articles for several publications, RSS was a way to get leads on breaking news, obscure topics, and product updates.

My favorite newsreader for the Mac, NetNewsWire, went through a couple of owners, and updates were delayed significantly, making it less appealing to use. I switched to another RSS reader. Meanwhile, after spending more time on Twitter, I found it to be a better source of up-to-date information.

In that 2015 article, I wrote:

I haven’t checked RSS for more than a few minutes here and there in the last year, and I don’t think I’ve looked at the aggregator I use at all in a couple of months. It’s not intentional; the need seems to be gone. It’s been replaced by a change in my needs and a combination of other sources.

I made this claim, too:

In the meantime, despite the amount of time I spend on Twitter, I enjoy the feeling of less pressure to keep up with what’s going on. I can walk away for hours or days, and put my toes in and get a read on what the world and my friends and colleagues are saying without the tick-tock tick-tock of hundreds of headlines dropping hourly upon me.

That didn’t last.

The once and future RSS king

Nuzzel let you know the most popular things that people you followed linked to.

The founder of Friendster launched a beta of a news aggregator, Nuzzel, that pulled from your Twitter and Facebook social graphs—the people you followed, specifically—to rank stories people were talking about. Jason Snell inserted into the article an aside as an editor’s note, that he was using Nuzzel, and I soon followed. While it lacked the breadth and coverage of an RSS reader, it scratched most of my itches and reduced that feeling of “less pressure.” (I think we were all delusional in the maximum Twitter period.)

Of course, all good tools are acquired and die, and Nuzzel was no exception. A company called Scroll bought it in 2018, and then Twitter purchased Scroll. Instead of using it to increase engagement and stickiness, and offer a premium flavor, they shut it down on its acquisition in May 2021, during a high-demand period by us pandemic-constrained people dying for news, nearly a year before Elon Musk’s purchase bid.

In a tweet—later deleted—I wrote (and was quoted via the above link by John Gruber):4

Nuzzel has been since it launched nearly the only app I’ve ever let put notifications on my lock screen, and something I consult 20 to 50 times a day. I don’t blame Twitter, though: the model didn’t pan out (though I would have paid $25–$50 a year as a service!).

Fortunately, a few years after my article, NetNewsWire’s creator, and first and fourth owner of the name, revived the app.5 In 2018, Brent gave us new hope with version 5.0d1, which was an open-source RSS reader he was developing. He was able to rename this fresh take as NetNewsWire. Brent has since released versions 6 and, recently, 7 for macOS and 7 for iOS.6

I started playing with NetNewsWire again following the 5.0 release. I discovered that my old file of feeds still existed, and I was reading many of the same blogs and news sources. I started trying to add sites I wanted to read and services that seemed useful—most turned out to have a straightforward RSS option or a way to acquire it.

NetNewsWire 7 is my constant, perhaps too constant, companion. You can read blogs in it!

You can also track most webpages using tools or services dating back to the early 2000s: feed extractors or converters. For instance, Boston University, where my older child attends college, has a so-called BU Today news page with no RSS feed. I dug around and wound up at Fetch RSS, which has a nice free tier and several paid upgrade options. Several other sites offer similar services, which can fill gaps for websites that aren’t up to date with 25-year-old standards.

Gotta get my RSS hit

I don’t know if RSS is good or bad for my mental health. I believe it prevents me from obsessively visiting lots of sites and scanning them for changes, reduces the number of notifications in my inbox, and gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world. It’s also let me tune into new blogs—yes, new blogs in the 2020s—like Nick Heer’s excellent Pixel Envy.

Jason recently went through an RSS re-examination and came away with a different conclusion: maybe some of his feeds he should stop viewing in a newsreader and instead read as email newsletters, and maybe some feeds should aggregate their multiple items into a newsletter. He’s done this with Six Colors, offering members a newsletter that’s derived from the site’s posts.

I’m trending the opposite way from Jason, I think. Anything that I don’t need to know about on a timely basis, I want to have appear as an item in NetNewsWire, where I can approach it as something I might scan and then read and skip over.

There were battles over names and credit for RSS development. Of course there were. ↩

I have always interpreted that statement of Stewart Brand’s as information wants to be unleashed—or freed—not that information should cost next to nothing, so it’s trending towards free. ↩

It makes much more sense to sign up for an email alert about a price change or a new copy of an out-of-stock or out-of-print book becoming available than relying on RSS for that! ↩

I left Twitter after Musk’s acquisition went through in late 2022, and gradually deleted all my old messages. ↩

NewsGator bought NetNewsWire in 2005, and sold it to Black Pixel in 2011, which released the name back to Brent in 2018. ↩

He also retired from his day job. ↩