Is RSS dead?

So Google Reader died Monday. Is RSS dying? I sure hope not, and don’t think so. I’ve heard many people say they gave up on RSS reading and now just read Twitter. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Twitter is great for what’s going on now, but how do I catch up with what’s been going on after a long day at work? Sorry, but I’m not scrolling back fourteen hours on my Twitter feed. Hell, I seldom scroll back an hour.

The other day I was trying to remember when I started reading RSS feeds. I know I started with a desktop app, and mostly used it to keep up with all the blogs I was reading. I remember wishing news sites had feeds so I could read my news that way, but none of them did. Gradually more and more sites got RSS feeds, and that’s pretty much how I’ve been consuming the internet for as long as I can remember. If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed, it doesn’t exist to me.

Once I got internet access on multiple computers and places I switched to an online reader. I think NewsGator was my first and then I switched to Bloglines. I remember when Google Reader was first launched. It sucked at first and took a few years before it was good enough to make the switch. I lived it Google Reader for years. It wasn’t flashy, they rarely added any decent features, but it was always reliable. The best thing Google did was to allow third party apps to connect to their services. That was one of the reasons I bought an iPad the day they came out. My RSS reading finally became enjoyable in the mobile space. It’s so easy for me to keep up with my 1000s of feeds now because any spare minute I have during the day I can whip out my phone or iPad and read some feeds.

I was a little shocked when Google announced that they were shutting down reader. I guess I had a hard time believing that “nobody” was using a service that I was using constantly twelve to eighteen hours a day. I wasn’t worried though. I was excited because I knew other companies would step in and have products that were better and actually work on them and evolve them over time. Many did, and I tried most of them, but for now Feedly is my choice.

Feedly has most of the features of Google Reader that I used, and works with Newsify, which is a great iOS app. I made the switch, and didn’t skip a beat. Long live RSS.