Home > Archive >  2009 >  November >  20

Where is RSS?

Friday, November 20, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I watched the morning session of TechCrunch's second realtime conference, including the half hour interview with Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter. 

Of course Mike Arrington asked him the "Is RSS Dead?" question, and thankfully Costolo didn't want to go there. It would be ingracious of him, of course, because he made $100 million with RSS.  

He said RSS had been "pushed down" the stack, and it was now a protocol like SMTP or HTTP.  

In a way I agree with him, but only so far. 

RSS was never anything more than a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. So it hasn't gone anywhere. It's still exactly where it has been since 2002, it's part of the fabric of the Internet, and is the standard format for news distribution. We're lucky to have a standard format for that.  

But... 

Had Arrington asked me the question, I would have answered it differently. 

RSS will form the basis for the open distributed version of Twitter.  

The loosely-coupled 140-character message network. 

RSS already has everything we need, including a protocol for realtime updates.  

Further, any vendor of a Twitter client would, imho, be well-advised to spread out to achieve independence from the Twitter company. One way to do that, and they should all do it, is to support Facebook on an equal basis with Twitter. But that isn't enough. They should all make an investment in the open distributed way of doing what Twitter does. What that means is to offer the user the option to create a backup of their tweet stream in RSS, as a publicly-accessible feed. And once there's a base of apps doing that, they should add a feature to subscribe to those feeds.  

Key point: Once they're there, they can add core features without waiting for Twitter. 

Of course Arrington didn't ask me that question, and that's fine -- that's his prerogative. But there's nothing to stop me from answering it anyway!