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For what seems like forever, a certain list-serv list on a topic of academic research interest has been a mere dribble of traffic in my Inbox. Most of the traffic being the monthly “you’re subscribed to List-FOO” and occasional position postings, most of which are in the UK. I know I stopped monitoring the list in detail ever since I changed gears to a more dev-related role, professionally.
It would seem that someone on list had the temerity to post whether there was a discussion forum that was more actively addressing this academic question to the more-or-less dormant list. This being the academic silly season, a significant number of members are all twitterpated over a discussion as to why the list is dormant, whether the list is worth saving, and what can be done to rejuvenate the community.
Two interesting trends in the last two weeks:
As to the second, I wonder where these people were asking their questions before the revival or if this is just guilt-based busy work, or maybe just a way to keep fingers in the pot. I also wonder just how busy the traffic would be if the initial question had been raised at a time that wasn’t between semesters. At any rate, it’s kind of amusing.
So Facebook doesn’t want to play nice and just give you RSS feeds for a user’s status updates. Used to be you could do that, but not so much any longer. It appears you may be able to generate a status feed using the Graph API, but that’s seriously overkill for my needs. Besides, who wants to write a graph parser when RSS parsers are a dime a dozen?
At least they haven’t nuked the user notifications RSS feed. Not yet, at least. Once they do, there’s always this.
I’ve been tinkering with pulling all of my generated content on other sites into a single, browsable, About Me kind of page here on SRT. On the flip side, I’ve been toying with how to create a nice portal that collects all of the various bits of content people I like create on various social media sites so i can participate more precisely in these sites. READ: be more private about what I consume from Facebook and its kin.
So imagine my surprise when I read this on Metafilter. Mozilla is killing their browser support for automatic RSS feed discovery. Because, ostensibly, people don’t use RSS.
Hrm.
I would complain but I no longer use Mozilla browsers and the browser I use doesn’t support auto-discovery either. Which is sad. On the other hand, I already have more incoming RSS traffic than I can conceivably manage. Combining it with email has the benefit of helping me scan news more quickly but the drawback of making inbox management daunting.
So I’d say that RSS isn’t really dead. I’d agree with the article that there are better ways of integrating RSS with standard browser behavior. I also agree that the browser doesn’t make the best RSS client. I would argue, however, that the browser is the best way to auto-discover RSS and that pulling this feature is kind of short-sighted given that there isn’t really a hue and cry to disappear that little orange button from the location bar.