Rest in Peace, RSS
It's time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn't cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it's not worth swimming in if you get my drift. — I haven't been in Google Reader for months.
Context & Ripple Effects
This obituary is the endpoint of a decline that started long before it: back in October 2006, Pluck's RSS reader was already fading, an early sign that standalone feed readers were struggling to hold mainstream users. What changed by May 2009 is that a replacement finally arrived with real gravity — relationships data from late April confirms Twitter was growing rapidly and being used as a news medium, giving the argument a concrete destination rather than just dissatisfaction.
The column's core complaint — the River of News has become unswimmable — lands because pull-based feeds scale badly once subscriptions pile up, and its syndicated pickup by Dare Obasanjo under the banner 'RSS readers modeled after email clients are fundamentally broken' shows the critique resonated beyond one blogger. The author's own admission of months without opening Google Reader makes the shift personal rather than hypothetical.
First-order effects
- Heavy feed users face an immediate fork: keep triaging an overflowing Google Reader account or move discovery onto Twitter timelines, where following decisions act as human filters on the firehose.
- Publishers tracking feed subscribers now have to watch whether Twitter referrals replace RSS traffic as their primary distribution channel.
Second-order effects
- Reader vendors face the same pressure Pluck hit three years earlier, forcing a choice between reinventing the reader around social signals or ceding news consumption to Twitter entirely.
- Twitter's OAuth experimentation for third-party apps like We Follow and TipJoy positions the platform to absorb the ecosystem of tools that previously clustered around RSS.
Third-order effects
- If consumption keeps migrating, news syndication shifts from an open format anyone can parse to streams controlled by a platform that owns the timeline — one analyst has already floated the counter-scenario that many Twitter-like networks emerge rather than a single dominant service, which would determine whether the replacement stays open.
- The 'followed people' model replacing 'subscribed feeds' makes editorial gatekeeping personal and opaque, raising the stakes on who curates what audiences see.
The trend: News distribution is migrating from open, user-controlled syndication formats like RSS toward platform-owned social streams where following, not subscribing, determines reach.