Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely
Last year I shared how Twitter was moving more and more towards a closed, less-standards oriented model of sharing content as they upgraded their design to bring more people to the Twitter.com website.
Context & Ripple Effects
The obituary for RSS has been written before — TechCrunchIT ran 'Rest in Peace, RSS' back in May 2009, and ReadWriteWeb pushed back that January with a defense of why RSS readers still matter. What makes this moment different is who is pulling the plug: not a niche publisher, but the two largest social platforms, acting simultaneously and without announcement.
It also fits each company's arc. Twitter has spent the past year steering consumption toward Twitter.com itself as part of its design overhaul, and is reportedly — though this remains unconfirmed — closing in on a $40-50 million TweetDeck deal that would put the most popular third-party reading client in-house. Facebook, approaching 700 million users per recent reports, has been tightening what leaves its walls, including quietly adding controls over which updates appear in friends' feeds. Removing RSS removes the last standard, no-permission pipe out of either system.
First-order effects
- Users who followed Twitter or Facebook accounts through Google Reader or any other feed reader lose those subscriptions immediately, with no replacement format offered by either platform.
- Third-party developers whose apps silently consumed these feeds must migrate to each company's official API — accepting rate limits, authentication requirements, and terms of service they did not previously answer to.
Second-order effects
- RSS client makers lose two of the highest-volume feed sources on the web, accelerating the decline the 2009 obituaries described and shrinking the audience that keeps standalone readers viable.
- Control of how Twitter and Facebook content reaches outside software narrows to the companies' own APIs and clients — a consolidation that matters more if the rumored TweetDeck acquisition lands, putting even the leading independent reader under Twitter's roof.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, real-time social content becomes accessible only through vendor-controlled channels, shifting the web's default from an open syndication layer anyone can parse to silos governed by each platform's terms.
- Developers building on social data internalize the lesson that platform-supplied formats can vanish without notice, pushing the ecosystem toward APIs as revocable licenses rather than durable infrastructure.
The trend: Major social platforms are replacing open syndication standards like RSS with proprietary, permission-gated APIs as they consolidate consumption on their own properties.