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.