Sometimes you just stick your foot in it. Yesterday, I made the mistake of Twittering my dislike of RSS, noting a story yesterday by Gillmore that is garnering quite a bit of controversy. People pounced on me on Twitter, and I decided to give this another round of thought. The discussion comes down to this: timing and interaction. Which blend of interaction is superior, and which type of timing is correct? The RSS debate, raging as it is at the moment, comes down to these two things.
To begin, RSS has had a long and useful history on the internet. It has helped send content out to the masses from centralized sources. It is akin to the newspaper delivery man, but instantaneous and free. It is hard to argue that it is ineffective, or even archaic. Perhaps it is past its zenith, with people turning to new methods of content acquisition and the like. But, it still has a large number (millions, and Google) that support it.
I can only speak from my perspective, as an individual. I support choice. Choice of sources, content, timing etc. One of the principle tenants of the internet is that is provides nearly unlimited selection. This is the base reason that I dislike phone calls as a general rule, preferring email. Email puts the discussion on my schedule, and I can draw on any resource that I choose before making a response. People, Twitter folks, tend to agree with this, based on their responses to my statements on the subject.
Of course, it is always argued that Twitter is full on real time. This is hogwash, Twitter is only real time when you are sitting in front of TweetDeck constantly reading the influx of new updates. If not, you are interacting with the data as you can, on your own time, etc. For example, if you send me an @ message, it might take me 14 minutes to get to reading it, and then a few seconds to respond. That is not real time. Gmail for me is just as real time as Twitter in that regard. Gmail never closes on my computer, so the information flows in in ‘real time’ but my interaction with that data is delayed.
All of this applies directly to the RSS discussion. RSS shares many similiar aspects, the data is delivered in real time to you (If feedburner is feeling content to do so), and then you can interact with it on your schedule. That is all well and good. However, only in RSS feeds is the content taken from its original home and moved to an external location, stripping it of its original context (the blog, etc), and the discussion (comments). Generally, the discussion can be half as useful as the article is, especially on higher brow publications. [Icanhazcheezburger is not an example of this.]
Of course, this applies to the moving of any content from its original abode and giving it to you, something that so many services do these days. I will not take a stand against a trend much larger than myself, at the moment I have much greater pressing matters. However, the number of times that I have logged into Google Reader (the same argument that Gillmore makes) must be a fraction of 1% of the number of times that I have read a blog on their .com. Perhaps I am old fashioned, or through my use of Twitter, new fashion, but either way, RSS feeds seem to be a odd way of getting information in the nude, as it were.
I prefer context. @schammy challeneged me to follow my convictions, and remove the RSS option from all publications that I am a part of. I will not, due simply to my aforementioned love of choice. Besides, this is the internet, the last thing you want to do is to tell someone no. Just my two cents.
