Where did RSS go in Safari 6???

s4lex wrote:

You are partly correct if you intended to say the resurgance "was funded by selling sugar water" 😉 The original iMac was a Hello Kitty toy computer that sold well to those driven by fashion trends -- but a joke for software developers working on real problems. I didn't switch from a ThinkPad dual booting Windows XP Pro and CentOS until the G4 laptops and G5 towers became available.

As for us fans of the simply beautiful RSS functionality in Safari 5 being "clueless" -- some further clarifications. Firstly, I have the luxury of working on projects that instrinsically motivate me. So I choose open source and open data where the truly clueless consumers of toys and sugar water are a secondary consideration. Some of my friends (many far smarter than I) were not lucky in startups or investing (thanks Steve and iGadget buyers for taking my truckload of $50 shares to $500+ 😉 ) -- so they have to work on closed source. You would think based on your assertion that there is no money to be had in selling to mere professionals, but some of my coder friends bringing home six-figure salaries for companies like Oracle, EMC and Salesforce.com would disagree.

Yes, I basically meant that it was funded, but what's the difference really?

Steve was all about usability and making things simpler, ie. making them accessible to the masses. Apple IS a mass market company and they're positioning themselves to continue being mass market.

Yes pro's have money, they buy Mac's. But there's a LONG list of hardware makers who went under or just gave up. SGI was stomped. IBM gave up. HP almost gave up. RIM is getting crushed, Nokia will be crushed. Remember 3dfx? Crushed to bits. Though they live on through Nvidia's continued use of SLI which they aqcuired when they bought the smashed pieces of 3dfx. There were a few pro graphics card makers who had their own chips and those were all hammered to smithereens. They finally adopted Nvidia or Ati chips until they faded away to nothingness.

Basically what the market has already determined is that if you can make hardware that works for today's consumers, you automatically make hardware that works for pro's.

RSS is done. It's single ended. The feed goes out and nothing comes back. No share, like, re-tweet, or even forward. It's a digital Readers Digest, it's TOAST!

erebos wrote:

RSS is done. It's single ended. The feed goes out and nothing comes back. No share, like, re-tweet, or even forward. It's a digital Readers Digest, it's TOAST!

Yes, RSS is a digital summary - a digest - of articles I might consider reading. Why is something useful like that "toast"?

So you want Apple to go bankrupt because you find RSS useful?

"The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. (RDA), became a publicly traded corporation in 1990. As of 2010 RDA has reported a net loss each year since 2005."

erebos wrote:

RSS is done... it's TOAST!

I'm trying to respectfully disagree, but I'm not sure how to respond to your assertions which seem more like opinions. It sounds like you are saying that RSS is a dead technology, and will not be in use for much longer? I assume you are grouping the family of RSS formats, RDF and Atom in your definition of toasted RSS?

Would you estimate we have weeks, months, years or maybe even decades left before there are no RSS documents being updated on the Web? Can you cite any data sources that back you up?

RSS is done. It's single ended. The feed goes out and nothing comes back. No share, like, re-tweet, or even forward. It's a digital Readers Digest, it's TOAST!

You stated that “Steve was all about usability and making things simpler...” What could be more simple than "really simple syndication?" (RSS) I used it as a simple and clean way, to track lots of different dailies, most of which are web pages. It only makes sense that the browser your reading "really simple syndication" of web pages in, should be able to open said web pages right there in the same window.

I've tried many readers and google etc, over the years and now over the last few days and Safari, to the best of my usages and knowledge of this sort of information gathering, has been thee simplest since its inception of reading Really Simple Syndication.

If they've got a new and improved simpler Web 2.8, 3.0, 4.xxx coming up than I'm all for it, but man... it was really simple.

Message was edited by: nybe

@ s4lex What I'm hearing from content creators of all kinds is that they do not really like RSS and many want to remove RSS from their websites. You just need to look at the world out there to see that RSS isn't as effective as social for most consumers never mind content creators. Having 10 people subsrcibe to an RSS feed is nothing compared to getting 10 people to share something on Facebook or getting even one well connected person to tweet about your site. If one of the latter two happens in could be like winning the lotto.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook. I can't use it. But lots of people do use it, obviously. I don't know how they can use it or what kind of mental gymnastics they must perform to retain their sanity, but it works for them. Other services I get a long with better such as twitter & stumbleupon. I like that I can let other people interested in the same things as me find my news and information. I think it just comes down to the level of awareness you have about the world. RSS lets you find a comfortable niche and stay there while social is always going to be bringing the lastest thing to you. Social is going to surprise you. The people really good at social are actually pretty savvy folks.

Anyhow, all this ignores one other key fact, which is networking. RSS is not a network, it's just a delivery system. That's really all you need to know. Networks win.

I get the social media thing, but I have like 40 bloggs I just want to keep up to date with (post at different times) and just need a system when theres a new post or content to read. I am still doing the socail thing but it certainly isn't similar. Are there no other systems out there creating or maintaining something like what I had wih the rss in my mail?

mtp411, just sign up for a social network like Facebook or Twitter and only follow the blogs you care about. All the blogs that are worth a darn have social networks they automatically update each time a post is created. It amounts to the same thing as RSS except you can't read the whole post you have to go to the actual site. Of course, if you choose to do this you can have those updates show up in notification center. (Which is prolly why Apple made Notification center.)

The thing you're missing here is sites like craigslist that make specialised lists based on search criteria you enter as the user. There is (was) then the ability to click and keep the RSS feed link at the bottom of the page and have that specific search with all it's variables RSS'd for you. In Safari 5 that was invaluable for some of the work I do and things I'm looking for and that's just ONE example of what is not provided by social media... they are just two different animals.

here's an example: I collect, restore and sell old motorcycles and sometimes cars:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/mca?hasPic=1&minAsk=1000&query=triumph&s rchType=A&format=rss

I like to have the choice to be able to narrow down that search on CL and see the daily updates, with the cute little numbers in the bookmarks bar of old Safari... FB or twitter and social as a whole have their very specific uses, but this is not one of them.

Message was edited by: nybe

Nathan Jones2 wrote:

(Safari is not a top ranked browser. Internet Explorer and Chrome are more popular)

I was careful to say "a" top ranked browser, and not "the" top ranked browser 🙂 It's in the Top 2 to 4 depending on how you slice things, e.g. Top 2 for mobile versus Top 4 for desktop.

erebos wrote:

mtp411, just sign up for a social network like Facebook or Twitter and only follow the blogs you care about. All the blogs that are worth a darn have social networks they automatically update each time a post is created. It amounts to the same thing as RSS except you can't read the whole post you have to go to the actual site. Of course, if you choose to do this you can have those updates show up in notification center. (Which is prolly why Apple made Notification center.)

I feel quite frustrated at the loss of RSS and you may not realise the subtle but non-trendy differences between the options available.

If you're talking Facebook or Twitter, I don't want to waste time re-opening articles I've already read - having scrolled down too far through the list of updates.

If you're talking Notification center, I don't want to be limited to the top 10 or so.

I want to have a list of every unread article from each site I subscribe to, and to have unread articles stand out so I know at a glance what remains.

I want what I have. I don't want to lose it. I can't get an adapter for compatability, nor can I get simple software that doesn't want me to shift all my reading habits into Google's pool of how to best advertise things to me. I don't hear that I'm being offered a better option to move forward with.

erebos wrote:

mtp411, just sign up for a social network like Facebook or Twitter and only follow the blogs you care about. All the blogs that are worth a darn have social networks they automatically update each time a post is created. It amounts to the same thing as RSS except you can't read the whole post you have to go to the actual site. Of course, if you choose to do this you can have those updates show up in notification center. (Which is prolly why Apple made Notification center.)

I'm sorry, but this advices makes absolutely no sense. Technology is already complicated and buggy enough, so let's just insert another bunch of flakey middle men (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Social Yahoos, Apple's Notification Center, etc) -- that should fix everything right?!? NOT!!! Anyone hear about the Twitter Fail Whale, or Facebook's endless privacy debacles (and falling stock price)? If I had a popular blog or web-based business, there is NO WAY that's who I'd want to solely depend on versus having my own RSS feed that I have 100% control over. If your customers are dumping their RSS feeds for social network channels, boy I feel sorry for them. They're terrible business owners if they can't think through that faulty advice.

The web is most successful as a form of disintermediation folks. If you don't get that, you don't have any business advising people on their web strategy. I'm not saying you shouldn't take advantage of existing social networks to get the word out about your blog, products or services -- but I wouldn't dump an RSS mechanism that you can control for social networks that are generally highly inefficient and designed for the benefits of the social network owner (big data analytics, viral growth factors, etc) and not the folks posting to them. Anyone here familiar with the term "Ponzi Scheme"? That's what most social networks rely on, although they prefer a related technical term: "The Network Effect". Do you want your web site's communication/marketing/branding strategy to be dependent on a ponzi scheme versus a Really Simple Syndication (RSS duh) technology that has been in place for over a decade and has never failed once!?! Gosh!

erebos wrote:

@ s4lex What I'm hearing from content creators of all kinds is that they do not really like RSS and many want to remove RSS from their websites. You just need to look at the world out there to see that RSS isn't as effective as social for most consumers never mind content creators. Having 10 people subsrcibe to an RSS feed is nothing compared to getting 10 people to share something on Facebook or getting even one well connected person to tweet about your site. If one of the latter two happens in could be like winning the lotto.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook. I can't use it. But lots of people do use it, obviously. I don't know how they can use it or what kind of mental gymnastics they must perform to retain their sanity, but it works for them. Other services I get a long with better such as twitter & stumbleupon. I like that I can let other people interested in the same things as me find my news and information. I think it just comes down to the level of awareness you have about the world. RSS lets you find a comfortable niche and stay there while social is always going to be bringing the lastest thing to you. Social is going to surprise you. The people really good at social are actually pretty savvy folks.

Anyhow, all this ignores one other key fact, which is networking. RSS is not a network, it's just a delivery system. That's really all you need to know. Networks win.

I get that there are many clueless people who have a hard time with three letter acronyms and web concepts in general. If we're letting these same clueless decide on how the Web evolves, we're in trouble. Luckily we still have the W3C and other intelligent people to advise us on this.

I've never once said that anyone with a web site should solely embrace RSS and ignore all social media channels. I help friends with their web sites all of the time, often to integrate them with Twitter, Facebook and other media partners. I would never encourage them to shut down their RSS functionality. There's a separation of concerns there that some people on here don't seem to grasp. Some of us do and made piles of money with that knowledge over the past two decades. Holy bat crap man -- HTML is not a network, but somehow we've managed to build this little global network called the Internet using that simple markup format.

Maybe Facebook, Twitter and Apple want RSS to go away, since that's a channel they can't control (the web site owners do). I don't know and am not a conspiracy theory minded person... Apple recently met with Twitter to discuss a major strategic investment in them, and wouldn't ya know that same week they release major OS X and Safari updates that disable RSS... inquiring minds might want to know. Not me, I've got important work to do applying open standards, open source and open data.

What I do know is that if Apple's Safari 7 disables it's (X)HTML support ("you should publish all of your web page content through the new Global Apple Content Syndication network instead of that majorly anti-social HTML format -- GACS is super social!"), it would be dead on arrival. Microsoft did their damndest to kill the open standards Internet, and look where it got them... back of the pack for the mobile and social Internet (r)evolutions.

For fear of getting into another weird reactionary interchange, I was keeping my lip buttoned, but... IMHO, I don't believe certain people, who have been commenting in this discussion, use RSS (or similar) the same way, or to the extent that others possibly do. It might be hard, for said people, to fully grasp the power of really simple syndication and the depth to which Safari implemented such a simple implementation... Just sayin.

RSS may or may not be back in a later iteration of Safari... I hope it is. The implications as to what it means when something this simple and powerful gets dumbed down or completely removed are disheartening. I like having my options for how I manipulate the information I take in. When those options are taken away so quietly, yeah, I get a little paranoid.

The Internet seems to be being manipulated more toward the "share" concept where now huge companies sit around trying to think up new and more meaningless viral memes that will get us to share so they can more precisely track metrics and inevitably sell more "sugar water" to the starving masses.

s4lex wrote:

I'm sorry, but this advices makes absolutely no sense. Technology is already complicated and buggy enough, so let's just insert another bunch of flakey middle men (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Social Yahoos, Apple's Notification Center, etc) -- that should fix everything right?!? NOT!!! Anyone hear about the Twitter Fail Whale, or Facebook's endless privacy debacles (and falling stock price)? If I had a popular blog or web-based business, there is NO WAY that's who I'd want to solely depend on versus having my own RSS feed that I have 100% control over. If your customers are dumping their RSS feeds for social network channels, boy I feel sorry for them. They're terrible business owners if they can't think through that faulty advice.

The web is most successful as a form of disintermediation folks. If you don't get that, you don't have any business advising people on their web strategy. I'm not saying you shouldn't take advantage of existing social networks to get the word out about your blog, products or services -- but I wouldn't dump an RSS mechanism that you can control for social networks that are generally highly inefficient and designed for the benefits of the social network owner (big data analytics, viral growth factors, etc) and not the folks posting to them. Anyone here familiar with the term "Ponzi Scheme"? That's what most social networks rely on, although they prefer a related technical term: "The Network Effect". Do you want your web site's communication/marketing/branding strategy to be dependent on a ponzi scheme versus a Really Simple Syndication (RSS duh) technology that has been in place for over a decade and has never failed once!?! Gosh!

Wow, well said.