TechcrunchIT has a piece on RSS. It suggested that with Twitter's popularity, RSS is no longer needed.

I don't think so.

Here's some reasons RSS is still (very much) relevant:
- A tweet is only 160 char long, it's inconvenient to encapsulate the actual data. The best it can do is to embed a URL to the actual data. In contrast, by reading the RSS feed, the contents is all there (assuming it's fulltext)
- Twitter is centralized, vs RSS is distributed from all its sources. If twitter's data center is gone, no love from the birds. If Google reader's gone. I just have to move to another aggregator and resume reading where I left off.
- RSS, as a standard, can be extended to add new meta data easily. i.e. Podcast enclosure. Twitter is controlled by one organization, where you are at the mercy if you want to add extra meta data into a tweet.
- Twitter as the new river of news might have all the advantage for real-time scenario, but it is no better than RSS (if not worse) for other information distribution applications.
- To replace RSS with twitter as a mean to distribute news and information, extra steps are likely needed: 1 - get a twitter account 2 - setup extra software to broadcast to twitter. On the other hand, RSS is build-in to most blogging platforms in use.
- Status/update is still no replacement for blog+RSS for more conventional cases.

Note, I have to admit that twitter has a total advantage in term of searching information from a know and unknown sources (to me). In addition, twitter also has advantage for a conversation/comment/discussion scenario.

Also, I think a real problem pointed out by Steve is that often many RSS feed are not fulltext, which make it less useful.

All in all, Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed are taking the river of news to the next level. But RSS still the glue to put things together in many cases.

I've been using Gregarius as my RSS aggregator for 3 years. It was a cool application written in PHP & MySQL. It has all the functions I need, but as time goes by the creator loses interest/unable to work on it.



Just like many open source projects, the project goes down hill when there is no one stepping up to continue the work. In my case, the items display are all screw up with many HTML tags stripped incorrectly and I am not in the mood to invest more times to fix it myself.

It just no fun using it any more.

Therefore, I switch back to Google Reader, which has evolve quite nicely. In addition, I read news from Mobile Google Reader on my G1. So, I can continue to catch up on my dose of news even when I am on the go.

Even through I still prefer to run my own web services when possible, I will be using Google Reader until I found a better RSS aggregator.